Imbroglio [Revisited]

I wrote this tune in Poland in 2004 as a memorial piece for Steve Lacy. But these days I’m working with it in different ways, preparing for a recording with my band, etc. Here’s a short excerpt of a more-or-less unconventional treatment :)

Back from Lunch

Well hello, world! Sorry it’s been awhile! I’ve been away from my blog for too long, but this should give you an idea of what I’m up to these days:

Life in Taiwan has been exciting, exuberant, amazing, bustling, and has been rewarding in a way that no other place could ever be in this short time since I’ve been here!

More on all this later. For now, it’s nice to see you guys again! :)

Humoresque

Some recordings from recent appearances in Taipei with pianist Andrew Page:

There is No Greater Love

I Mean You

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Nostalgia in Times Square

Now here’s a musician I really connect with! Playing with Andrew is both great fun and a real journey. He’s willing to take a deep plunge into familiar territory and work towards something new and fresh with each passing chorus. I can’t help but have a great time!

For two gents bred in the Midwestern U.S. (we’re both from St. Louis, as it turns out!) and who turned out to be musicians in the far East, it’s a healthy reminder of a tradition that began on our own stomping ground: that modernism in jazz is just as much about joy and enjoying life as anything that came before.

Everything that is freely improvised, serially-composed or otherwise atonal about modern music suffers from that awful Germanic myth of pain and struggle. While that’s certainly part of our musical tradition, something beautiful began in Chicago with Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, and others: use modernism’s devices to put humor at center instead of something abstract, nebulous and disconcerting. The same loss of meaning in life can simultaneously be expressed through struggle or sheer ridiculousness.

Gee, isn’t that nice?

Since the late 60′s this attention on humor has steadily developed; now you can find its practitioners on each coast and all over the globe, so our recordings here are only a small sample! Still, being abroad certainly has its way of reminding you where you’re from :)

Flâneur daguerre

I’m thrilled to report that the paper I’ve coauthored with Robert Kohn and Janne E. Irvine on Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia has been accepted for publication in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory at Penn State. We’re all very excited!

After many collaborations, emails, and a whole lot of study(!), we’re now editing a final draft. My trusty copy of the Sinfonia score has seen the light of day all around the Taipei coffee shops, especially my favorites in ShiDa, and soon it will get a well-deserved rest :) Our work centers on the intermingling of various ideological trends in modernism and structuralism as well as presence of Lacanian schizophrenia within Berio’s masterpiece. As we’re nearing completion, I’ll have more to share soon… !!

Calle de siempre

Zhongxiao Dunhua (2009, for electronics)

It’s been almost a month since I came to Taipei. Obviously a lot has happened since my last post! I’m really enjoying it here. So much is going on, but with all the stimulation only now am I finding time to react creatively to what I’m seeing!

Any newcomer here will learn the city from the MRT stops first. The piece above is named after the intersection of Zhongxiao and Dunhua roads, where there is a very large MRT stop. Zhongxiao has its own MRT “blue” line; it cuts across the entire city and is lined with all kinds of commerce and interesting people. It’s always very crowded, except late on a Sunday night after your gig:

What can I say? I had the cab driver drop me off here so I could snap a photo for you to see, but all I got was this empty street! It’s the opposite of what normally goes on here. Nothing compares to the awesome sprawl of this street. It just keeps going, and only more places, people and avenues reveal themselves along the way. It’s overwhelming and exciting, and it reminded me of this line from a poem by Borges:

¡Qué lindo atestiguarte, calle de siempre, ya que miraron tan pocas cosas mis días! (How lovely it is to attest to you, street of forever, since my own days have witnessed so few things!)

Hope you enjoy it!

In Love with a Sopra[ni]no

Oska-T by Thelonious Monk. That’s me playing it on a sopranino sax.

Dontcha just love snow days? So far I’ve spent mine at Saxquest on Cherokee, where my visit was long overdue. Just weeks ago I bought a P. Mauriat soprano saxophone with all the fixins, and I’ve been fumbling with my Selmer S-80 D mouthpiece to no avail. This mouthpiece gives a warm, round sound to the thing, and I’m glad to have it for use with classical literature. But I sound way too much like an oboe for jazz. So I have my legit mouthpiece, and I went to the shop today to find a good one for jazz playing.

After narrowing my selection down from 7 to 3 mouthpieces, I decided to wait for the Tenny Select Otto Link mouthpieces to come into stock before I make my final decision. The current hit list is:

• Selmer Super Session with E facing
• Lamberson wood mouthpiece with .070″ facing
• Tenny Custom Select Otto Link 7

Who will win? Stay tuned!

The Lamberson is an excellent mouthpiece with an incredible sound. I’ve never played on a wood mouthpiece before! I might go with this one, but while I was sampling it I got curious about the other horns in the shop. So I checked out their vintage saxophone museum featuring some particularly rare finds. I played a mezzo-soprano “Con-O-Sax” in F, developed to replace the English horn (which is shaped like one too), an original Swanee Sax that uses a slide instead of keys, and a vintage Buescher sopranino sax (on which I’m playing Monk’s Oska-T in the recording above). The Swanee Sax, much like a trombone or Ondes Martineau, lends itself implicitly to the cello solo from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. So I serenaded the other saxes.

Gotta tell ya though: that sopranino is amazing! What a sound! Need to find one…

Not Quite Messiaen (Not Even Close)

I’d say the Inauguration went off without a hitch, wouldn’t you? History making: yes. Astonishing numbers of people: check. Moving speech from qualified + tactful new leader: shazam! Old money gone ASAP, or as fast as the wheel chair could carry him out: done. Tragically we all had to learn about Ted Kennedy’s fall, but there was little turbulence on top of that. Still, maybe I’m the only one who’s bothered by this:

(Man, I tried so hard not to be any kind of musical elitist on this blog, but here is where I’ve completely lost it; this really frosts my cake.)

