Now Music in New Albion

Playlist

2012-02-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

Live

February 24, 2012
Crystal Beth
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle


Beth Fleenor

An electronically enabled she-minstrel traveling relatively light, equipment-wise: a clarinet, an amplifier with a few gizmos, and some small percussion. Build-a-music on the spot. Lighthearted but too rich in timbre and rhythm to be lightweight. Focused, center-of-the head vocal production (think mid-eurasian folk singing). Bravely winning.

Recorded

February 19, 2012
Yes! I'm In The Barrel - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives And Sevens]
Fifty Miles of Elbow Room - Rev. F. W. McGee [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]

Somewhere in the back of James Brown's head is this sound, keeping him honest, chasing him.

Wednesday Evening - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]
Sincerely - The Moonglows [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Fancy brush-work on the drums. Check it out.

Rank Strangers - The Stanley Brothers [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Help Me Rhonda - the Beach Boys [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Poor Will And The Jolly Hangman - Fairport Convention [from Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years (1967-1975)]
Rising For The Moon - Fairport Convention [from Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years (1967-1975)]

Deeply back-cross-mixed influences. Syncretism upon and within syncretism.

On The Radio - Donna Summer [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

February 21, 2012
Banned Sectional 2 KEENWM - (May 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)


A fragment of the highly technical interface

In 1984 I bought a used Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite in Greenwood for $200. What sold it for me was that you could play all the push-button rhythms at once, and slow them way way down. Here the effect of the mechanical rhythms is not to set a tempo but to delineate exactly in what wise there is no such thing. The other beauty of the Sprite much on display here is that not a single sound that can be made on it is in good taste. It is all and throughout rich cheap crudiness. We got a lot of use out of it, and its wonders are amply documented. Currently it is being slowly reborn into an entirely new device.

Dear 23 - The Posies

The ironic '80s counterpart to the psychedelic '60s sincerity.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 20, 2012
Gradus 206 - Neal Meyer

Just Like That

Playlist

2012-02-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

Recorded

February 12, 2012
Jerome Kern Tribute - UPS Women's Chorus (1985), Sylvia Munsen
Banned Rehearsal 233 (September 1990 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

February 16, 2012
Hanonew - Amy Denio & Petunia

For those who did not come up through the vernacular, or who listen as though they had not come up through the vernacular, the gestures that are merely neutral to those who did, pop out. This music is both completely stable and ready to slide off into a heap on the floor, like a pile of books on a graduate student's coffee table.

Gradus 79 - Neal Meyer
Banned Rehearsal 775 - (June 2010 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A lovely session - the link is to the sound on soundcloud. Navigating the balance of sounding like music but not going like music.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 13, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 807 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

In light of the recently completed Seattle Improvised Music Festival, which I heard and enjoyed a little of, and also of the many thought-provoking essays in Wally Shoup's Adventures in Music, I have been thinking of the claims made for improvisation as an activity, and of the social aesthetics that often adhere to its practice. No conclusions of course - How could there be? - but a question I find in a talk given by Warren Burt at Bard back in 1984, as reported in News of Music, [February 1984] "Can one ask one's own language to remove itself in its own terms?"

Fabulous logo by Nelson Bragg. The more I dig it the more I dig it.

Playlist

2012-02-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

Live

February 4, 2012
More Cool Tunes For A Hot New Stove
Prospect Congregational United Church of Christ - Seattle

Your Mother Should Know; John Daugherty, with Charlie Loesel and Steve Alfred; Charlie Loesel; Raindrop Quartet; Roland Holloway, with Tom and Rosemary Bell; Cuatro; Frank Trujillo, with Tom Bell

A semi-amateur variety show to fund the replacement of an 80 year old stove. All acquitted themselves admirably. My wife's band, Your Mother Should Know, played a stripped-down unplugged set. The Raindrop Quartet really are that young, but they are lots of fun, quite capable, and carry themselves scary well. They bear watching.


Raindrop Quartet

February 9, 2012
The 27th Seattle Improvised Music Festival
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jamie Drouin, John Teske, Matthieu Ruhlmann, Jonathan Way, Taku Sugimoto, Mara Sedlins, Lance Olsen, Mark Collins, Jack Wright, Paul Hoskin, Jeph Jerman, Doug Theriault

Tiny edge of intent dark or dim

Empty environs vacant hive

Squatters seep

Note's incipits

Tactile heft blasting

Hushed long still line

Whale Song if X sang Whale Song where X is invisible if hidden blatant if frightened porous if soft brilliant if cornered pungent if ripe bickerous if baffled

(distant shelling) (battle of the boojum)

Snark Song if X sang Snark Song where X is

Jub of the Crycry

Thoughts I might have had about the socioaesthetics of free improv blown away by the engaging spectacle of that 12 foot long sax.

Recorded

February 7, 2012
My Heart - Louis Armstrong [from Hot Fives And Sevens]
No Trumps - Fred Gardner's Texas University Troubadours [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Playing The Races - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]

Manhandling his guitar as though it were a toy ukelele.

Pledging My Love - Johnny Ace [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Mountain Of Love - Harold Dorman [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Day Tripper - The Beatles [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) - Sly and the Family Stone [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Is it just me, or does this edge toward what would in a later age be hip hop?

One More Chance - Fairport Convention [from Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years (1967-1975)]
Monkeys - Echo And The Bunnymen [collected from Nancy's Mix]

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 6, 2012
Gradus 206 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2012-02-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

Live

January 28, 2012
Attila - Verdi
Seattle Opera

There are few musics where the disconnect between ostensible subject matter and apparent affect is so strangely askew. This may be, at last, a toe-hold into Verdi for me. I'll keep you posted.

February 2, 2012
One Minute Solo Improvisations -
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

I didn't try to keep track of who all played, but there were a bunch. Here is a link to a gallery of each individual doodle I made (they look best big, so watch the slide show), and below is the whole page. If you played you are free to guess which one was done while you were playing. I can't remember, and they weren't made in left-to-right top-to-bottom order.

Recorded

January 29, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 232 - (September 1990 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

The feeling of being resonating is a pleasure. The feeling of being one resonating is a pleasure. The feeling in one's being of being resonating is a pleasure. The feeling of being one resonating is a pleasure in one's whole being.

Wild Thing 2 - Banned Rehearsal (July 2000 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

See post last week for Wild Thing 1, but with echo.

January 31, 2012
Gathered Songs Recording Session 1 (May 2005) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

A song is (can be) a clear statement of text as set apart from conversational modes.

Keyboard Shortcuts - Richard Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

This was the recording from my recital of June 2010. As a performer one accretes a sense of what a piece is from a standpoint that is both privileged and distracted. On the one hand all its details, all its structure, are baldly present. On the other hand the performer is so busy attending to the physical details and to the projection that it is a delight to step back, after time has passed, and listen for how a piece hangs in the audiosphere. All to say that, listening now, each of these six pieces is precisely distinct and unlike anything else, even its fellows - except that they are also exactly like each other in a way that seems unlike any other way that sets of pieces are ever like each other. Imagine six of the oddest people you had ever met - and then to discover years later that they were brothers.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

January 30, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 806 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Playlist

2012-01-28T12:05:00.000-08:00

Live

January 22, 2012
Triptet
Lucid Jazz Lounge in Seattle


Triptet

Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, and Michael Monhart crammed the tiny Lucid stage with electronics. Tom used a theremin to control the mix between his guitar straight and his guitar modulated, and Michael shifted the bell of his sax between two microphones to mix the sound with laptop-morphed versions of itself. All that intense technology combined over Greg's melodic and ever-shifting-never-coming-to-a-downbeat-that-isn't-five-other-things-at-the-same-time drumming form a deeply rich and lyrical sonic surface for what, in the end, is a supremely simple and elegiac music. Free jazz for the spirit entire.

Recorded

January 24, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 231 - (August 1990 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

Lots of empty space. This session tries hard, but is stuck.

Wild Thing 1 - Banned Rehearsal (July 2000 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

In sillier moments over the years Banned Rehearsal has indulged in impromptu arrangements of this garage classic. This was the first of two more amplified versions that were separate from the regular improv session.

Gradus 78 - Neal Meyer (May 2005)
Keyboard Shortcuts - Richard Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey (studio recording June 2010)


Richard Johnson, missed in Seattle

Pieces of pieceness glued onto the page. A gloriously cobbled music, and lots of fun to play too!

January 26, 2012
Gut Bucket Blues - Louis Armstrong - [from Hot Fives And Sevens]

Here the exhortations one musician to another become an integral melodic strand in the piece as a whole.

Jesus Is My Air-O-Plane - Mother McCollum [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]

On top of the bizarre titular sentiment and the fine performance, a sensuous hiss rolling through the sound adds a guilty pleasure.

Careless Love - Joe Turner [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Interesting segregation of vocal sound from the accompaniment. The fact of it is almost 80's preminiscent, but the sound of the actual tracks are clearly early 40's.

Howlin' Wolf - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]

Guitar Toccata.

I'm A Man - Bo Diddley [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Money - Barrett Strong [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Both of these: harmonically colored percussion and voice.

Crying Time - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

The backing vocals, especially at the very end, sound like they strayed in from a Disney movie.

Pressure Drop - Toots And The Maytals [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

The downbeat scoops up.

Shining Star - Earth Wind & Fire [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
He Stopped Loving Her Today - George Jones [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

A natural-born button pusher.

This Is England - The Clash [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Within the continuing cultural conversation a song is lobbed over the water. Pick a fight.

In Session At The Tintinabulary

January 23, 2012
Gradus 204 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2012-01-21T16:07:00.000-08:00

Recorded

January 16, 2012
Keep Your Temper - Gulf Coast 7 [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Barnacle Bill The Sailor - Hoagy Carmichael [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Moten Swing - Eddie Durham [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
All Around The World - Little Willie John [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Doggin' Around - Jackie Wilson [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Agent Double-O Soul - Edwin Starr [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Give Me Just A Little More Time - The Chairmen of the Board [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
No Woman, No Cry - Bob Marley and the Wailers [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Floats on the downbeat

How every little thing hangs

On a horizontal gesture

Generals and Majors - XTC [collected from Nancy's Mix]
Small Town - John Cougar Mellencamp [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

January 17, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 230 (August 1990 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)
Banned Rehearsal 576 (July 2000 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

The specifics of sequence are indistinct. The specifics of any sensuous slice are rich in detail.

January 18, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 684 (April 2005 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

Our first recording onto flash memory.

Sonata Liebeslied - Keith Eisenbrey

The recording of my performance at Seattle Composers Salon in September of 2010. I hope more of the sound of the piece got to the audience than got onto my DAT.

January 19, 2012
Sugar Babe - Lee Morse [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]
I Am In The Heavenly Way [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]
Baby Dear - Mary Lou Williams [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]


Mary Lou Williams

Airborne.

Baby Let's Play House - Elvis Presley [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
He Will Break Your Heart - Jerry Butler [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Ain't That Peculiar - Marvin Gaye [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
I'll Be There - The Jackson 5 [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Opens with a toy-symphony vibe, sweet and uplifting. But buried deep is an undercurrent of creepy that just doesn't go away.

Shame Shame Shame - Shirley (And Company) [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Girls On Film - Duran Duran [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
The Payoff Mix - Double Dee and Steinske [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Playlist

2012-01-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

Live

January 8, 2012
Transport presents Michael Partington, guitar - at the Wechkin Shainin House, Seattle


Michael Partington

24 Preludes - Bryan Johanson

Having just completed writing a set of 24 piano preludes myself it was with great interest that I attended to this lovely sequence for classical guitar. The usual reason for there to be 24 is to have one in each key, a nearly impossible task for guitar without the use of a capo or retuning. Either strategy would fundamentally change the relationship between the key and open strings. Bryan's solution was simpler: compose 24 but don't worry about keys.

Lurking behind sets of preludes is the model of theme and variations. As sequences of things they operate in much the same way. We delight in each new pleasure, eager to discover the next. The major difference is that the structural role of the theme in the latter is played by a literary idea in the former, i.e. preludes are related to each other nominally, rather than internally. In this sense one can think of them as liberated variations, and I think this helps illuminate what is so fun about them. Each can go its own way and build its own interior logic, yet proximity and commensurate scale allow easy comparison amongst themselves - a model of non-heirarchical diversity.

These 24 give ample play to the varieties of figuration and tone color specific to classical guitar, fluid and warm. Michael, as always, played with admirable clarity and lyricism. The intimate, informal setting suited perfectly. A joy from beginning to end.

