Listening: wind in aspen trees, stream water, thunderstorms, rain on the roof, coyotes howling at night, the silence of the stars. Reading: Osho, Lao Tzu, Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Maurice Bucke, Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, Tagore, Rumi, Kabir.
In Rio En Medio, Lee plunged into new approaches to his own music (solo acoustic guitar) and new kinds of writing (autobiography, fiction, essays, poetry). It was here that he wrote dozens of short stories, including "Buddy and the Blue Yarn Trail," "Crystal City Ice-falls," and "The Question."
He played original solo guitar music in Santa Fe's hotels and in concerts. He camped in high mountains, hiking the trails with Sonia. He fly-fished streams and rivers in northern New Mexico and southwest Colorado. All the while, he carried his camera with him. He gave seven photo exhibits in Santa Fe.
In 1997, he and Sonia moved to Oakhurst, California, in the Sierra Mountains near Yosemite. Lee set his guitar aside, bought a piano, and began playing his own free-floating, stylistically expansive, improvised solo piano music, which has few if any references to folk, rock, jazz, or Euro-American classical genres.
Listening: Peter Michael Hamel, Eno, Stephan Micus, Harold Budd, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould playing Bach, Beethoven's String Quartets, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Alan Hovhaness, musics from Morocco, India, Japan.
In 1998, Underwood began performing live poetry readings. He published numerous individual poems in Light of Consciousness, In the Grove, ZamBomba, The Central California Poetry Journal, Say Yes and One Dog Press. Reading from 18 books of poems, he appeared live in San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakhurst, Mariposa, Yosemite, Fresno and elsewhere.
At home, reading: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Han-shan, Ikkyu, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Anthony Burgess; Osho, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Buddha, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Karen Horney, Abraham Maslow, Ken Wilber.
He gave a two-hour solo poetry/piano concert at the Sierra Arts Center in Sonora, and three other poetry/piano concerts at the Oakhurst Library (with a Yamaha concert grand). On one occasion he performed his poetry and solo piano music in Oakhurst on the same bill with Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash. For two years he co-hosted the radio show, "Between The Lines: Poetry To Take You Home," with Preston Chase on KFCF, 88.1 FM, Fresno.
Today, Lee and Sonia live in a modern two-storey cabin beside Lewis Creek in a mountain forest four miles north of Oakhurst. It was here that he wrote Blue Melody.
Listening: whispering pines, susurrant streamwaters, and inner silence, the radiant emptiness from which all songs are born.
In 2003 he recorded a solo piano CD entitled Phantom Light, a Special Edition limited to 100 copies. In 2004, he completed a novel entitled Diamondfire: The American Odyssey of a Universal Mystic. He plays piano regularly, occasionally performing privately for friends and publicly for wider audiences.
Contact: undrwd@sti.net