I had my hopes up for the scheduled inaugural performance by Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill, slated and first leaked back in December by The Detroit News and just after brought to wider attention by Alex Ross. We weren’t sure what to expect, only the performance of a work for violin, cello, clarinet and piano… hmm, there aren’t too many pieces meeting those specs. :::gasp::: Could it be?? Certainly it could. Yes we can! Yes it could! It would have been entirely appropriate at the sight of this historic event for a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s (dare I say timeless?) Quartet For The End of Time, and anyone reading Alex Ross’ blog would have agreed.

Could there potentially be a piece of music, anything really, more moving than this? Apparently so. Aaron Copland, popularly known as a homosexual and a communist but who’s music has been the locus of Americana and popularized by many Republican campaign tickets, was our star composer of the day. I say this lovingly because I enjoy Copland’s ballet music as much as the next guy, I certainly don’t mind his own politics for which he came under attack, and also because we owe Copland’s name to any arrangement of “Simple Gifts.” Not even John Williams will be remembered for his craptastic “arrangement” heard around the globe today.

I have this mental image of John Williams receiving the commission, thinking “Oh yea, this one’ll be easy!” and, completely aware that almost no composing will be necessary for the piece, immediately farming out the arranging to a few novice minions in his army of Hollywood orchestrators.  ”How far ahead of schedule are we on music for Harry Potter XXXVII? Good! Hey Boopsie! Lombordozzi! Anastasio! You look like you got nothin’a do. Get over here and do this commission for the government. Take ya five minutes.”

There should be a futures market on the lifespan of John Williams vs. Randy Newman. Here are two composers we could stand to hear less of at MacWorld Expos and really really important historic events. Yes, I know it helped to choose the music of a “populist” composer and get another real live “populist” composer to do the arrangement for our amazing musicians, but that’s just it: our musicians were capable of so much more and could have played an absolutely vital and appropriate piece with such a bigger message! Instead, we got the same old “Where’s the Beef” act. Despite the let down, there’s still plenty of hope and change in the days ahead – and nicely enough for those of us in the arts.

As someone who works in sheet music, I’m sure I’ll be seeing my copy of John Williams’ Air and Simple Gifts for violin, cello, clarinet and piano on New Issue any day now, and I will proudly and properly christen it by use as toilet paper. It will still sell and make as much money, if not more, as his Olympic Fanfare and Theme. Oy.

Did the math

St. Louis opened up its new year once again with the marvelous Bad Plus at Jazz at the Bistro this week. I caught the late set on Wednesday and both sets last night, and it just gets better each year! I’ve also had the pleasure of exposing at least 5 virgin sets of ears to the group this time. One of them was Michael, who called it, “Easily one of the best performances of my life!”

It’s always exciting to hear what they’ve been playing. They had just come straight form the Village Vanguard, where they played two dates this fall and winter; one I could have seen while I was in New York in October if they hadn’t sold out! As it is, I’m now humbly awaiting my pre-ordered copy of their new album ‘For All I Care’, out in February, which will feature Wendy Lewis.

The selection looks promising: it showcases everything from Nirvana and Wilco to Stravinsky, but curiously lacks any of their newer originals that we were privy to this week. Reid Anderson’s latest power pop-infused ballad “People Like You” made a friend of mine cry on her first listening to the group, and a new tune by Ethan with a title that escapes me now (something like “Who’s He,” “He’s Who” …throw me a bone here!) was exquisite.

The most powerful live performances came this time from surprise covers of staple avant-garde pieces: Ornette Coleman’s Song X from 1985 (played alongside their never-fails crowd-pleasing cover of Everybody Wants To Rule the World), Milton Babbitt’s Semi-Simple Variations, and my personal favorite: the György Ligeti piano etude Fém (Book 2 No. 8). The latter two originally-piano pieces sounded incredible with the addition of bass and drums, and although the improvisation only seemed to address the rhythmic aspects of each piece’s nature it fit quite well. Both the Ligeti and the Babbitt are on the upcoming album. My mouth is watering.

The Babbitt cover began a couple of years ago when this crude recording of it appeared on their blog after Ethan Iverson and Alex Ross appeared together for a Halloween program of “spooky twentieth century music.” My guess is the band has been touring and tinkering with it ever since. I wonder what Milton Babbitt himself thinks of this, but my gut tells me that he’d gawk at it if he knew. I don’t care, I like it, so he can eat it.

I asked Ethan about the collaboration with Ross after the show, and he did mention that there would be more performances to come. Hopefully plane tickets to New York will get cheap…!?! I also embraced the chance to thank Ethan for posting this wonderful tribute to Steve Lacy and Thelonious Monk which launched a great conversation about the breadth of Lacy’s discography. Now I have to find Trinkles, supposedly one of Ethan’s favorite Lacy recordings, on which Rosewell Rudd is at his finest.

Geriatrics

If only they talked to each other then as they do now.

Impatience

I did it! I didn’t think I could do it! But I did!

After spending a few months scrounging around for moneys, after many peanut butter sandwitches + sleepless nights wondering, ‘How the hell am I going to afford this?’ I finally bought a soprano saxophone. A P. Mauriat PMSS-64 with vintage lacquer is on its way from Ohio and should arrive tomorrow. It was a snag, but we’ll see how well it plays. I’ll have 10 days to play-test it before I decide to keep it, but I have a good feeling about this one.

Needless to say: waiting is the hardest part! There’s an incredible build-up, like it’s some sort of really important blind date; if it goes well tomorrow, I’ll post pictures!