Recorded

January 10, 2012
Two Rose - Keith Eisenbrey - members of The Four Winds Woodwind Quartet (Sarah Bassingthwaighte, flute, Deborah Colyn, clarinet, and Ryan Hare, bassoon)

This was a recording of the one and only live performance at the Seattle Art Museum in June of 2000. When I wrote it I was experimenting with the composition of standard formats (such as prelude and fugue) in a synthetic tonal environment. Arbitrarily assigning 17 semi-tones as the modular interval (rather than 12) I reconstructed the notion of "key" along the same lines as Ben Boretz's construction of "key" in Meta-Variations. The results are variously successful, but probably more interesting as novelties than as particularly wonderful music. That is, they manage to outfit a caravan in order to get to the edge of the sidewalk.

January 13, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 683 - (April 2005 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)
the mute right channel of Lionel Marchetti's Train de Nuit - Christopher DeLaurenti

Long moments without signal are interrupted by pops, squeals, and raspberries, the material relics of the digital medium. The skirt of purity lifted. The pants of virtue dropped.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 9, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 805 - Pete Comley, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

A full house!

Playlist

2012-01-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Recorded

January 3, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 682 - Banned Rehearsal

Participants were Karen, Neal, and me. April of 2005. As an experimental adjunct to Neal's Gradus project we devoted a dozen or so sessions to Midden, a systematic exploration of extremely limited instrument sets, their possible groupings, and who was playing them. Neal was in charge of keeping track of who was to play what, and I don't pretend to remember the protocol. This was the tenth session of that series. The effect is to focus the sound of the session and to force the issue of composition and inventiveness within a narrow range of options. It certainly did that, but I can't help thinking that the reason we abandoned the project may have been partly because the focus was only apparent, and too easily obtained.

Sonata Liebeslied - Keith Eisenbrey


le me

This was a home recording I made a few days after my recital of June 2010. You can listen or download here. The score is available here. The impetus of the piece was Ben's invitation to re-compose his unfinished Liebeslied, for a pianist alone. He had done much the same thing himself, crafting a re-configured version of the opening pitch-class set (more or less) and spinning it into the wholly remarkable ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") of 1977. My first go at it was essentially cosmetic, and you can see my score here. This time around I decided to try something more like what Ben had done, recomposing from the seed outward. My method was to take the re-configured seed (the first six dyads), and compose a set of series of versions in which each subsequent iteration within each set was derived from the last by various mod-17 functions. The functions were derived from dyadic relations within the seed. The sets were rhythmically differentiated, and then layered into a large-scale time-scheme that reflected the rhythm of the opening iteration of the seed. What a chore! But the result is a big strong piece, at the outer edge of my capabilities as a pianist.

January 4, 2012
Grandpa's Spells - Charles Creath [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Listening to these old recordings, 1925 for this, one can only wonder, from what little remains of the sound how much had been there, and yet how much remains to be heard through the little that is left. I wonder though how much our epicure's delight in the old-timey sound as new-timily produced obscures our hearing of what was there, and if it matters.

Expressman Blues - Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachell [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]

As perfect a use of out-of-tune piano as could be got.

I Got To Cross The River Jordan - Blind Willie McTell [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]

This is an astounding performance in which the steel guitar plays some of the words, hocket-like. To explain what he does makes it a gimmick, but to hear it happen is breathtaking.

Only You (And You Alone) - The Platters [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Let Them Talk - Little Willie John [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Help (song) - The Beatles [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Get Up I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine, Part One - James Brown [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Master Race Rock - The Dictators [collected from Nancy's Mix]

A self-parody of self-parody.

Funkytown - Lipps, Inc. [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Each of the songs, and all of them as a collection, are an essay on the ways in which the vocal and their accompaniments converse. Listen to McTell's intertwining magic act and to The Platters' and Little Willies John's understated perfection. In Help the accompaniment is a force unto itself, while for James Brown it is a cooperative endeavor, moving finally to Funkytown, where the vocal line has been dethroned and becomes the most equal among equals.

Psalm 121 - Gerald Kechley, UPS Chorale (1985), Thomas Goleeke
Banned Rehearsal 229 - Banned Rehearsal

Participants were Karen, Aaron, and me, in August of 1990. We used this session to announce our pregnancy to Aaron, but even amid the silly talk there are some fine percussion sounds.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 2, 2012
Train Case - recording The Quaker's Courtship
Your Mother Should Know - recording Rocks And Glass, unplugged, or as Karen quips: "Not Your Mother's Train Case".

I hope to have these on ReverbNation soon.

Playlist

2011-12-31T14:52:00.000-08:00

Recorded

December 26, 2011
Squeeze Me - Clarence Williams' Blue 5 [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Stripper tempo.


Jack Purvis

What's the Use of Cryin' Baby - Jack Purvis [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In a single song the horn steers a course from song to dance, from image of voice to image of body.

Moten Swing - Jay McShann [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Maybellene - Chuck Berry [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Lead Me On - Bobby Bland [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Don't Look Back - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Arranging chunk to chunk, the patterns of notes don't create the harmonies from themselves, but just bounce around as though trapped in them.

Domino - Van Morrison [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind - John Rutter - UPS Chorale (1985), Thomas Goleeke

Egregious word-painting coupled with sicky sweet sentimental pop - and politely British to boot. Not a winning combination.

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables - Dead Kennedys

The instrumentals are fabulous, riding just on the edge of too fast for the tempo. They would have been miles ahead in my book if the one-trick pony singer, a misanthropic spawn of Frank Zappa & Ian Anderson, had kept his mouth shut. Cutesy art-punk.

Let Us Break Bread Together - UPS Women's Chorus (1985), Sylvia Munsen

December 27, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 228 - Banned Rehearsal

Over the decades these sessions have been many things. Among them has been a sort of aural snap-shot album of our collective life. Midway through this session Karen's mom comes over to visit, sharing some of the first pictures of our then new-born nephew. Prior to that were 10 to 15 minutes of luscious noisy roar. August of 1990, Karen, her mother Marilyn, Aaron, and I participated.

December 28, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 575 - Banned Rehearsal

A session full of players: both my sons, Karen, Aaron, the above mentioned nephew, Anna, Neal, and me in June of 2000, celebrating the 16th Bannediversary. The opening does not bode well, a muttery electric guitar (played by me, I think) dominates a sound that could be the quintessence of incessance. As we peel players the sound thins out, guitar and drums are put away, and we find a surprisingly lovely quiet peace.

Playlist

2011-12-24T16:23:00.000-08:00

Recorded

December 18, 2011
St. Andrews Night Recovered - Benjamin Boretz/Dorota Czerner

This is another file that Ben sent me recently (Thank you!). I'm extracting the title from the computer file, so I am only presuming it is more or less correct.

Spoken text and percussion feeding back into the spoken text through its un-pop-filtered pop. Room reverb cut short as though damped. Page turns to the remains after spoken text.

Sanctus - Faure - UPS Women's Chorus (1985), Sylvia Munsen


Charles Fulcher & Orchestra

My Pretty Girl - Charles Fulcher [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

A master class in tightly measured silences.

I'm Bound For Home - North Canton Quartet [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]

Apparently this vocal quartet recorded exactly two cuts ever, both on the same day. For about a half a second at the beginning of each verse you could believe you are in for some very nice ordinary music. Then you are pitched headlong into a rhythmic and contrapuntal whitewater. Up for air just in time. Back you go.

Lament for Javanette - Barney Bigard [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]


Barney Bigard

I love the way the low clarinet occupies a border between vamping for time and being the main melody, and how the piano just melts a few notes into the sound.

Mannish Boy - Muddy Waters [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Georgia On My Mind - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Bourree For Bach - Bach/Williams UPS Women's Chorus (1985), Sylvia Munsen
Bring The Boys Home - Freda Payne [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

It's the backup singers and arrangement that make this one for me, how they pile up.

Bad Luck - Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

What a rhythm section is about: a multitude of specificities within the beat.

Cold Love - Donna Summer [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Ev'ry Time I Feel The Spirit - UPS Chorale (1985), Thomas Goleeke

December 20, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 227 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron, and me in July of 1990. Transparent but mis-balanced in a fine way.

December 22, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 574 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Anna, Aaron, Neal, and me in June of 2000.

Two Pomes Play (two midi versions) - Keith Eisenbrey

In the late '90s I was starting to play with the possibilities of composing using a mod-17 pitch-class system, i.e. treating pitches that are 17 semi-tones apart as being "the same note". As part of this project I wrote several pieces of music-like music in order to find out what music-like music would sound like in the synthetic system. Two Pomes Play was originally written as a duet for clarinet and bassoon, but having midi easily available I was tempted to tinker with it. These versions are from 2005 and end up sounding like computer or video game music of an earlier era. Not bad, and not so long as to cloy - kind of fun actually.

Sonata Liebeslied - Keith Eisenbrey

This was the recording from my recital of June 2010, at the Chapel. I still groove on how it spreads immovably from the ordinary into oddly warped planes. Here's the score. And here's a home recording with more right notes.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 19, 2011
Gradus 203 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-12-17T17:34:00.000-08:00

Live

December 16, 2011
Gradus for Fux Tesla and Milo the Wrestler - Three Rungs (Gradus 202)
Neal Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

There are many musics in the world that are not quite like any other, but there are few of which it must be admitted that there isn't any other at all similar. Neal's Gradus project, in conceptual scope, dedicated application, and sonic delicacy, is without peer.

rounded endings and then not or protract

Recorded

December 13, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 573 - Banned Rehearsal

This lovely session persists as sound without resorting to musical contrivances. Scrape and bang, with light drumming. Nicely transparent throughout. I posted it on Sound Cloud, so it should be there in a little while. Karen, Neal, and me in May of 2000.

Gradus 77 - Neal Meyer

December 15, 2011
Gradus 176 - Neal Meyer

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 12, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 804 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Steve Kennedy, Aaron, Neal, and me.

Playlist

2011-12-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

Live

December 9, 2011
The James King Band
University Temple United Methodist Church (Chapel)


James King of Virginia

This was at my church, so I suppose disclosure is appropriate, but I would heartily recommend this gentleman to your ears anytime and anywhere. He played two sets at the gospel end of bluegrass or at the bluegrass end of gospel, depending on which way you look at it. The rest of the trio consisted of Clay Lillard on banjo, and a young man who's name I regrettably did not catch playing upside-down mandolin (right-handed mandolin played left-handed) and singing the tenor harmonies. Among other joys, they presented a veritable master-class on just how easily tight an ensemble can be.

Recorded

December 5, 2011
Quixingshan: String Quartet No. 2 (midi realization) - Benjamin Boretz

In the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel, at the height of the king's feast, a human hand appeared and began writing words on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lampstand. I don't know what 'Quixingshan' means any more than what Belshazzar knew what the writing on the wall portended, but even through the midi with its lock-step vibrati and armless string players the sense in the sound of an indictment not to be ignored, of a divinely accusatory graffito, was enough to give me the willies.

December 8, 2011
Crazy For You - Madonna
Banned Rehearsal 226 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron, and me making noise back in 1990. The first 10 minutes is spectacular, but as soon as we start talking it falls apart. I was the first guilty party this time around.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 5, 2011
Gradus 201 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-12-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

Live

November 26, 2011
Your Mother Should Know
Sky Church at EMP, Seattle

Your Mother Should Know sound check. Mike Gervais of Curtains For You, Karen Eisenbrey, Neal Kosaly-Meyer

Full disclosure is required here: I'm married to the drummer in this band, and the other half is my longtime collaborator Neal Meyer. The show was great fun, Karen's VistaLites looked great, and the light show on the big screen behind them was stupendous. There is still some work to do balancing all the parts, but I've heard similar problems in some pretty big-name venues, with some big-name acts.


Your Mother Should Know on Mars

Recorded

November 27, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 572 - Banned Rehearsal

From May of 2000, the classic five-piece personnel: Karen, Anna, Aaron, Neal, and me. Reeds and percussion move toward plucks plunks and percussion ending with evening lounge.

November 29, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 681 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Neal and I were joined by an old friend of N&K, Brent Bankson. It ended up being something of culture clash, mutually mystifying. Listening back though one can hear the ebb & flow of various attempts to find anything like a common ground.

Banned Rehearsal 774 - Banned Rehearsal

In May of 2010, Karen, Neal and I are joined by Neal's young progeny Isabel. Mostly drums, electronics, plucks and twangs.

December 1, 2011
Ain't No Flies On Auntie - Perry's Hot Dogs [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Down On Me - Eddie Head And His Family [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]
Lafayette - Hot Lips Page [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
A Bit Of Blue - Art Pepper [from Smack Up]
Gloria - Them [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

It's a few years later, but the sound and vibe remind me of the Northwest garage bands of the early 60's: It could almost be the flip side of The Kingsmen doing Louie, Louie.

