Jim Nollman Shares ‘The Three Jimmies,’ an Underwater Collaboration with Wild Orcas
Jim Nollman has shared a new video for ‘The Three Jimmies’, an interspecies performance recorded with wild orcas in 1988. The track is available now via Smithsonian Folkways, appearing on Nollman’s album ‘Orcas’ Greatest Hits’.
Recorded at a cove along British Columbia’s Johnstone Strait, ‘The Three Jimmies’ brings together Nollman’s electric guitar, Jonathan Churcher’s keyboard and programmed beats, and the calls of orcas moving through the surrounding water.
The piece takes its musical starting point from the clipped, propulsive guitar style associated with Jimmy Nolen, whose playing helped define the rhythmic force of James Brown’s records. Nollman repeats and varies the funk-inflected figure while the orcas’ calls enter the spaces around it, creating a dialogue between guitar, rhythm track and underwater sound.
Jim Nollman comments:
“Jimmy Nolen’s classic guitar work with James Brown has always seemed to me to be music’s most powerful riff for getting people to dance. The first night I played the riff into the water while our boat was encircled by wild orcas, it felt perfect, the best possible music I could play for whales who hardly ever stop moving.
“That night, when their own calls started filling in the spaces in the groove of my variations, I recall wondering if the orcas had been waiting all along for me to play some soul music that made it impossible to sit still. Their calls to one another sound a lot like alto and soprano saxophones.”
Nollman and his collaborators established an artistic residency and community space at the cove, which they named Orcananda. Music was sent into the water through underwater speakers, while hydrophones captured the calls of the whales and the resulting exchanges. The musicians generally worked after dark, when motorboat traffic was quieter, and kept the volume at a restrained level.
‘Orcas’ Greatest Hits’ collects fourteen recordings made between 1985 and 2002, selected from more than sixty hours of material. The album documents Nollman’s long-running exploration of communication between human musicians and other species, with electric guitar, voices, percussion, oboe, keyboards and other sounds meeting the whistles and rhythmic calls of wild orcas.
The recordings also carry a natural echo created by sounds reflecting from the glacially formed bottom of the strait, which reaches a depth of approximately four hundred feet.
Nollman began producing experimental work for Berkeley’s KPFA Pacifica Radio before founding the nonprofit organisation Interspecies in 1979. His 1982 Folkways album, ‘Playing Music with Animals’, brought together recordings created with orcas, wolves, turkeys and Death Valley kangaroo rats.
Interspecies later issued a 25-minute cassette titled ‘Orca’s Greatest Hits’ in 1987, containing three early recordings. The forthcoming Smithsonian Folkways collection is considerably broader, with Nollman stating that approximately ninety percent of its material has never previously been made public.
‘Orcas’ Greatest Hits’ will be released by Smithsonian Folkways on August 14, 2026. Read more about his work here: www.interspecies.com
Cover design by Visual Dialogue. Photo by Jim O’Donnell. Photos of Orcananda by Sandra Wilson. “Orca Pod” artwork by Jim Nollman. Photo of Jim Nollman by David Rothenberg.
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