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I have not been writing here, obviously. First because I was too busy, then because I needed a break. So now I am coming out of hiding. Next weekend is August and I start up my crazy schedule again (more on that later). So I thought I’d better check in here while I still have time to do so.
So what have I been doing? Well, pretty much going non stop from the end of February through the end of June of this year. Here’s the run-down:
Feb 21: Chris McIntyre’s gig at The Stone, featuring a quartet with me (glass), Chris (trombone), Shelley Burgon (harp) and Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon). An auspicious beginning to my 4 month music frenzy. You can listen to the entire concert here.
Feb 22-27: The very next day left for Toronto to play my first gig there in 22 years. (I ended my 8 years of being Canadian in 1986.) I also went up there to start work on a dance/music collaboration with my dear friend and wonderful choreographer Maxine Heppner. We played a gig at Somewhere There. Starting off with solo glass:
Then presenting our work-in-progress collaboration, with Maxine dancing solo and I improvising on laptop (Ableton Live). Here’s a taste:
and some photos:
March 1: Returning to NY, went right into rehearsals for the first Ne(x)tworks gig of the season. This one featuring the work of Jon Gibson (wind player in the Philip Glass Ensemble since the very beginning). I first heard Jon’s music at the first Kitchen (in NYC) when I was 16. Ne(x)tworks actually played one of the pieces I heard back then. I think Jon is one of the most under-appreciated composers from those early years of NY minimalism. But unlike Glass or Reich, (but like Terry Riley and LaMonte Young), Jon usually incorporated some sort of improvisation in his solo and ensemble work. It’s always such a joy and inspiration to play his music. (I will be uploading this concert to the Open Source Audio site soon.) I look forward to working more with him.
Jon Gibson:
Also on this program was the Ne(x)tworks Trio, which brings me to the next event of the season.
March 4-6: a 3 day residency at the Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, N. Ireland. The NxW Trio is me (glass+electronics), Joan LaBarbara (voice), and Cornelius Dufallo (violin). The composer/improvisor Tim Hodgkinson flew up from London to meet and hear us. (Tim is working on a piece for our full ensemble.) SARC is a beautiful facility with some very interesting students and teachers. They were very appreciative of our work. Here’s what the NxW Trio sounded like on March 1 in NYC:
(audio here soon!)
Here is a documentation recording of an informal improv with the trio plus Tim (clarinet). Unfortunately, Joan is not well recorded here.
March 20: Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, the month finished off with the first concert of the year by Gamelan Son of Lion. A very fun show at Issue Project Room. Lots of gongs!
I wrote the following post the end of May, but never uploaded it for some reason. The piece I write about, Long River High Sky, for which I did much of the music, is having it’s east coast premiere at Jacob’s Pillow this weekend. Seems like a good time to finally post this.
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My whirlwind three month “season” is coming to an end, and I will be writing more about all the activities over the next while. But first here are some videos & audio from the upcoming Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet season in San Francisco. They are re-mounting the piece we created last year, for which I co-composed and music directed the score with the traditional Chinese music ensemble Melody of China. The piece is a collaboration between choreographer Alonzo King and the Shaolin Monks from China. I was just out in SF two weeks ago re-working some of the sections. It looks even more beautiful than it did last year.
(The music they are dancing to here is mine, except for the first minute of the second video.)
Here are some audio excerpts from my score:
May 28 - June 1, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF.
I played with four of my most favorite musicians last night; Carla Kihlstedt, Marika Hughes, and Shahzad Ismaily, who make up 2 Foot Yard, plus Zeena Parkins. It was just 2 songs in a 15 minute set, but it was an absolute joy to play with these master musicians again. Oddly enough, it was the first time I’ve actually played with Zeena. Odd in that I’ve heard her play so many times, it seemed natural to play together. And of course Carla never ceases to amaze me, even though we’ve known each other and have worked together for almost 15 years. It was kind of an odd but very interesting show; the opening night of this year’s Look & Listen Festival.
I am now three weeks away from the end of the busiest three months I’ve ever had. The Ne(x)tworks gig this Saturday, the Behrman gig monday night. On Tuesday I’m off to San Francisco to finish up a score for choreographer Alonzo King. Then back to do the Merce Cunningham gig at DIA-Beacon on May 17 & 18. After that things lighten up; only three projects to work on!
I wonder what it is that the thousand-named-oneness (aka God, the Fates, etc.) seems to frequently take masterful musicians of contrasting genres off this planet within just a few days of one another. Last year Stockhausen and Ike Turner died on either end of the same week. Now two other music treasures have moved on; and their musics could not have been expressed in more disparate forms, while still sharing a uniquely 20th century vision. On the one hand, we mourn the passing of Henry Brant, orchestrator extraordinaire and inventor of “spatial” instrumental music. While on the other hand the jazz world will never again have anyone quite like composer/clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre, whose music was structurally so scaled back it was almost invisible, yet amazingly soulful. Mr. Brant eloquently showed us that we exist in a multi-planed dimension where front and back is just as important as high-pitched and low. Mr. Guiffre eloquently showed us that we are our own multi-planed dimension where internal and external are practically non-existent. We are lucky they have left so many auditory impressions for us to visit again and again.
The Gamelan Son Of Lion concert at the Living Theater went very well the other night. The entire evening had a very nice feel to it. I can’t post audio for the entire program, but my piece, Telling Time#3 is at the end of this post. Here is the program:
Program:
1. She (Really) Had to Go – John Morton
the gamelan blends with an electronically processed music box and a familiar tune
2. Music Box – Jody Kruskal
the entire gamelan plays as a giant music box in ths fantasy for double suling (flute)
3. Piece in Harmony – Patrick Grant
a stately, neo-baroque harmonic trance with keyboard
4. Telling Time #3 – Miguel Frasconi
for gamelan and glass. A composition in unison tempo is then repeated in “telling time,” where each performer tells a story through use of shifting tempi
interval
5. Toy Symphony: Introduction and Non-Development Section – Daniel Goode
a romp of the gamelan through Toyland, including the softest sound you can imagine
6. Wauking – Barbara Benary
five Scottish working songs learned in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Wauking, or milling, is a preindustrial way to preshrink wool by pounding
7. Hard Rain – Bob Dylan/Lisa Karrer
a Dylan classic arranged for gamelan
I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally checked out the American Music Center’s Counterstream Radio, and I haven’t turned it off since. It’s not just that Raz Mesinai used recordings of me and Joan LaBarbara to create their “audio logo,” or that within the first half hour of turning it on I heard some of my own music I haven’t heard for a while. Nope. I’m surprised it took me so long because they play some f#%king great music! Just in the last half hour I heard some Bill Frisell, Sun Ra, Paul Dresher, John Cage…, it’s like they looked in the “favorite composers” file in my brain and created their playlist. Then other times I’ve heard wonderful music by folks I don’t know, and also by people I’ve met but haven’t yet heard their music. Now I have. There are also “on demand” and special programs I’m looking forward to hearing, like their spotlight on pianist Jenny Lin and the conversation Sarah Cahill arranged between Elliot Carter & Phil Lesh (that’s Sarah for ya’). Thank you American Music Center!!
Here are some excerpts from two of my recent ensemble pieces, both being performed soon.
This Friday, Gamelan Son of Lion will be premiering Telling Time #3, for glass and gamelan. This piece is a reworking of the piece I wrote for them in 2006. Here is an excerpt from the first Telling Time, where the performers are asked to relate a personal narrative about the experience of time through the use of shifting tempi:
A week later, on Saturday, May 3rd, Ne(x)tworks will be performing a concert of our “in house” composers, where we will be doing another performance of my music/theater piece, Tasks & Objects, from 2007. This piece is a suite of activities that allow musicians to explore their instruments and the performance environment in musical and extra-musical ways. Here is an excerpt from the first performance:
I had a dream the other night that a friend of mine was married to Pablo Picasso. Even though they had just been married a few months, they already had 6 teenage kids. I went to visit them in the south of France, which was a two hour drive from Manhattan. They lived on a very rocky shoreline and I had to walk the last mile or so to get to their house. Once there, I sat and talked with my friend for a long time. A while later Picasso came in and sat by the window. He didn’t join our conversation for a good long while. When he heard that I was a musician, he perked up and started asking me questions about music. He asked me what my favorite piece was and I said that it was, without a doubt, this one recording of Miles Davis that was made right before Bitches Brew, and I always carry it with me. (In reality “In a Silent Way” was Davis’ recording right before BB. But the recording in this dream was made in some other dimension between these two sessions.) Picasso & I listened to the entire piece together. When we finished, he got up right away and said he must go paint. My friend had gone out to do errands. I left and climbed across the rocky coastline back to my car and woke up.
The feeling of listening to this wonderful (imaginary) music with Pablo Picasso was what stayed with me after waking.
I remembered this dream later that day as I was packing my glass instruments for a short run of solo shows; a concert at Barbés in Park Slope that evening and one the next day here in Inwood (northern Manhattan). In both concerts I told the story of this dream and played a piece called “Listening to Miles Davis with Pablo Picasso.” I, of course, wasn’t trying to recreate the Davis piece from my dream, but the feeling of the dream itself.