The Psychedelic Furs (album) - The Psychedelic Furs

Post-Bowie glam from 1980, shading more arty than ultra-professional. Constructed with clean transparent tracks, each in its own echo chamber, the whole then lightly smeared with a slow flange. The Psycho Furs were, if not the favorite pop band of my friends at Bard, then at least among the most-often mentioned. This may have been the first time I've listened to them carefully.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 28, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 803

Just three of us - Karen, Aaron, and me. Flashback to the early 90's.

Playlist

2011-11-27T13:54:00.000-08:00

Live

November 19, 2011
Curtains For You
Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs
The Posies
Neptune Theater, Seattle

I am coming to the local rock & roll party late, and I usually feel like the old guy who's just there to give the kids a ride home. Late in The Posies' set they were thanking all the people who helped put on the show (thoughtful!) and finished up by thanking us, their fans, for being with them all through the decades. I'm sure the spotlights weren't aimed just at me, though it felt that way, and I wanted to say "No, you should be thanking those guys in the next row down! I've never heard you before!"

In the old days when kids were asked what they liked about rock & roll the nearly unanimous answer was "It has a beat." But Bach has a beat and Chopin has a beat. It takes a good bit of work to avoid it. I think, though, that the ubiquity of the popular meme is a pointer to a more interesting inquiry. It isn't just that the beat is loud and in your face (sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't), it is that this music, as does jazz, gospel, the blues, and all their kin and progeny, consists not so much of particular relations to harmonies and pitch-patterning clarified by their metrical contexts, but rather of subtle vocabularies of weights, bounces, and viscosities in and among the beats themselves and between them and all their subdivisions. Pitch here is the handmaiden, not the lord of all.

What was interesting to me about these three fine acts is how exactly the players relate, amongst themselves, to the particular flavors of beats they create, how those flavors differ from each other, and how the idea of what a beat is in these musics is both different from and also akin to such ideas in other musics. Curtains For You plays with a quick, effortless, Superball bounce. Star Anna fills long bluesy measures with heavy, blunt, heels-to-the-ground hammer blows. The Posies are all about power and drive. Karen thought they were like a psychedelic-grunge version of Simon & Garfunkle, but I came away with a less clear picture of them than of the other two bands. This is partly because I have become familiar with Curtains and had time to think about them, and because Star Anna inhabits turf made familiar by many another electric blues diva. If and as I become more familiar with them I'm sure I'll have more to say.

Recorded

November 20, 2011


Maggie Jones (Faye Barnes)

Dallas Blues - Maggie Jones [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

I love the sound of this recording. You can hear the room, its walls and chairs. The center of the beat is wide and soft, but precisely so.

John the Revelator - Blind Willie Johnson [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]

Folk song as catechism.

Save It Pretty Mama - Sidney Bechet [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Please Be My Boyfriend - The Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology, Rhino Records]

Just careful enough. Just articulate enough.

Get Off Of My Cloud - The Rolling Stones [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Rock and Roll - Heart [from Heart: Greatest Hits]

November 21, 2011
Banned Sectional #1 KEE NWM - Banned Rehearsal

Neal and I made this tape in the spring of 1985. We begin with nearly 40 minutes of tiny sounds in spectacular concentration and wonderful cross-communication. In the last 7 to 10 minutes Neal started playing with feedback sound. I remember at the time I thought this was a big disappointment. We had been sharing something quite fine and subtle for most of the tape, and then the electric walrus comes in and nothing else can be heard. Listening back at it now I hear yet another installment of Banned Rehearsal's ancient argument between the sessions as experimental socialization and the sessions as the making of artifacts of recorded sound. As much as I admire the latter, and admit its often brilliant success, I am convinced it is the former that is a more difficult task, and holds higher possibilities.

November 22, 2011
Banned Rehearsal #225 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron, and I made this tape in 1990 while Aaron was house-sitting somewhere. Fallacious Assumptions that are laid out here as on a slab: 1. The What (the notes, the information) of what is being played is crucial, not the How of how it sounds. 2. The Fact that a thing is made up on the spot guarantees its authenticity. 3. Known, identifiable, and scholastically approved compositional procedures have the power to unify and to make chaos coherent.

Playlist

2011-11-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

Upcoming Show

Your Mother Should Know


Karen mugging at EMP

Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 1PM - FREE -
Sky Church at EMP, Seattle


Neal at Full Tilt Ice Cream

Your Mother Should Know is Neal Meyer and my spouse Karen in Rock and Roll mode. It will be loads of fun, so come on out!

Recorded

November 13, 2011
Gradus 76 - Neal Meyer


Fungus - White River Valley, Mt. Rainier National Park, September 24, 2011

Subtly melodicizing the dynamic gradations. Beyond loud and soft.

Old Habits (album) - Hot Bodies In Motion

I bought this CD at their live show a few weeks ago. Their funk beats lead from the hip, and they make fine use of nearly silent breaks and big fat instrumental sound. Every once in a while the ping in the singer's voice reminded me of The Humidiflyers, a now-dissolved but much missed local band from the early oughts. This may count as the first time I listened carefully to a track that uses what I presume is Auto-Tune (just once, as an effect). Oddly, it gave off strong whiffs of Charles Dodge's Speech Songs. I guess there is really nothing new under the sun.

The Wagon - Ben Harney [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
The Lone Star Trail - Ken Maynard [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]
In A Mellotone - Duke Ellington [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]
When It Rains, It Really Pours - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]
Stay - Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

This fabulous arrangement is too darned short!!

A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

November 15, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 26 - Banned Rehearsal

Participating were Aaron, Neal, and me. It was March of 1985. It barely moves. What enters first waits, waits, waits. Then enters. Not a perfect session, weakening toward the end as we succumb to the stupid, but for the most part patient and still.

November 17, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 224 - Banned Rehearsal

Anarchy endrummed.

Participating were Karen, Aaron, and me. It was June of 1990. There are some big drum beats in here that sound great! I thought of a possible strategy for improvisation: Avoid variety and eschew repetition.

Nothing As It Seems - Pearl Jam

I am new to Pearl Jam, but I am finding some deep listening in these songs by all concerned. The arrangements are full of "just so" sound, even though the sound that it is "just so" as is far from simple, and far from simply good.

Book of Windows (studio version of 3/20/2005) - Keith Eisenbrey


Me, Neal and Aaron with scores of Book Of Windows in 1982

I used to say that I didn't need to think about minimalism anymore, because I had already written music that was much more repetitious and much much uglier than anything anyone else had ever done. Possibly not true, but not particularly interesting even if it is. Book of Windows is a massive score that I made in 1982. It is composed of a long text (Ben called it a word-mare) containing (among other things) three interlocked acrostics, and hugely repetetive, repletely patterned musics for piano and saxophone. I was exploring the notion of score-making as opposed to musical composition, and the format of the score has as much or more to do with how it hangs as a book than with how the music might go. The immediate influences were, I suppose, Ben Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") with its lines of music as carefully placed on the page as any poem, and Gertrude Stein's Lucy Church Amiably. The score is explicitly open to interpretation concerning how it might be performed, and it never has been done with a saxophone. Aaron, Neal, and my brother Paul recorded it in 1982 with piano and clarinet, with Aaron speaking the text. Later that summer it was performed and recorded in the common area at Bard College with Jill Borner speaking, Bruce Huber on electric guitar, and me on Crumar. Both of these performances are long slow affairs, clocking in at between 90 to 120 minutes, but they are not without their charms. I spent several years re-making all of my scores digitally, and when I got done with this one I realized I could use the score to make a midi performance. I used a marimba sound instead of piano, and stuck with electric guitar for the sax part. I recorded the text, amending the sound of my voice with various cheap digital effects, and sped the whole thing up so that it goes by in just over 30 minutes. The result is a lighter-weight performance, not so much of an endurance test as the earlier version.

BF Vocals Rough - Keith Eisenbrey

This is the first mix of the choir of me singing There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood, for eventual use in Blood and Fire Hallelujah.

Playlist

2011-11-13T14:45:00.000-08:00

Recorded

November 6, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 223 - Banned Rehearsal

Participating were Karen, Aaron, and me in 1990. After about ten minutes of transparent chamber music, we call Anna in San Diego to celebrate the 6th Bannediversary. The rest of the session is 1/2 of a telephone converasation.

I Got Shit - Pearl Jam [from Rearviewmirror]

Check out the slow flange of the cymbal's sound rolling through the pounding rhythm. It is the antithesis of an 80's tight-ass production.

November 7, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 571 - Banned Rehearsal

My index only lists Karen, Anna, Aaron, and me, which would be an unusual grouping, in that Neal is not there. An error is always a possibility. A delicate session, and then raucous. But when raucous, raucous in detail and briefly.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 10 - hosted by Keith Eisenbrey & Mike Marlin

The final mass improv of the evening.

BF Percussion Rough - Keith Eisenbrey

All the percussion tracks collected for eventual use in Blood and Fire Hallelujah mixed together. Seven minutes of kaleidoscopic rhythm wheels.

The Wagon - Ben Harney [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]

Allen also includes this cut in his earlier collection That Devilin' Tune, so I'll get to listen to it again soon. Ben's voice, alone, sings a cheerful tale of woe.

The House Carpenter - Clarence Ashley [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]
Milenburg Joys - Kid Rena [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Trying To Get To You - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]
Only The Lonely - Roy Orbison [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Until Roy comes in, this could be The Fleetwoods. It must have been something in the air. I guess we could always blame Sputnik.

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Who'll Stop The Rain - Creedence Clearwater Revival [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Born to Run (single)- Bruce Springsteen [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Bebe Le Strange - Heart [from Heart: Greatest Hits]

November 8, 2011
Trance Butchered Knight 3 - Keith Eisenbrey

A somewhat less than successful mix of percussion (#1) plus Funmaker Sprite (#2). The progressive loss of signal has tipped a tidge past the optimal garbage-y quality of the Sprite tracks alone.

Recitative, Aria, and Burlesque - Sergei Slonimsky - Paul Taub, Roger Nelson, Matthew Kocmieroski - [from Edge - Flute Music from the Periphery of Europe]

I must presume that composers from within the former Soviet block view the various techniques and attitudes of free-world post-war concert music from a perspective that is as difficult for us to comprehend as our view of their attitudes and techniques are to them. And so it is no surprise that to some extent what is picked up as salient from our culture is just what seems to us most superficial to it. Extended instrumental techniques are as easy to hear as new and weird as they are difficult to produce well, and so can give what is otherwise a fairly standard musical endeavor the sheen of open-to-western-ideas-ness, without necessarily engaging in the full decades-long dialogue that led to them in the first place. The performances here are top-notch, but the overall effect is more like a duct-tape skin graft. The glitz of the not-so-unusual-as-all-that-special-effects doesn't shine from within the musical fabric. Instead, it obscures and distracts.

Sonata - Pteris Vasks - Paul Taub - [from Edge - Flute Music from the Periphery of Europe]

This one gets closer. Paul plays magnificently, as always, and the piece doesn't spend much time being music-as-usual - though it doesn't exactly not do that, either. Somehow in the midst of it, the technique of playing the flute while singing, and of playing the flute, and of singing itself, all become part of the activity of inhabiting this piece.

Light Years - Peal Jam [from Rearviewmirror]

The vocal part studiedly narrow both rhythmically and pitchwise. A composer's performance.

Live

November 10, 2011
Solstice Quintet at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center Seattle
Ann Marie Yasinitsky, Keri E. McCarthy, Shannon Scott, Matthew Aubin, Ryan M. Hare

Wooden Miniatures - Gregory Yasinitsky
Three Little Fantasies - Oliver Knussen
Towns of Wood and Wind - Carl Schimmel
Mythos - Ryan Hare
Suite for Wind Quintet - Ruth Crawford Seeger

The wind quintet as an ensemble presents composers with numerous challenges. The instruments don't really balance dynamically all that well, each pairing has unique characteristics of blending-ness and not-blending-ness (which shift with the various pitch ranges), and unless you have five heroes of circular-breathing to work with you must always consider length of breath in every idea and at every moment. None of these are really bad challenges, and they are often met and vanquished to huge success.

This fine Palousian band was brave enough to travel from over the mountains, in November no less, to offer five largely successful assays into the field. I was especially taken by Oliver Knussen's little pieces with their surprising and imaginative textures and phrasings, Ryan Hare's subtle theatricalities, and of course Ruth Crawford Seeger's supremely slippery notions of parallel play. All said and done this was an attractive and well balanced program, and I enjoyed it immensely.

November 12, 2011
Curtains For You, Out On The Streets, and The True Bugs at North City Vintage Honda, Seattle

Neal had informed us that Mike Gervais's "other band", The True Bugs, would be playing in Lake City on Saturday night. Later we were informed that it was at a "used car dealership", and then at a "vintage Honda store" - "more of a party than a show". We had an intersection a vague time (8 or 9), and the instructions that the "entrance is on 140th". We drove by it twice without seeing anything even remotely lively, explored the other side of Lake City Way, and just before giving up and going home Karen happened to spot a van with North City Vintage Honda printed on it. It was parked in front of a dark commercial building. A "For Sale" banner covered its streetward sign. We wound back to the correct side of Lake City Way, parked a block off and, fortunately, spotted some folks heading in the right direction carrying instruments. We followed where they had disappeared into an unlit vacant lot. Hidden around the corner of a building a square canvas awning had been set up, with a fire-barrel in the middle for heat. We found Neal, and said our howdys to those we knew, finding out only then that not only would The True Bugs be playing but also Curtains For You. After an hour or so we wandered inside. Of course it turns out that the Hondas in question aren't cars at all, but motorcycles, with what I presumed to be a repair-shop garage space as the venue. The bands set up toward one end (with the restroom behind them), and we were surrounded by shelves of tools and motorcycle parts.

If I am not mistaken, the connection between all the bands and the venue goes something like this: Jeremiah, who I gather is the the proprietor of the venue, plays guitar in both Out On The Streets and The True Bugs. Mike and Matt Gervais, the respective singer and drummer of The True Bugs, are also the front end of Curtains For You.

CFY plays with an infectious bouncy beat. Their songs and arrangements are accomplished, gleefully professional endeavors. We'll be seeing them again next week - so more later. To my ear, OOTS was a bit under-developed. They play music reminiscent of early U2 with lots of skill and energy, but their sound hasn't gelled. I couldn't help thinking that it would behoove them to think hard about how much like U2 they really want to be. Why be a 300th rate Bono when you've got a shot at being a 1st rate Out On The Streets? I leave open the question of why anyone would want to emulate His Insufferableness in the first place, but to each their own. TTB is a fine specimen of second-generation Seattle Grunge, straight up and hard reckless driving beats. The moshing in the crowd got more reckless than I am comfortable with (being an old guy), but I suppose the young folks were having fun, and I didn't see that anyone got hurt.

Playlist

2011-11-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

Recorded

October 30, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 222 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron and I participated. This session got blatty and chatty discussing the word assuage, and went downhill from there.

Assembly Rechoired 45 - Banned Rehearsal

Pete Comley, John, Karen and me in April of 2000.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 9 - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer

Neal drags the washtub bass across the floor of Gallery 1412 to great effect.

Garage 100520 - Keith Eisenbrey

Five minutes of my neighbor tearing boards off an old garage.

November 3, 2011
All I Want Is A Little Spoonful - Papa Charlie Jackson [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]
Cosmics - Frank Melrose [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]


Frank Melrose

As though junkyard versions of Thelonius Monk and Art Tatum were mixing it up something fierce. Frank produces a whole suite of pieces in a four minute tour de force of pianistic touch.

Harlem Air Shaft - Duke Ellington [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]
Mystery Train - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]

Elvis the musician's musician. The closer the listen the more dropped the jaw.

Black Beauty - Duke Ellington [from Ken Burns' Jazz]

In 1960 Ellington drops in the sounds of 30's solos and ensembles.

Winter Potato 3 - Cornelius Cardew - John Tilbury

Two minutes of folds and creases. Tiny but not exquisite. It's more like a wee but perfect construction of found objects.

Turkey In The Straw - George Childers [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]
Trance Butchered Knight 2 - Keith Eisenbrey

My second go at this, and by now I was using the score that I later re-named Lacrymosa. Once again I was overdubbing using an erase-head override switch. In this case it ends up sounding rather grandly horrible.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 31, 2011
Gradus 200 - Neal Meyer

Live

October 29, 2011
Carmen - Bizet - Seattle Opera

November 4, 2011
Seattle Composers Salon - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Winds Go South - Yvonne Hoar

A short tango for woodwind quintet. For my part it seemed undercooked, and I wish it were more fully worked out. It just seemed a bit too satisfied to be what it was.

42 - Scott Adams

A solo accordion piece literally at sixes and sevens with itself. The tunes are nothing special, but they are exactly all they need to be to make the rhythmic concept shine wonderfully. Nice job!

Eternal Silence of Infinite Spaces - Conan McLemore

Conan dips his hands and splashes with cups in this attractive little piece for baptismal font.

Two Pieces - Nelda Swiggett

Nelda on piano with her husband Cliff on trombone, which he claims to have just picked up a few weeks ago after many years of neglect. We were all in amaze at the apparent resilience of his lip. I ended up liking most the second, less finished, of the two pieces she played. It had some nice Monkish touches.

Playlist

2011-10-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Recorded

October 22, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 570 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Neal Meyer, and me participating. This session dates from April of 2000. We called it Gradus ab Parnassum in possibly bad Latin. It wakes itself mostly into the upper spectral ambit with low frequencies entering later. It settles after about 10 minutes into a place that just doesn't gel, but which is nevertheless a pretty interesting collection of sound. I got to thinking about some of the ways that our knowledge of the social history of an artifact affects our perception of it. Knowing that a recording was made on the spot without prior restraints beyond our past of social and musical interaction frees us from trying to discover the intent of its maker as a single utterance, and allows us to focus on how multiple utterances interact on the fly, without any of them knowing where it is headed. It ends with bells.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 - Track 8 - Jim Knodle, Mike Marlin, and Tom Swafford (I think)

Deliciously lyrical, warm and folksy

Man of My Dreams/Be Like You - Shaprece

Extraordinarily sophisticated arrangements that play with the sound and surface of sound. As lush as it gets it is always intricate and transparent.

October 23, 2011
A Married Man's Blues - Wade Ward [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]

The interaction between downbeat and pickup is to die for, like Schumann with a wicked twist.

Piano Breakdown - Frank Melrose [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The vinylscratchysound provides a worthy and sophisticated percussion track to this.

Harlem Air Shaft - Duke Ellington [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
I Forgot To Remember To Forget - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]
Tonight's The Night - The Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology, Rhino Records]

bump sh' bump. oh yeah.


Cardew

Winter Potato 2 - Cornelius Cardew - John Tilbury

Microphones up close to the action, all sorts of odd rumbly sounds exude from the piano's inner workings.

She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain - Maude Thacker [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

October 27, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 25 - Banned Rehearsal

Banned Rehearsal in 1985

Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and me participating. This session dates from March of 1985. If I recollect rightly I had rigged the space prior to the band's arrival by covering the floor with blue paper pup tents and inserting them between books on the bookshelves. My intent was to give the space a sense of otherness. All the sounds set themselves onto a vast wheel revolving through. A recording of a Bach Cantata finds its way into a tin can to explore the science of the beauty of bad audio. The last 10 minutes are a silly waste, but most of this is raw and interesting.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 24, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 801 - Banned Rehearsal

Present and making noise were Karen, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and me.

October 25, 2011
Your Mother Should Know - recording The Day You Deleted Me

Neal made an attempt at a cornet track, and then we got two vocal tracks. On to the mix!

Live

October 22, 2011
Lovesick Empire, Thee Emergency, Mudhoney, Hot Bodies In Motion - at Neumos, Seattle

Hot Bodies In Motion (standing still)

Four extremely able bands put on a spectacular show for us. Both Lovesick Empire and Thee Emergency are straight-ahead driving local bands, with LE tending toward the solid beat style of Goodness, while Thee Emergency tends toward a more bluesy style reminiscent of Heart. I was quite taken by both of them, and I sure hope LE puts some music up for download soon, since I missed out on the free CD they were giving out. Mudhoney of course is well known and their set was loud, fast, non-stop, and loud. To my (ringing) ears it is as though The Sonics, The Stooges, and The Dead Kennedys were thrown into a paper bag and shaken vigorously. Did I mention that they were loud? Hot Bodies In Motion will forever after be known as "that band that came on after Mudhoney," which is unfortunate because they are tremendously accomplished musicians and they put together a fabulous funky set. The guitar player looks like Gunther from Greg Evans' Luann, and he doesn't move around much, but he sure can play that thing. The bass was matching him funk for funk, the drums were solid and the singer was all in. Great job guys!

Playlist

2011-10-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Recorded


Lovie Austin

October 15, 2011
Too Sweet for Words - Lovie Austin [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune

Check out this fine bio of Lovie Austin.

Dear Old Southland - Louis Armstrong [from Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens on JSP records]
Perdido Street Blues - Louis Armstrong [from Jazz Heritage Series Vol. 7 on MCA records]
Greeting Prelude - Stravinsky - London SO, Michael Tilson Thomas

The biggest and solidest 40 seconds you'll ever hear.

How Long Blues - Guitar Pete Franklin [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]
Winter Potato 1 - Cornelius Cardew - John Tilbury

October 18, 2011
Red Ink Blots - Benjamin Boretz, Jeff Presslaff [from Inter/Play]

At first first one then the other
Then the other then the first
Riffing jointly then in creative spelunkery
First in light then elsedown

Reminding myself: It isn't about weirdness or extremeness. It's about specificity.

Pastorale for Anna - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey


Aaron Keyt - back in the day

Aaron composed this lovely little piece a few weeks too late to be included with his two other Pastorales (for Keith and Helena), in Banned Rehearsal's first live performance in January 1986. But this home recording I made shortly after really gets somewhere as this dancing song emerges from shadows. I only wish I could play that well consistently!

Banned Rehearsal 221 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron and me participating back in 1990. Starting with guitar, fiddle, and harmonica we focus on the sounds of a root music. Interestingly I can't be sure who is playing which instrument. Every time I think some part sounds like the sort of thing I do, or Karen or Aaron does, it moves to something distinctly like what another of us does.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 17, 2011
Gradus 199 - Neal Meyer

Live

October 15, 2011
The Slagg - Live at Cafe Racer, Seattle

Cafe Racer seems like it could be a nice place to hear music. Karen and I hadn't been there yet so we went to hear somebody we'd never heard of. The Slagg was apparently trying to play reggae, but they were pretty lame and didn't come across as all that excited to be there playing for folks. We left before they finished their first set.

Playlist

2011-10-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

Recorded

October 10, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 569 (Fritz with Fritz) - Banned Rehearsal

Participating in this session from April of 2000 were Karen, Anna, Aaron, Neal, Pete Comley and me. This was a dub of the recording Pete made using 'Fritz', a head-shaped binaural microphone.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 7 - Keith Eisenbrey and Jim Knodle
Gradus: Three Rungs for Marcia Bellamy - Neal Meyer

One of Neal's overt practices since early in this project has been to leave prodigious gaps of not playing. Under certain circumstances these can stretch up toward 10 or 15 minutes long. Part of the reason for doing this stems from considerations surrounding Cage's 4'33", i.e. that the sounds leaking in from the environment are or should be valid parts of the performance, and that we should be attending to them every bit as much as we attend to the traditionally valued slices of sound. Underlying this notion is the assumption that a sound ontologized as an intended sound will drown out, psychologically, sounds ontologized as accidental to intention, or at least to the intention we are attending to, and that therefore the act of making a sound intentionally is an egotistical aggression and a violence upon Cage's silence, upon the goodness and purity of sounds just being themselves. A paraphrase of Neal's formulation might be: Do nothing that would substantially interrupt a performance of 4'33".

But the case could be made that imposing lengthy silences as a compositional decision preceding the hurly burly of the session is a too easy solution or penance for the aggression of soundmaking, is a way of having one's cake and eating it too. If the method is simply to spread out the soundmaking portions among vast stretches of doing nothing, stretches often much longer in extent that 4'33", so that one could quite literally overlay conjoint performances of Gradus and 4'33" in such as way as to have no actual interruption, then does this constitute a lack of substantive interruption? Are we attempting the classic aesthetic cheat of pretending that a fact trumps an image? Wouldn't it be a far more interesting and difficult challenge to make noise while not interrupting? What might it mean to succeed at this? To play with such transparence that it were as if no music had transpired - no notes played - no utterance uttered - no intention voiced - as though one had not been. . . ?

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 10, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 800 - Banned Rehearsal
Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer participated in this milestone session.

October 11, 2011
Your Mother Should Know - recording The Day You Deleted Me
Karen Eisenbrey, drums; Mike Gervais, tenor & alto sax; Neal Meyer, guitars & vocal

Neal's friend Mike (of Curtains For You - see below) was available to lay down some horn tracks so we had a grand time getting enough on the MR8 to make that feasible. We still need to record the vocal, and Neal also wanted to try a cornet track.

