June "Calendar"

A quiet month at the moment, but a couple fun performances will be happening nonetheless. First will be my solo trumpet performance at the Douglass Street Music Collective. This is taking place on Wednesday, June 8, at 8:00. Contrary to one of my earlier posts, I will not be performing "Obstructions for Trumpet." Still, some of those ideas have leaked into my current playing and will surface sub- or not-so-subconsciously, I suspect. I am very happy to be joined by Buckminster, who will be performing at 9:00.

Later this month, I will perform at International Waters in Philadelphia with the Johnny DeBlase Quartet. This will be happening on Saturday, June 25.

As usual, keep posted for more details!

Recordings: Past and Future

Here are some updates on my myriad recording sessions. My quintet Ad Faunum, with Noah Kaplan (sax), Jacob William (b), Giacomo Merega (e b), and Luther Gray (dr) will be released later this year on Not Two. More information, such as the album title, release date, etc. will be announced. Stay tuned!

Bird Fly Yellow recently went into the studio to record its full-length debut. We spent a day at Trout Recording and had a very fruitful session. We will be re-entering the studio to mix the session within a month’s time, and we hope to release the album by next Summer, 2012.

Alban Bailly, it turns out, is not only a guitar wizard but a great home-recording engineer as well. He, guitarist Nick Millevoi and I recorded a fully-improvised trio session in Alban's basement in April and are very pleased with the result. We will be mixing this one ourselves, and we’ll see if we can get it released for public consumption in the near future.

This weekend, I will be meeting up with my good friend Jeff Kimmel to do a couple performances and record a duo session as well. Jeff, who recently saw the release of a trio album, tilting, with Jacob Wick and David Moré, is one of the best bass clarinetist-improvisers around, and putting a little something on tape with him will be a great pleasure.

Finally, I'll be recording with the Johnny DeBlase Quartet on June 26, which performed not long ago at the Highwire Gallery in Philadelphia. The recorded material will consist of Johnny's compositions and, of course, lots of improvising.

May Calendar: Super Message Body

This is how May is shaping up so far: Well.

May 7, 10:00: w/ Jeff Kimmel (bass clar), Marc Riordan (dr), and Brian Labycz (synth) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago. Also performing: Wingbridge.

May 8: Duo recording w/ Jeff!

May 9, 7:30: Duo performance w/ Jeff at Myopic Books, Chicago.

May 28, 8:00: Performance of a piece by Brad Henkel, "Shopping List for the World Ends" for 4 trumpets, 2 guitars, and narrator. Also featuring performances by Mariel Berger's quartet and Dan Peck (tuba). Show takes place at Jonathan Wood Vincent's UWS apt.: 201 W. 86th Street Apt. 806 (The Belnord), New York, NY

Follow them links!!!

Rant in All Clefs

Since free improvisation is not, de facto, avant garde anymore, we shouldn't assume that what we're making is somehow innovative or new. Currently, this mode of performing is problematic because it can act as a haven for perfectly talented and learned people to make music that lacks the furor and prescience of truly avant-garde music, while there still being the assumption that it is somehow "different" from other kinds of music. And by furor or prescience, I'm not referring necessarily to volume, density, or speed. What I mean is a personal or personal-political furor (because the personal is political and the act of collective improvising has political implications), or the prescience of a music that leads one (performer and audience member alike) to think in a more sensitive or simply different manner. So let's do it. Let's go somewhere truly exciting and take an audience with us.

Part of the issue is the inherent revolutionary attitude that is presumed by free improvisation. It is, for example, a valid question to ask whether this kind of music must actually do something new, every time. Can't we simply be good at it? But when I ask this I come to the conclusion that for it to be good it must at least be vigorous, which, in a way, aligns it with other forms of music (isn't all truly "good" music simply a perfect expression in its time, extending beyond its temporal locus?).

There is a much larger discussion to be had outside of this post. But I should take this moment to point out that there are people who specialize in free improv that do not rest on its history in order to prove its relevance. Let's be sure to follow their lead, in the spirit of what these performers do.

April Happenings

I am excited. Not just because I'm excitable, but mostly because there are happenings that merit... excitement. Bird Fly Yellow will be performing twice this coming weekend, and will also be recording at the end of the month. And April 15 will see the return of Gleason's Twins, my duo with vocalist Kristin Slipp.

Big thanks to Matt Plummer, Bonnie Lander, Owen Stewart-Robertson, Brad Henkel, and Derek Beckvold for all their work in putting these events together. (If I missed anyone, please accost me, preferably on the street.)

April 9, 8:00: Sunshine Soldier / Pink Brown / Masri, Cohen Duo / Bird Fly Yellow

International Waters
532 S. 48th St.
Philadelphia, PA

April 10, 8:30: Bird Fly Yellow / OS-R, Niggenkemper, Gray / Sunshine Soldier

Douglass Street Music Collective
295 Douglass St.
Brooklyn, NY

April 15, 8:30: [Music + Words]: Gleason's Twins / Ben Syversen Trio / Box Lunch

Douglass St. Music Collective
295 Douglass St.
Brooklyn, NY

April 30: Bird Fly Yellow recording at Trout Studio in Brooklyn.

Klangfarbenmelodelicious

I remember Joe Morris talking to me about a “pivot” where a given moment in an improvisation is like a triangulation that references points immediately before and after in time, or above, below, left, or right, etc. in space. Listening back to some recordings from my last year in school, it seems that it was definitely having an effect on me – I’m trying to recapture this idea in my current playing, as I sometimes find it’s lacking (did I forget?). The idea, if memory serves, is one way of dealing with “line,” where the line continues (as it does naturally because it exists in time), but I as the improviser do not coddle (or swaddle) it. If the line of music is a child, you have to let it go out and play. The line of course is not only mine but mine in relation to others’ – a klangfarbenmelodie of fragmented swing, blips, ringing tones, etc.

Thingness: A Little Leslie Scalapino

I've been reading an earlier series by Leslie Scalapino, hmmmm. I'm finding myself falling into her work more and more, after a brief hiatus. There is something quite tangible about this writing, where I can simultaneously relate to the emotion in the work while at the same time be strangely freed of its inherent heat. She utilizes decidedly biological symbols in this series (the water lily, the fish, and, like George Oppen, the anemone) that act to objectify and thus cool narratives that arise from “extreme” emotional or socio-economic states.

Or, as in covering a contortionist with a blanket, allow one to see the shape discarded of the uncomfortable and unflattering tangle of the body.

The narratives are folded. I read first the happening - say, of searching frantically for someone in a park at night - and then the symbolic overlay brings me away from the intensity of the first-hand experience. With Scalapino often acting as a conduit of another's reflection on an historical (personal) action, there is a further distancing of the narrative by degrees, further cooling it, giving it a certain solidity, tangibility, and "thingness."

It is a hunk of obsidian.

The series is available via the linked site above, the Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo.