Quintet 21 Grand 4-21-2006

Last Friday I played at 21 Grand in a group with weasel walter on drums, liz albee on trumpet, damon smith on bass and aurora josephson on voice. The group was put together by aurora, who went to Mills and still lives in the bay area. We got together about a month ago to play and what happened last Friday was similar to our first meeting. Everyone in the group are good musicians that have just as good ears and our styles mesh well. At no point did I ever feel that the music was boring, or that something else "needed" to be done, but something else was always about to happen and for the most part all the decisions made affected the rest of the music in the way you'd want it to. Weasel was glad to play in a group where he isn't expected to play loud the whole time, Aurora is about the most tasteful vocalist I've heard in a long time and Liz's trumpet playing is right on, there were parts when each of us backed the other up. We played the longest set of the night, there were three bands, it started at 9:00 and was over by 11:15. We played the second set and we set up in the middle of the room, surrounded by the audience but facing in. This allowed for us to be able to hear each other before the natural echo of the space affected our sounds - a good idea when playing in a bouncy space. We'll be recording in early May, my last recording before the summer break at Mills starts.

A Week in April 2006

The spring is coming into it's own out here in the bay area - this last week was a busy one, being involved in three different concerts in different contexts. Early in the week I played on a concert which featured a string quartet. The 2nd year compostion majors got a grant to pay for a string quartet to play their new compsitions. Paul Scriver wrote a piece for the quartet plus flute, piano and bass clarinet. I played bass clarinet and actually had to borrow his horn as mine, though has a nice tone & I like the feel of the instrument, tends to have trouble with intonation (which I think is mainly due to when it was made - back in the 20s I believe). I enjoyed the piece Paul wrote, some moments which dealt strictly with the instruments timbres, others which involved precise timing to achieve the right musical effect. The quartet which was hired was young & friendly, maybe not super-pro yet, but on their way to being solid. I definitely like the fact that there is challenging new music being written and played out here in the bay, except for a few experiences, notably with Guillermo Gregorio, there could have been more of it going on in Chicago.
There was an electronic music concert at Mills; an exchange between several of the music schools in California, CalArts, Stanford, UCSB, UCSD. Steini Gunnarson & I played as Son of Gunnar, Ton of Shel. We had a ten minute allotment of time, but tried to pack lots into it. Alto, Bass Clarinet, Guitar and lots of different processing. I had a bit of a technological failure at the beginning so Steini stalled the proceedings by rambling on about "as we approach the singularity...." always good to have someone be able to stall for you. Lewis Keller form CalArts brought a nice piece which utilized the sounds of two ibooks - he wrote a piece for wurlitzer and accompanied it by the whirring, static tones of the ibooks - I was impressed with the intonation between the two instruments - some complained that he didn't do much with the sounds, but I thought that it was a good piece - he limited what he could do and built a piece around it.
The Pink Canoes played on that concert and also on Saturday night at 21 Grand. Both sets were short - 10 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. Both times we set up in a way that we could all actually hear each other and it helped immensely. The past few shows we had tried to get creative with our set-ups only to realize later that it was close to impossible to hear each other and therefore be able to react and make music together. On these nights there were ebbs and flows, space was given between the five of us and the results were much better than in the past.

Signal Flow 2006 Mills College

This past weekend there was a four day festival at Mills which is called Signal Flow. I played on one piece each day of the festival and had my piece 'November' performed on Saturday night. November was written for two clarinets, bass clarinet, piano and live sampling & processing via MSP. It was a good concert on Saturday night, most of the other compositions had video along with the audio. Chris Kubick's Crowd Control was a particualr favorite of mine. The piece was based on sound files of clapping , applause and crowd reactions all triggered by Chris clapping into a microphone. Seems pretty simple but turned out to be very well constructed and performed really well in the room. I was happy with how my piece went as well - had a constructive soundcheck earlier in the dayin order to get the levels between the instruments and the computer playback. I set up my patch to be operated by Jacob Danziger, and though I could have designed it to be more automated, I feel that having someone actively controlling the processing and being able to balance the sound from the room made a huge postive impact on the performance.
Signal Flow ended on Sunday with a keg-fueled reception that involved Les Stuck and Fred Frith dancing just as goofy as the rest of us.