Live

October 8, 2011
Reverb Festival - Seattle

Mutiny Fires at the Tractor
Shaprece at the Sunset
Stephanie at the Eagles Ballroom
Less Than Equals at Conor Byrne
Tom Price Desert Classic at the Tractor
Curtains For You at the Tractor

Five out of six sets were musical dynamite, and the sixth (Stephanie) is a very young but listen-worthy up&comer group. Very quickly so that we have some idea where we are standing, Mutiny Fires is power-pop-punk-a-billy, Shaprece is up-to-date soul r&b, Stephanie is (I think) still in flux but tending toward pop-glam, Less Than Equals is echt-old-school, Tom Price Desert Classic is electric-bigsound-blues, and Curtains For You is pop, if some raucus combination of The Beatles, The Young Fresh Fellows, and Elvis Costello counts as simply pop.

Shaprece

I was struck by the different feels of each band's stage presence. Mutiny Fires was all friendly and loose lets have a beer but how the heck am I going to rock out at this hour. Shaprece and her backup band - nine people on the wee stage at the Sunset!! - were both scary professional and family warm. Her dad was playing keyboard and was easily in charge, her sister sang backup vocal, and the rest of the crew could have been a re-union of uncles and cousins. Strictly from a hair-style angle having Shaprece and her sister on stage at once was like having Sarah Vaughan and a teenage Ann Peebles standing there. Stephanie, a group of four or five guys topping out, to my old eyes, at about 20, was having some unfortunate technical difficulties (the trouble with pedals!) but they were doing their best to have a good time anyway. I look forward to hearing them under better circumstances.

Less Than Equals is a two piece with guitar and drum. Both gentlemen sing.They are there to put on a show, dressed in matching white suits and pastel shirts, trunks of bodies held still in space but vibrating with energy. Kurt is a wrecklessly effective drummer - nothing fancy but everything whang on. John Bamberg is one of those guitar players who doesn't sound fancy until you realize he's got an entire combo in there with him.Tom Price Desert Classic has an easy bluesy presence, late night at nearly any roadhouse anywhere in America any time in the last 30 years. Curtains For You is self-described as "happy shiny people". By the time we got back to the Tractor after dinner the place was packed. These guys are having a blast playing high competence rock & roll. But don't take my word for it, check them out on the November 19th at the Neptune on a terrific bill with Star Anna & The Laughing Dogs, and The Posies.

Shaprece is knock-out sensational.

Playlist

2011-10-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

Now Music in New Albion is now one year old.


Fungus, White River Valley, Mt. Rainier National Park, September 24, 2011

Recorded

October 4, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 24 - Banned Rehearsal


Banned Rehearsal, Little Greenwood House, 1985

Participating were Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer. In early 1985 I moved into a little house in Greenwood. This is the first full session made there, and also the first full session after our debut performance at Brechemin. Long bowed drone tones on acoustic guitar, plucks and high bell dings interrupted by low-fi images of the just recently passed soundscape. The overall effect is of careful composition holding steady and true for about 35 minutes, after which microphone silliness begins and the energy sags. A rule to remember: Cleverness kills music.

A Cat's Life Act III take 3 - Keith Eisenbrey

The last take from 1992, reasonably well played but marred by radio bleed of some horrible pop song.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 3, 2011
Gradus 198 - Neal Meyer

Neal Meyer, The Man Who Plays A

Playlist

2011-10-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 26, 2011
Rehearsal - Banned Rehearsal 799

Participating were Karen Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and me.


Fungus, White River Valley, Mt. Rainier National Park, September 24,2011

Live

September 29, 2011

Benaroya Hall, Seattle
Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Le Sacre du printemps - Stravinsky
An American In Paris - Gershwin
Ameriques - Varese

We had a fabulous dinner at Juno, in the revamped Arctic Building (1914) on the corner of 3rd and Cherry. From our booth the only buildings visible either existed at the time of the programmed works or were built contemporaneously to their composition, emphasizing how much of what we tend to think of as the old Seattle is quite literally a city born of modernism.

It is a small thing, or it should be a small thing, but I applaud Morlot for programming these three works in this less than obvious sequence. A more usual approach would have been to reverse the halves - starting and ending with the ultra-popular and hiding the crowd-chaser in the middle where fewer would be able to escape it. Instead we were presented with an ordering that entwined them into each other. Gershwin holds his modernist own remarkably well in this company of giants, matching car-horns to air raid siren, dance to dance; and never does Stravinsky sound so tunefully populist and rhythmically straightforward as when we hear his primitivism foiled by Varese's war-poet sensibility. Here is what that music is like with the folk tunes shelled out of it and no dancing to get in the way of rhythmic imagination.

Playlist

2011-09-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

Recorded

September 18, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 569 - Banned Rehearsal

Fungus with Ooze - White River Valley,

Mt. Rainier National Park - September 24, 2011

Participating were Karen, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and me. Pete Comley was recording us with a fancy binaural microphone shaped like a human head. We called it Fritz. But this was my recording using our usual setup of two Realistic PZMs taped to opposite walls. Usual, that is, until a couple of months ago when one of them finally failed after 20+ years of trouble-free use. The alto sax makes a valiant effort at a jazzy vibe. The rest of us do not so much resist as see just how far off around the edges of jazzy vibe we can possibly get. At 10 minutes in we begin to collectively rub the greater balloon of noise while the tamtam flanges roomsized waves of threads of jazzy vibe.

September 20, 2011
Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 6 - hosted by Keith Eisenbrey and Mike Marlin

I think this track was Tom Swafford on violin, Mike's spouse Deb singing, and one other vocalist whose name I can not recall. I apologize for that because this is quite a nice slithery trio.

BF Tongue Drum, Tub Drum, Twang, Wood Drum - Keith Eisenbrey

The last of the percussion sounds collected for what became the canned bit for Blood, Fire, Hallelujah.

September 22, 2011
Why Can't It Be Poor Little Me? - Stomp 6 [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Dear Old Southland - Louis Armstrong [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Best I can tell from a quick google, Buck Washington is the pianist for this duet. They seem, for their own amusement, to be trying to outdo each other in rhythmic play.

Down In Honky Tonk Town - Louis Armstrong [from Jazz Heritage Series Vol. 7 on MCA records]

With: Claude Jones, Sidney Bechet, Luis Russell, Bernard Addison, Wellman Braud, and Zutty Singleton.

I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone (slow version) alternate take - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]
O Day - Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]

Not just a perfectly tuned quartet blend of individuated voices, but also the be-all and end-all of clapping percussion - it isn't just on the offbeat, it creates the offbeat, and composes it's own slap-echo effect to boot.

Who Be Kind To - Allen Ginsberg
Om Namah Shivaya - Benjamin Boretz, Marjorie Tichenor [from Inter/Play]

Crumar and voice discuss mouthshapes and vowels. Barely voiced. Not whispered. Hollow shapes.


Fungus with Ooze - White River Valley, Mt. Rainier National Park - September 24, 2011

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 19, 2011

Gradus 197 - Neal Meyer

September 21, 2011

Your Mother Should Know - recording Chaotic Heart

Karen Eisenbrey, drums; Neal Meyer, guitars & vocals.

Live

September 17, 2011

Medula Pinata and Pouch at The Josephine, Seattle

The Josephine seems to be a kind of BYO speakeasy. No sign out front that I saw, just a number and a gate. From the outside you can't tell what might be going on inside, which is probably all for the best given the thickness and complexity of the atmosphere.

Jake Thompson of Pouch

Both bands are loud and rhythmically charged, though I was somewhat frustrated by the balance in that (especially with MP) although vocalizing seemed to be a part of what they were doing theatrically it didn't get into the sound with much success. I know I'm a fuddy duddy, but it seems if you are going to all the trouble of learning words and shouting them with all your heart in front of friendly folks it would make sense to work with the sound so that we could at least tell that's what you were doing and that you weren't just making faces - even if we can't understand the words without a script.

Still, it was enjoyable and I was glad I got to hear Pouch again. We couldn't stay for the last two bands because, well, because we're old and we had stuff to do the next morning.

Playlist

2011-09-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Recorded

September 12, 2011
Gulliver's Eight Wonderful Resonant Pipes - Banned Rehearsal

A short session from 1985 with Aaron, Neal, Anna, and myself, indulgent with obliviously parallel play. Early on, and less so continuing to the present, we have experimented (under some protest) with the idea that if X-quantity of people make noise in the same room for a timespan without paying any particular attention to what the others are doing then the resultant tape will have some special quality of ineffable otherness worth striving for. For me this has seemed a mis-placed act of faith resulting, usually, in a desperate filling up of the void where we might, to our benefit, have risked actual communication.

A Cat's Life Act III (take 1) - Keith Eisenbrey

From 1992, first of three takes.

Humoresque - Keith Eisenbrey - Rosario Sounds

Rosario Sounds was an amateur string quintet based on Whidbey Island. My mom played 2nd violin. This is a recording of their live performance at a Good Friday service at a church in Oak Harbor back in aught aught. It was, to my amusement, programmed as a contemplation of the crucifixion. Of course I had no such image in mind when I wrote it, and they re-titled the work for the program (Quintet, I think). Kind of a grim joke on me, I think. Being played late in the service, after several hundred worshipers received communion in the least efficient way imaginable, I think I can confidently state that never have so many suffered so long just to hear my music.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 5 - Keith Eisenbrey, Mike Marlin & Others

Not the most successful bit from this concert, veering toward the idea that there is some specific sense that music makes that we have to make this particular music make. It opens out right at the end.

BF Gong/Kora/Organ Pipe/Shell Shaker - Keith Eisenbrey

More sound collecting for Blood and Fire Hallelujah. The gong take is quite lovely on its own.

September 13, 2011
Jimmie's Blues - Jimmy Blythe
When They Get Lovin' They's Gone - Billie Young, Jelly Roll Morton

Yodeling cross-dressing as scat jazz - or the other way around. Weird.

Coal Cart Blues - Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bernard Addison, Wellman Braud

Would I had been a fly on the wall for this. Jeepers!

Wee Wee Hours - Chuck Berry

Chuck's make-out song.

Django - Modern Jazz Quartet

Limpid and articulate, but a little spooky too.

Volo Solo - Cornelius Cardew - John Tilbury

A ferociously difficult piece brilliantly played. Single-note tremolos skewer through the timemeat.

Who Killed Poor Robin? - Ollie Gilbert

weren't me.

September 15, 2011
Breathe - J.K. Randall, Marjorie Tichenor

I sit as usual breathing quiet and slow to find myself hearing sound of breathing distinct and slow and sound of flutepipe breathing fibrous and distinct and slow and sound of fibre timbre wiggle distinct and slow plucked. And at every moment a newly created sense of having just gotten somewhere.

Prelude op. 1 Revisited - Keith Eisenbrey

The first piece I ever wrote (back in 74 or 75) was an e-minor string quartet movement. In early 1985 I made this version by recording each part separately on a Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite that I had purchased in Greenwood for $200. The result is pretty hoary. The Funmaker went on to feature prominently in many a Banned Rehearsal session, and was even carted to a couple of live shows. It is currently being refitted by Steve Kennedy into what I hope to be a remarkable bizarre contraption.

A Cat's Life Act III (take 2) - Keith Eisenbrey

see above - take 2.

Live

September 14, 2011
Monktail Creative Music Concern at Composer's Spotlight - Jack Straw Productions, Seattle
Stephen Fandrich, Mark Ostrowski, John Seman

John, Mark, and Stephen spoke about their personal musical history together, and Stephen performed three solo piano pieces. The first was his set of variations on John's theme LG, the second a Nocturne by Mark, and lastly a gamelan-informed Ballade by Stephen. In each case I was quite taken by the starting points, but was disappointed by the end result. John's jazzy little two-part theme would seem to make quite fine fodder for improvisation, and such shenanigans are apparently a big part of its back-story. The inside-the-piano strummy bits that start and finish Mark's Nocturne are lovely and clear. And finally, the delicate rhythmic counterpoint with which Stephen's Ballade opens are among the most exquisite episodes of piano figuration it has been my privilege to hear. But in each case the insidiously persistent phantomic memes of pianistic virtuosity take over and we are beset by the sterile ghosts of Scriabin and Sorabji, Liszt and Busoni. What for those guys were means to their various aesthetic ends becomes here a default end of its own - a kind of hollow shell, all two-fisted sound and fury, signifying (to me), what sound and fury always signify. There is lovely stuff here, I wish it had not been drowned out.

