arrive hungry brain 5-1-2005

after a long lapse, finally had a chance to play with arrive, the quartet which i first wrote music for back in 2001. for some reason, the group has only played a handful of times in the last 4 years. the original lineup is me on alto, jason roebke on bass, jason adasiewicz on vibraphone and tim daisy on drums. there's really no explanation for not playing the music more often, except that we had made a recording back in 2001 that i think went really well, and it is somewhat tough playing the music live, as i've listened to the recording so many times - it's hard for me to not try to emulate the recording while playing live. so, in the past i put lots of time in between dates, in an attempt to keep the music quite fresh when we play. i think it works, though whenever we play i feel that it would be good to do it more.
for this date, tim was actually out of town, so i called up frank rosaly to play the drum parts - it worked out well. one of the things about the music is that the compositions are pretty minimal, but they influence the improvising greatly - it's not a group where the improvising just goes anywhere & doesn't reference what has come before it. we played two sets, the crowd was light and there were a few talkers, but we got them to quiet down one way or another. except for one guy who was making bird noises every now & then. what rock do these people crawl out from underneath? it was good playing though, there were some real moments when we all played together. i've been really liking Roebke's playing lately, he's really got something individual happening. actually had seen him play the night before at Heaven gallery with Brian Labcyz - they worked really well together, Brian did some processing of Jason's sound, but also did computer generated tones - a good balance.
Arrive will have another chance to play in June - looking forward to it.