well-weathered music

One of the reasons I started this blog was to document the rather odd gigs I get every now and again. Tomorrow evening I’m playing at the 3,000 seat City Center as part of “Dance Rocks!” the gala fundraiser for Career Transition for Dancers. I have a prerecorded score for a dance by Ann Marie DeAngelo and then I’ll be performing live on my glass instruments as underscoring for a tribute to some successfully transitioned dancers. I thought I’d be playing much longer but it turns out to be quite short. Here are some of the rather polite, rather Satie-esque, notes I’ve put together:

And here is the Playbill blurb on the evening. I didn’t know I was a Broadway star.

There are two Ne(x)tworks related gigs coming up the second week of October. A trio concert with Cornelius Dufallo, violin; Joan LaBarbara, voice; and me, glass & electronics, at The Stone, Sunday October 7, at 8pm. Then the full ensemble at The Kitchen, Wednesday October 10, at 8pm. Each show will be very different, so come to both. The trio will be exploring some very new territory. The ensemble will be playing works by composers in the graphic score exhibit at The Kitchen, including Earl Brown, Wadada Leo Smith, Cardew, LaBarbara, and Schumacher.

Here is an excerpt from the piece I wrote for Ne(x)tworks earlier this year, premiered at The Stone in June. It was a music theater piece called Tasks & Objects. (You haven’t lived ’til you’ve seen Joan LaBarbara totally wrapped in paper, singing her favorite aria.) Unfortunately I didn’t videotape it (doh!) but did get a good recording. Here is a 3 minute excerpt.

Here are some pictures and an audio segment of the Relay event in Williamsburg last week, organized by flautist extraordinaire Jane Rigler, part of the Conflux Festival. The idea is that there are a number of improvising musicians who trade off playing trios in three locations. When a fourth musician shows up, someone must stop so that this new musician can join. The one who has stopped moves on to a new location where the same situation occurs. And on and on for three hours or so.

Here is an audio clip from one location (Lucky Cat):

This clip starts with me, Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon) & Jessica Pavone (viola). Then Chris McIntyre (trombone) shows up and takes Jessica’s place.
More audio and info here.
Here I am playing at the Ione Bar with Julianne Carney, violin, & Kyoko Kitamura, voice.

And the Lucky Cat Bar with Julianne Carney, violin, & Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon.

Actually, my favorite location was outside in front of the Conflux office, but there were no pictures.

John Cage was born on this day 95 years ago.
He continues to give us many good reasons and opportunities to simply listen.

Thank you, John.

David Tudor performs 4′33″

I went to The Stone last night to see legendary guitarist Eugene Chadbourne playing with equally legendary drummer Jimmy Carl Black. It was a wonderfully enjoyable concert. For those not “in the know,” JCB was the original drummer in Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. If you were one of the many who could not stop listening to We’re Only In It For The Money when they first discovered it, you know him from his line: “I’m Jimmy Carl Black and I’m the Indian of the group.”

And then there’s Chadbourne, the quintessential North American free improvising guitarist. He took Derek Bailey’s guitar explorations to a whole new level. I first saw (and played with) him over 30 years ago in Toronto (he was living in Canada as a US draft-dodger). He was the first person I ever saw play a prepared guitar, and he even took that a step further by adding kalimba tines on to the body of a few of his many guitars. So then President Carter granted immunity to all the draft-dodgers and Chadbourne came back to the US. To make a long story short, he has been integrating Country Music into his improvisations over the last many years (coined the term “Shockabilly”), and, judging from last night, has been having a grand ol’ time doing so.

Last night’s concert was all songs; some blues, some Texas ballads, and even some Zappa covers (an amazing version of Mom and Dad from …In It For The Money). EC & JCB have a great rapport; singing together, talking to each other during the songs. When EC would start getting “out” JCB would be right there with him, and again, with him when they seamlessly returned to the tune. I’m always happy when I hear music that simultaneously refers to and defies styles, but still knows exactly where it is at any given point.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million:

Eugene Chadbourne (but no Jimmy Carl Black):

Now that I know how to add videos to this page, thought I’d put these up. They are two short excerpts of a concert I did with Morton Subotnick and Sue Costabile in San Francisco this past March (2007). They look like they were shot by someone in the audience on their cellphone camera. Very odd. We spend a week at Naut Humon’s Recombinant Media Labs recording and filming the entire piece for Mode Records. The DVD will be released next year sometime. In this section of the piece, the changes to the various soundfiles, triggered from the computer, follow the dynamics of my voice. My actual vocal sounds are not heard, but the loudness and articulation have a huge effect. The visuals in the back are being created live by Sue.

The trio, left to right, Mort, me, Sue:

Me rocking out:

I’ve been touring with Mort pretty regularly since we both performed our music with Anna Halprin in Paris in 2004. (I performed my score for Intensive Care, and he and I performed his score for Parades & Changes.) We started working on his Until Spring Revisited, with Sue Costabile providing the visuals, and have performed it about a dozen times over the last few years, including a gig at the Library of Congress last year. Hopefully we’ll present it one last time in NY next year when the DVD is released.

The night before last I went to hear SGM at the Highline Ballroom here in NY. If you haven’t heard of them, well, I’m not sure what labels to use; thrash pre-apocalypse post-nihilist metal perhaps? Let’s just say I was one of the very few people there without piercings or tatoos (and perhaps the only one whose hairless head was not the result of shaving). But I gotta tell ya’ I have not heard such precise and well executed metric-modulations since…, well, since the last time I heard SGM. But little surprise here, seeing that my dear friend and consummate musician Carla Kihlstedt is one of the creative forces in the band. I couldn’t really understand the words they were scream-singing, but they were nice enough to give a hint of the content before each song. One was about trees, one about rocks, or the “mineral kingdom,” and one sincerely and touchingly dedicated to the guitarist’s dying father. They also used a bunch of home-made instruments and a few songs had some microtonal guitar work. I don’t know if they are aware of this connection, but they could be Glenn Branca’s offspring. Also, they were joined by my dancer friend Tanya Calamoneri who did some wonderful and appropriate rocked-out butoh movement (how slowly can one dance fast). All in all a very enjoyable, albeit very loud, evening. It made me proud of my recently-former home town of Oakland, CA (where they hail from). I find their material is best heard live, so if you get a chance, check ‘em out (don’t forget your earplugs).

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - “Helpless Corpses Enactment”