Playlist

2011-09-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

Recorded

September 8, 2011
Pitch Fix - J. K. Randall, Linda Smukler [from Inter/Play]

Crumar and piano. The anchor sound of the Inter/Play ensemble.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 5, 2011
Banned Rehearsal - Banned Rehearsal 798

Karen, Aaron, Neal and myself.

September 6, 2011
Your Mother Should Know - recording Ask Your Question

We adjusted our method a bit, and played with different microphone placements for the drums & vocals - each of which needed just one take. We ran the guitar part three times - mostly to nail the solo and cover a problem with the patch cord connection. Neal's vocal performance was more nuanced than during the first session with many nice details and good tone quality throughout. I played with the mix yesterday and hope soon to have something to share. Your Mother Should Know consists of Neal Meyer on guitar & voice, and Karen Eisenbrey on drums. We decided not to bother laying down a bass track this time.

Playlist

2011-09-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

Recorded

August 27, 2011
Chili Pepper - Gred Longshaw [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

fallen ragtime.

Goodbye, Babylon part 1 - Rev. T. T. Rose and Singers [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]
I Surrender Dear - Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

I love the ambiguity in the title. A mid-evening tempo.

Maybellene - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]
Down The Road Apiece - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]

That must be where he put the piano player.

August 28, 2011
Steppin' Out - Paul Revere and the Raiders - [from The Legend of Paul Revere]
Plastic Ono Band - Yoko Ono

Studies in the use of voice as an instrument rather than a medium for text. What she is doing is not singing (and I don't mean that in any snarky sense), it is playing. John plays guitar, Yoko plays voice. The last cut, a bonus on the CD version, is a nicely intimate acoustic session with no underlying rhythmic groove.

Five to My Five - Rev. Howard Finster [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]
Trance Butchered Knight 1 - Keith Eisenbrey

This recording from early 1985 is the first salvo in a project that eventually became my piano piece Lacrymosa. My memory is hazy as to what exactly I thought I was doing, and as to how exactly I accomplished it. But I think I was using the "overdubbing" button on my tape deck. I had my cousin install a switch that turns off the erase head, so that I could get a kind of double exposure. Aesthetic results vary, and the sound quality is about what you would expect.

August 31, 2011
A Cat's Life Act II - Keith Eisenbrey

A draft recording from March of 1992.

Humoresque - Keith Eisenbrey

The midi version of a string quintet movement I wrote for my Mom's amateur ensemble.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 4 - Keith Eisenbrey, Mike Marlin

A long session that is remarkable in how carefully and lingeringly it protracts that moment when it finally starts to sound like music. The picture is from that session. You can listen to it on Sound Cloud.

BF Autoharp/Barang/Clay Drum/Frame Drum - Keith Eisenbrey

Collected sounds for what became the canned bit of Blood and Fire, Halleluja.

September 1, 2011
Hersal Blues - Thomas Hersal [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]

Starts plain, sneaks fancy in.

Goodbye, Babylon part 2 - Rev. T. T. Rose and Singers [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]
2:19 Blues - Louis Armstrong, Claude Jones,Sidney Bechet, Luis Russell, Bernard Addison, Wellman Braud, Zutty Singleton [from Jazz Heritage Series Vol. 7 on MCA records]
Thirty Days - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]

As solid a single as you could ask for.

The Way You Look Tonight - Art Pepper, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb [from The Way It Was]
Variations IV vol. 2 - John Cage - John Cage, David Tudor

"In the grooves of this record is the sound of John Cage." John Cage is his own least reliable commentator, which is another way of saying that I dig his music but I don't buy his talk. Variations IV, or at least this recording of a portion of it, has nothing to do with sound as sound, and precious little to do with chance. Instead we are offered snippets of variously recognizable recordings (mostly instantly recognizable classical pieces) mixed with street sounds, bar sounds, and others, arranged using a system that involves a chance procedure somewhere, but carefully chosen for iconic quality and carefully trimmed for comprehension. This is a craftily composed commentary on music, not an invitation to hear sounds as simply sounds breathing free. Gird your loins for some heavy duty mind warp action.

Stony Point - John W. Summers, Art Rosenbaum [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

In Session

August 29, 2011
Train Case - recording Gramma's In The Cellar at the Tintinabulary, Seattle

Train Case is Neal Meyer and my lovely spouse Karen singing old folk tunes. This is a song that their mother taught them as children. We suspect she picked it up at Girl Scout Camp. They kindly allowed me to lay down a spoon track. We should have this available for download soon on ReverbNation.

Live

September 2, 2011
Seattle Composers Salon - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Three Student Pieces - Sean Osborn - Sean Osborn, clarinet
Quasi Improvisando - Ryan Hare - Ruth Boden, cello
Three of Five Dovetailed Pieces - John Teske - John Teske, bass
Eight Preludes from 24 Preludes - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Three Movements from Woodwind Quintet - Paul Gillespie - Cliff Dunn, flute; Janet Putnam, **; Judy **, **; David **, **; Jenny **, **

A remarkably strong Salon, with nary a clunker in the mix (yours truly perhaps excepted). Of Sean's pieces I really dug the second, a lovely and clearly thought poem using various extended techniques - like an easy starter drug. Ryan's four-movement cello solo deftly shifted the focus from the composer persona behind the notes to the performer persona behind the sound, with an immediate spike in the social-intimacy index. I could listen all day to John Teske bowing his open D-tuned low string. The sensual hit of the bass sound is forever in danger of overpowering other aspects of utterance, but as Doc Holliday said in Tombstone, "That's my game." I look forward to hearing the whole thing.

I'm sorry I didn't get all the performer's names lined up with their instruments in Paul's number. Wind Quintet is an attractive ensemble as to both timbral variety and dynamic range. But there are daunting challenges as well. Each instrument has a unique matrix of registral color and technical limitations that can easily confound an unwary composer. If this attractive neo-classical essay is truly Paul's inaugural effort then I am stunned, and look forward to much more.

As for my preludes, I hope to have a final enough edit of the score available on my website within the next few weeks. I was just about thinking I was done when I had a better idea about the E-Major one, and I think I can tighten it up considerably. If I can get over some of my pianistic problems I hope to perform the whole set sometime. At the very least I'll record them soon.

Playlist

2011-08-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

Recorded

August 23, 2011
Sounds of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel

We were so earnest! But I like the fancy guitar work here and there and the arrangements hit pretty well about half the time. For me the strongest cuts are Blessed (if for nothing other than the line "blessed is the church service / makes me nervous"), Kathy's Song, Anji, April Come She Will, and We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'. Who spells 'groovy' that way?

Get Back to Toronto - The Beatles

A bootleg LP I purchased for $12 in 1983 or so at a record store in Woodstock, NY. It comes in a plain white cardboard sleeve with GET BACK TO TORONTO stamped at a rakish angle in purple across the middle front, and lower down, at somewhat less rake, HIGH-QUALITY STEREO. On the label it says "I.P.F. Records Presents" and the sides are I.P.F. 1A on the front and I.P.F. 1B on the back. Side One claims 22:26: 1. Peace Message-Get Back, 2. Teddy Boy, 3. On Our Way Back Home, and 4. All I Want Is You. Side Two claims 23 54: 1. I Got a Feeling, 2. Let It Be, 3. Don't Let Me Down, 4. Sweet and Lovely Girl, 5. Get Back, 6. When You Walk Christmas Message.

August 24, 2011
In Under, Not Toward - Benjamin Boretz [from Inter/Play]

In the '80s at Bard the synth of choice was the Crumar, which in my head for some reason is always spelled with a K. This 20 minute solo session trots out the sound in all its shaggy glory.

Corinthian Perspectives on Ukelele, Doritos, and 8 Resonant Pipes - Banned Rehearsal

Participants: Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer. A short exquisitely gentle session from early in 1985. After our first live performance we experimented with forms of framing other than our usual practice of playing until the tape ran out. I'm guessing we were thinking that if we were to play again in public it might behoove us to do shorter bits.

A Cat's Life Act I - Keith Eisenbrey

This was the last of my takes from February 2002, and by far the most solid. Here is another of Karen's fine illuminations from the score. At the end of Act I Hero Cat falls asleep. He doesn't re-awaken until the very end of Act III - though he has an active mid-nap life.

August 25, 2011
Assembly Rechoired 44 - Assembly Rechoired

When Banned Rehearsal was at its most geographically diffuse, Karen and I would often make tapes together as Assembly Rechoired. The name and sequence of numbers continued and now constitutes all those sessions in which Karen & I participated but in which neither Aaron nor Neal was present. This session was from April of 2000. Karen & I are joined by our son John (who was 9 at the time) and our frequent guest and neighbor Pete Comley. The session increases like a huge leaky silk balloon slowly failing to be filling from supine quiet.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 3 - Keith Eisenbrey, Mike Marlin

Recorded live at Gallery 1412, five minutes of scrapy twangy.

Gradus 175 - Neal Meyer

A lovely session. Thinking about aspects of John Cage as attempts to abstract the concrete out from within the rhetorics of musical abstraction. Never have the several A-naturals felt so alien to each other.

Playlist

2011-08-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

Recorded

August 14, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 568 - Banned Rehearsal (from April 14, 2000)

My index shows the participants to have been Karen, Aaron, and myself, but I'm not sure Anna and Neal weren't there as well judging from some of the sounds. This session, though often wonderful and getting to a lovely peaceful plane at the close, brings up one of the perennial discussion points that makes Banned Rehearsal such a lively argument (and I admit to framing that discussion point to skew): Is falling into a groove, even when it feels good, likely to lead us somewhere unexpected and unexplored, or is it a retreat to the familiar and the known? From my standpoint the other side of this argument comes across as: What have you got against music? For me, in the context of improvisation especially, but for that matter in a more global compositional sense also, it isn't music as such I have a problem with, it is the known, the too easy, the facile, and the clever. All of these things tend to blind us to more strenuous possibilities.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 track 2 - Keith Eisenbrey, Mike Marlin

Two distinct parts: the first clattery and the second luminous and pretty.

Extracts 9 - Keith Eisenbrey

Part of a midi-enabled music analytical experiment based on Scriabin's Prelude op.74#4. If a piece of music is considered to be based on or derived from a certain pitch set, then it would be interesting to find a way to hear exactly how that pitch set and its transformations sit within the rhythm-scape of the piece. If we were to analyze a piece of music as being "in C-Major", for instance, then we could play through the piece but only play the notes within the C-Major triad. One could then make different versions using each different triad, differentiating them by timbre, and also combining them together in sets. One set might be the C-Major and G-Major triads , to hear how the Tonic and Dominant harmonies interact. Each set or combination of sets would be a unique abstraction or analysis of the piece. This is essentially the idea I was using in Extracts, though I thought Scriabin's Prelude might better be analyzed as being based on the (0,3,4,7)-type tetrachord (C-natural, E-flat, E-natural, G-natural is one transposition). I made one version of 12 runs through the prelude, once on each transposition. Then I made eleven more to combine all the possibilities of combinations of bi-tetra-chordal sets in all their transpositions.

Augst 16, 2011
Careless Love - Bessie Smith [from Allen Lowe's Really The Blues]
The Old Ark's A-Movin - A.A. Gray and Seven Foot Dilly [from Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon]
Dinah - Ray Noble [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Ends as a completely different song than what it starts out being.

I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me - Roy Eldridge [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]
Aviary - Charlie Mariano [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone (slow version) - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]
Bye Bye Johnny - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]

In Session

August 17, 2011
Your Mother Should Know - recording Ask Your Question at the Tintinabulary, Seattle

Your Mother Should Know is a two-piece rock and roll band made up of Neal Meyer (vocal, guitar, and bass), and Karen Eisenbrey (drums). This is their first attempt to record a song, and my first attempt at multi-track recording of amplified sound. Due to time and equipment constraints, we are going about it in an other-than-standard method. First I had them play it together for a guide-track. Then we recorded the drums separately, followed by guitar, vocals, and finally bass. I'll be spending some time mixing the tracks, but hope to have a listenable version in a couple of weeks.

Playlist

2011-08-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

Recorded

August 7, 2011
Fun House - The Stooges

Full of mid and off rhymes, this is what Joey Ramone wanted to sound like, if he'd had more range. The introduction to Dirt is brilliantly composed, each instrument sliding in from where it always was. 1970 has the roll part of rock&roll in spades. The rhythm section is uncannily both dirt-basic and absolutely distinctive at once. Listening to both discs all together may a bit much, but this is pretty interesting stuff.

Going Down The Road Feeling Bad - Golden River Grass Group [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

This cooks - really really cooks. bonker banjos.

August 9, 2011
Three: for Keith: 3 - Benjamin Boretz

Intuitive quantity steps sideways. The Liszt of Via Crucis, rescaling time.

A Cat's Life Act I - Keith Eisenbrey

My draft recording of 2/20/1991.

In Session

August 8, 2011
Gradus 195 - Neal Meyer

Neal rehearses for the gig on Friday, with three rungs.

Live

August 6, 2011
Porgy and Bess - George Gershwin - Seattle Opera

The principal Bess, Lisa Daltirus, was ill, so we had a replacement: Donita Volkwijn. She did splendidly. I have no complaints whatsoever. I love all the ensemble stuff. This is what big productions are for.

August 10, 2011
Tom Baker at Composer's Spotlight - Jack Straw Productions, Seattle

Tom discussed his soon-to-be-released recording of Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner.

August 12, 2011

In Memory of John Cage - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Gradus: for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler - Neal Meyer

Actively serious in a way that little else is. Maximal minimalism. Transformation is the quest, but it isn't principally our transformation he is after, it is his. Actually tangential to music rather than simply evoking the pretense of tangentiousness. We are afforded an opportunity to hear and think our own voices, our own heads, and our own species. We make a dull roar. Out aloud allowed in out loud. The freeway crescendo throughout - a great gooey mass from which is occasionally extruded a temporary particularity. And through it all Neal persists.

Playlist

2011-08-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

Recorded

July 31, 2011
Rubber Soul - The Beatles

Short lines, sophisticated but unfussy arrangements. A master class in tight songwriting.

When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd - Roger Sessions - Boston SO, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Seiji Ozawa, Esther Hinds, Florence Quivar, Dominic Cossa, John Oliver

This is among the richest and most affecting oratorios I know. It is also one of the very few times in which an iconic American high-art (to the extent that Whitman is high-art exactly) text has been set successfully on such a grand scale. Here there is no cringe-worthy patriotic piety, no cloying ironic wink. Instead we have the cumulus rhythms of Whitman's images, flowers and bird calls, transfigured keens. All that and the alto solo is to die for.

August 2, 2011
Nobody's Business - George Childers [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
One: Threetext: Commentary - Benjamin Boretz [on OpenSpace]
A Cat's Life Act I - Keith Eisenbrey

Take one, recorded on 2/19/1992. These are probably more useful as examples of how I was thinking of the phrasing and tempi than as fodder for editing.

August 3, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 567 - Banned Rehearsal

There is some confusion in my records as to who was actually on this session. It was some grouping of Isaac (as a toddler), Karen, myself, Aaron, Anna and Neal. It is a study in background. The sounds that step forward in the mix do so only to add a particular spice to the main show already humming in the room.

Sounds of the Underbrush 2/28/2005 Track 1 - Keith Eisenbrey, Mike Marlin

Improvising with Mike is like an encounter with a large sentient hamster. This was at Gallery 1412.

Extracts 8 - Keith Eisenbrey

Part of a midi-enabled study of Scriabin's Prelude op.74#4. See my post of 1/29/2011 for an explanation. By treating each pitch-instance as structural fact, each becomes a structural image, and more vibrantly than I would have expected.

August 4, 2011
Down and Out Blues - Louis Forbstein's Royal Syncopaters [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Part of what makes Mr. Lowe's collection so fabulous is that it strings together so many interesting ways that recorded sound has sounded. In this cut from 1925 the rhythm section can barely be heard, but it sure makes its presence known.

You're Just My Type - King Oliver [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Simple and square, not a note that couldn't be captured on the recording equipment and heard at the end of the production line. Clearly the pros had learned how to do it.

Between The Devil . . . - Teddy Wilson [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Frantic inter-manual independence.

Chloe - Horace Henderson [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Smooth sax choir with an edge of trumpet.

You May Not Love Me - Teddi King [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Archly old-fashioned.

I'm Left, Your'e Right, She's Gone - Elvis Presley [from Sunrise]

Of course, what he sings is "You're right, I'm left, she's gone . . . " but I guess the King can get away with it.

Pitch-Derived Rhythms: Five Presentations - J. K. Randall

Leave it to Jim to call into question the very notion of apt-ness. On the surface these are flat-footed midi-realized (I think) studies that sound like scraps from Arthur Berger's desk that have been thinking themselves over for awhile. But everything about them is off kilter - the dynamic range (too big), the instruments (too ordinary and too raw), the mix (too bald), etc. In short, completely fascinating.

S. S. 396 (Remix) - Paul Revere and the Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

Really puts the commercial in commercial music.

In Session

August 1, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 796 - Banned Rehearsal at the Tintinabulary

Participants: Karen, Myself, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer. Playing with some new noisemakers: a cast-iron skillet from Ellensburg, and a milk-can from Prosser. Aaron brought some rude-ophones.

Playlist

2011-07-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Recorded

July 23, 2011
Unchained Melody (a capella version) - The Fleetwoods

Saxophone trio for voices alone. Aural soft-porn. This is a remarkable cut for its pacing and focus. One wonders if the parents of these kids knew what they were up to. But they were probably too busy listening to Peggy Lee.

Poeme Symphonique - Ligeti - University of Washington Contemporary Group

This performance was spearheaded by Neal Meyer back in the mid-eighties. I'm guessing Fall of '84 or sometime in 1985. We found ourselves unable to locate the requisite 100 metronomes, or to convince 100 music students to loan them to us, but we were able to locate 10. So Neal and I spent at least one long day making 9 tapes of 10 metronomes each for playback on boomboxes that we could place around the audience. I think this was in one of the lecture spaces at Kane Hall. Neal wanted each metronome to be set at a different tempo, and he wanted the piece to end naturally, with all the metronomes simply winding down on their own. The challenge of course is that each wind-up metronome is unique as to how many winds it takes to generate 10 minutes of ticking at a specified tempo. But Neal had carefully worked it all out and had all 10 metronomes set up backstage ready to go when another performer picked one of the metronomes up and, winding it a helpfully a few times, asked "So Neal, have you figured out how many winds each one of these needs?" There was not time to let that metronome run itself out to be wound back up before the show, so on we went with one wild card. It turned out to be one that was set at a pretty slow tempo (and Neal was loath to reset it) so 10 or 12 minutes after the ticking began everything started to thin out, finally leaving the one metronome slowly ticking all by itself. This went on for 10 minutes or more, generating a certain amount of audience anxiety and a few walkouts, before someone walked on stage and put the last metronome out of its tickery.

It is still one of my favorite UWCG fiasco stories. Unfortunately the recordist didn't include the long single ticker coda, but the sound is oceanic and lovely, each boombox source layering itself softly like eternally breaking waves.

We're Only In It For the Money - Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

Ripped from a tape dub of the vinyl, so the sound quality isn't very good. But this whole project seems just mean-spirited and misanthropic anyway. Arch and sophomoric at the same time, it comes across as one long not funny fart joke. Yes, the 60's were idealistic and there was a great deal of stupidity running around. Was this supposed to help? The most that could be said for it is that it operates as a kind of cultural time-capsule. I guess I'd be willing to give Zappa another chance if someone could recommend a better example.

July 24, 2011
Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey

My recent studio recording.

Ain't Love Grand - X
A Cat's Life - Keith Eisenbrey

This is a rough edit I made at home with two tape decks, trying to dub in the takes with the pause button. What can I say, it was the early '90s, I didn't have money for equipment to do it right. The dates I put on the tape cases don't match up (the dub is dated in January, and the takes are February), but I think the original takes are still there, so I may be able to re-do this, or something like it, digitally. A Cat's Life is a little opera for solo piano I wrote in 1990, it has three acts, next to zero plot, and a spoken narration that provides the nearest approximation to a singer. I was listening to a lot of Wagner at the time, and I was interested in how music could function within and as a part of a narrative context. Karen illuminated the score with some darling cartoons of cats. All that and it has some really pretty tunes. I would be just completely overjoyed if some better pianist than I were to pick this up and give it a go. I've always thought it would be a sure-fire hit.

Banned Rehearsal 566 - Banned Rehearsal

A very nice session for well-developed background drones.

July 25, 2011
KEE JK 050228 - Keith Eisenbrey, Jim Knodle

This was a nine-minute improvisation Jim and I did during a 2005 Sounds of the Underbrush gig at Gallery 1412. I had separated the track out for inclusion on a CD. The rest of the SOTU show will be on the playlist in weeks to come. Mike Marlin was the particular instigator.

July 26, 2011
Gradus 174 - Neal Meyer

Among the more overtly compositional of these A-playing sessions, establishing figurational regions that can be revisited and developed.

July 28, 2011
South Street Blues - Benny Moten's KC Orchestra

E-flat clarinet? Is that what I hear slipping around up there?

St. James Infirmary - Alphonso Trent
Cotton Tail - Duke Ellington
Red Hills and Green Barns (excerpt) - Nat Pierce Orchestra
Baby, Let's Play House - Elvis Presley
Walk, Don't Run - The Ventures

Live

July 25, 2011
Gradus 194 - Neal Meyer

Full bodied.

Playlist

2011-07-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

Recorded

July 17, 2011
A Cat's Life - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey/Neal Meyer

A recording of a live performance, the narration is too low in the mix, and I'm still rushing the fast bits. Need to take it easy next time.

Kingdome Implosion on KPLU
Banned Rehearsal 680 - Banned Rehearsal
Figure Study 4 - Keith Eisenbrey

Developing chords that read like sentences.

July 19, 2011
Wolverine Blues - Jelly Roll Morton
After You've Gone - Alphonso Trent

A deftly balanced arrangement full of unobtrusive detail.

Four or Five Times - Bob Wills

low-brow.

Never No Lament (aka don't Get Around Much Anymore) - Duke Ellington

high-brow.

Dizzy Atmosphere - Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker/Al Haig

Among both the low and the high, Bebop was an insurrection. I think though that it was Mr. Ellington who left the door open.

New Piano Roll Blues - Duke Ellington/Max Roach

As I was saying. . .

Variations for Orchestra - Elliott Carter

Live

July 18, 2011

The Funhouse, Seattle

Your Mother Should Know
Pouch
High Class Wreckage

YMSK consisted solely, at this show, of my brother-in-law and longtime musical collaborator Neal Kosaly-Meyer on voice and electric guitar. My spouse Karen is in rehearsal on drums and should join in the next gig. Disclosures done.

Neal has always wanted to play loud and I am personally grateful he has found this outlet. There are still some compositional issues to work out balancing voice and guitar (aside from the accidental technical difficulties with the sound system on the first song). I would not change a thing from the engagement standpoint. Neal is all there and all out there all the time. But it is only with the very young that engagement alone is enough for a performance to achieve incandescence. For us old farts a healthy dollop of eloquence is required. To that end, I think these songs simply need to be lightened up here and there, so that we can hear the words, and so that when the power comes on full blast it makes a real impact. More Jonathan Richman, less Dead Kennedys.

I have blogged about both Pouch and High Class Wreckage before and my opinion hasn't changed much. They are both high energy high fun kick-out-the-jams bands, squarely in the louderfaster PNW tradition of The Sonics and their ilk. Hearing them together and back-to-back was great. If anything, Pouch comes across as more traditional and bluesy. A friend said, with great enthusiasm, "More cornball grunge riffs than you could shake an empty Pabst can at." High Class Wreckage is a phenomenon unto themselves. Flailing limbs, spewing beer, (us old folks with sense hang back), 96 mph downmountain on a goat path in an iffy jalopy. They are the sort of thing that is much safer as music than in real life.

Playlist

2011-07-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

Recorded

July 9, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 565 - Banned Rehearsal

A rope of guitar sound accumulates barnacles and algae. We pull to drag from the depths a great dripping roar of sound murky with life forms || then build centering on the elephant guiro (a corrugated plastic drain pipe) || the clinks clacks and clangs a rolling steel minimarble.

Downtime - Benjamin Boretz

Moments last until they become their own moment. A moment of such moments.

July 10, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 773 - Banned Rehearsal

Neal riffs on Blake, arousing variants of affective disjuncture.

Frank Du Pree - Jenkins - Blind Andy

An abstract setting in that it does not paint the words, only allows them.

Thou Carest Lord, For Me - Holy Ghost Sanctified Singers

Not about the music - about the joy of it. Jug band.

Frisky Honey - J. H. Bragg and His Rhythm Five
I'd Be Lost Without You - Helen Forrest

A come-on, but not precisely sultry, something else more complete.

Good For Nothin' Joe - Kay Starr

A complaint that aint'.

Short Wave - Maynard Ferguson

crazy slippery trumpet.

July 12, 2011
Ulysses at the Edge - Harry Partch

Partch works even when it shouldn't. No matter how prosaic the compositional accumulation of rhythm, nor how flat the affect, the visceral theater blasts through.

Ubi caritas - Durufle - Tirnavia/Anrej Rapant

July 13, 2011
Play Guitar & Play Guitar 2 - The Ventures

July 14, 2011
Wach - Stockhausen

This plays out as an essay on distance and presence, unashamedly bleepblooping.

Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey

My live recording from May of 1981, at the Meany Studio Theater. The tape deteriorated some before I could rip it, but you can still hear the door opening for the guy who walked out on me.

12-inch Single (1985) - The Ramones

Ripped from a tape dubbed from vinyl, so the sound isn't great. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg is available on-line, but I couldn't find the other two songs - Go Home Ann, or Daytime Dilemma (Dangers of Love).

Playlist

2011-07-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

Recorded

July 4, 2011
Gradus 75 - Neal Meyer
Keyboard Shortcuts - Richard Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

This was the first home recording of these pieces that I made, in March of 2010. I hadn't had much of a chance to go over them with Richard yet, and there were some pretty significant compositional changes made before I performed them in June. The intelligence of the writing is obvious, and though they are occasionally modestly awkward from a pianistic standpoint, this doesn't come out on the far end. Richard tells me he is moving to Buffalo soon. His presence and conversation will be sorely missed.

Those Panama Mamas - Cotton Pickers
Blue, Turning Grey Over You - Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra
I Ain't Got Nobody - Oliver Brown
Cherry - D. Redman - Louis Armstrong/The Mills Brothers/Norman Brown
We'll Be Together Again - Doris Day/L. Brown
Lover Come Back to Me (excerpt) - Tony Scott
Tweedle Dee - Elvis Presley
To Prove My Love - Godfrey Winham - Bethany Beardsley/Robert Helps

July 5, 2011
the memory of all that - Benjamin Boretz - Eastman Musicians

Ben was in town and stopped by, sharing this draft edit of his new piece for voice and piano, composed in response to the passing of Milton Babbitt. Last February, when the song was hot off the press and there was a need for a quick recording, Karen and I struggled heroically and cobbled together a rough approximation. The tessitura is really too low for Karen, spending much of the time below the treble staff and dropping down to a G at one point, which is about as far down as she can make a pitched sound. So it was with great pleasure that we listened to this fine performance by two musicians at Eastman, and we look forward to the final edit and release.

Tenuous and broken strands of long tones and longer tones, slowly rung words, emptiness, tautening between them a poem and the parts of a poem, long chords and longer chords, words slowly rung, intoning in and into taut suspension. The closer the further.

July 6, 2011
Piano Concerto - Elliott Carter - Cincinnati S.O./Micheal Gielen/Ursula Oppens
The Ventures Underground Fire Radio Spot - The Ventures
7 Harmonies from 'Apartment House 1776' - John Cage - Stefan Hussong

The subject matter of these lovely pieces, in a seeming contradiction to what John Cage is popularly about, is coherence and musical continuity.

Four - J.K. Randall/Marjorie Tichenor

Flute and Krumar share peace spacefully.

July 7, 2011
One:Four:Text - Benjamin Boretz
A Cat's Life - Keith Eisenbrey - Ellen Dessler/Keith Eisenbrey

My live performance from 1993, Ellen Dessler, a drama student at the UW, providing the narration. I'm thinking I may want to rethink my tempi - the quick stuff needs more time in which to register as quick, else it just sounds rushed and offhand.

Live

July 2, 2011

Pouch at EMP Sky Church, Seattle
Sean Delaney, Jake Thompson

This two-piece band (drums & guitar) comes across like fabulous blues-anthem B-sides to High Class Wreckage. On stage the drummer looks like a long-faced hippie tree-hugger right up until he starts to play, at which point a look of existential terror takes over and he's all arms and sticks desperate to outrun a herd of stampeding dragons. Loads of energy and fun. I look forward to hearing them again in a couple of weeks. They have some tracks to download at the link above.

Playlist

2011-07-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

Recorded

June 26, 2011
Four:Text:Commentary - Benjamin Boretz

From the InterPlay tapes.

June 28, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 220 - Banned Rehearsal

Karen, Aaron, and I lay out an image of intentional unintentiality - radio roar space aliens become disalienated.

June 30, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 563 - Banned Rehearsal

Participants: Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Neal Meyer. This session raises an interesting question for me about what counts as a music-structural node, and in what sense that which counts as such has a structural meaning for the listener, and further, what structural meaning, for the listener, is. Theorem: What is structural is only that which we perceive as being structural, and its structural meaning is not what we postulate it to be after stringing together the collected markers of structural nodes we have heard and whose relations we have analyzed repletely and globally, but rather it is exactly and only what we perceive that node-moment to be as structural as we perceive it so to be. Its structural meaning qua structural meaning is exactly how it sounds vis-a-vis those less-structurally-perceived graces that make up its local context.

Live

June 26, 2011

Triptet - at Lucid Lounge, Seattle

Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, and Michael Monhart were joined in the second set by Jesse Canterbury and Stu Dempster.

Highlights, for me, of this beautiful, rich, and completely rewarding show: Michael's long slow solo in the first set, deep as a river at night; The interplay of Greg's elaborately melodic drumming and the friendly hubbub of the lounge; The palpable human warmth between the audience and performers. A truly memorable evening of mountaintop playing by all at every moment. Thank you!

July 1, 2011

Seattle Composer's Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Four Songs from Seven Songs of Death - Stuart Wheeler
Stuart Wheeler, voice; John Teske, string bass; Brianna Atwood (name?), viola; Jesse Canterbury, clarinet; Richard Johnson, trombone; Tom Baker, guitar; Dianne Ashbrook (name?), bassoon.

These songs steer an interesting course through contrasts of atomospheria and concretia, among deep pools of abstract repetitive structures and gaping maws of gooey sensuality. I'm not sure where they come out in the end - but I'm sure interested to find out.

Storm Before the Calm - Jeffrey Izzo
Dana Wen, piano

Clever title, but if you're going to put 'storm' in it then put STORM in it. I think Dana did about as well as could be done, but in the end it just didn't make it for me.

Three Movements from The Cage Elegies - Tom Baker
Tom Baker, guitar

Nowhere, Questions, Middle - Luminously coherent lyric utterances, contrasting poignantly with the well-known predilections of the elegaic subject.

Playlist

2011-06-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

Recorded

June 19, 2011
The Ventures Twist Party Vol. 2 Radio Spot - The Ventures
Rapport 3 - Robert Morris, David Mott
Bryde one Brere (live) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, Aloysia Friedmann
Three: for Keith: 2 Commentary - Benjamin Boretz
Holden Greets the World - Banned Rehearsal
Banned Rehearsal 562 - Banned Rehearsal

The first 35 to 40 minutes of this is truly fine, becoming a thought of the past, the present, and of what we just have been. At our most symphonic.

June 21, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 679 - Banned Rehearsal
Figure Study 3 - Keith Eisenbrey

Slow, disjunct tempi, with occlusions.

June 22, 2011
Steel String Blues - Sylvester Weaver
Blue, Turning Grey Over You - Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra
I Belong To The Band, Hallelujah - Rev. Gary Davis
W.P.A. - Louis Armstrong, The Mills Brothers, Norman Brown

An humorous take on the New Deal, from the thick of it. "I'm so tired, don't know what to do/Can't get fired, so I'll take my rest until my work is through".

You Always Hurt The One You Love - Bunk Johnson
Ornithology - Charlie Parker, Navarro, Bud Powell
The Wayward: San Francisco - Harry Partch

A magnificent and phenomenally gorgeous memento of lost time and lost sound.

The Last One To Know - The Fleetwoods
Pedal Pusher - The Ventures
Tony Gave a Picnic - Ralph Shekel
Fox Chase - Coy Martin

June 23, 2011
Language, as a music - Benjamin Boretz

What do we mean when we say that a music moves us?

While studying at the UW in late winter or spring of 1981, soon after I first heard Ben's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."), John Rahn played a recording of Language, as a music for us in a theory seminar. If my chart was the seduction, this was the sucker punch. A year later I was on a plane to New York to spend two years with Ben in life-changing verbal and musical conversation. But now that I can't hear Ben's voice without immediately bringing forth an image of his physical and gestural presence it is difficult to recall the sense of that first hearing: just a voice on a tape, a peculiarly articulate voice, gesturing in itself, creating a series of personae to speak with, and, as it seemed, to challenge me with. After all these years I can point to many ways this piece, and the thinking about this piece, changed, moved, the path of my life. Here is the seed of my decision to abandon an attempt at an academic career and also of any real attempt at a musical career. Through this piece it became clear to me that music and the thinking of and in it was far too vital to my self to allow the vagaries and exigencies of career to get in its way or limit my doing.

In short, this piece of six invented personae, each deeply concerned with illuminating and valuing that moment in which meaning happens, inhabits me in what I have become. It has moved me, and it has moved into me. It has become personal to me, which is all that ever matters anyway.

Playlist

2011-06-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

Recorded

June 11, 2011
One: Three: Text - Benjamin Boretz

This is the recording on the Open Space disk. Although it is in fact the same session as the recording that Ben had sent me on tape back in 1985, called there Three: for Keith 1: text, they are given different dates. The instant recording is dated 1/31, the other is labeled 1/30. This is the first time I listened to them more or less back to back.

June 12, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 219 - Banned Rehearsal

Chock full of wee incidental sounds - moving, setting down, picking up, sneezing, shifting. The playing proceeds best in staccato plosives. It doesn't quite manage to hold concentration the full 45 minutes.

PCKE 000227 - Pete Comley, Keith Eisenbrey

Pete and I play bells and gongs.

Banned Rehearsal 679 - Banned Rehearsal

Steven Kennedy joins Karen, Neal, and myself on a session full of guitars and amplifiers accumulating noise and color within a remarkable panmetric groove.

Figure Study 2 - Keith Eisenbrey

This is part of a project to explore and build a sense of keyboard figuration improvisationally from the bottom up. Attempting singularities and finding sequence, steering between a structural sense of form-making and sheer sensuality. Considering that, perhaps, the well-shaping of a sequence does not necessarily produce a sequence of well-shaped moments, that if the well-shaping of moments is given its due the sequence shape will take care of itself.

June 13, 2011
Red Man Blues - Piron's New Orleans Orchestra
Bessie Couldn't Help It - Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra

I am curious how this recording was engineered as to the balance between sax choir and trumpet - did he muffle them? put them in a box to record?

I Am the True Vine - Rev. Gary Davis

From another great collection: Goodbye Babylon

June 14, 2011
Boog-It - Louis Armstrong, The Mills Brothers, Norman Brown
Alexander's Ragtime Band - Irving Berlin - Bunk Johnston
I Hadn't Anyone 'Til You - Earl Hines

June 16, 2011
The Wayward - U.S. Highball - Harry Partch

Snapshots of journeying with wordplay.

The End - Allen Ginsberg
Passio et mors domini nostri Jesu Chrisi secundum Lucam - Penderecki

At its best in its compositional imitation of the acoustic effects of cathedral architecture. I find the final big chord a disappointment. All that work and all we get is a triad ex machina?

Live

June 11, 2011
Festival de Musique - University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle
Organ Recital, featuring Stanislav Surin, Zuzana Zahradnikova, David di Fiore

Concerto in a BWV 593 (after Vivaldi) - J.S. Bach - Stanislav Surin
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 771 - J.S. Bach - Stanislav Surin
Sonata No. 1 in d - Final - Alexandre Guilmant - Stanislav Surin

O Mensch, bewein dein Sunde Gross, BWV 622 - J.S. Bach - Zuzana Zahradnikova
Offertory on "o fili" - Alexandre Guilmant - Zuzana Zahradnikova
March funebre et Chant seraphique - Alexandre Guilmant - Zuzana Zahradnikova

A Suite of Dances - Anonymous 16th Century - David di Fiore
Sonata on the 94th Psalm - Julius Reubke - David di Fiore
Come Sunday - Duke Ellington - David di Fiore
Etude No. 5 in c-sharp - Jeanne Demessieux - David di Fiore

This festival, at the church of which I am a member, stretched over three days. The evening prior was a choral concert in which I participated in the choir. The next day was a 2 hour service to celebrate David's 40 years of music ministry at the temple - 2 hours o'er-brimming with music. I made a decision early on not to discuss my church-music life in this blog, mostly because, due to its different social and spiritual function, I think about it differently than when I consider the aesthetic aspects of my musical life. Organ recitals, though clearly intended as an aesthetic event, often occupy an odd sort of middle ground for me, especially when presented in a worship space, and because so much of the repertoire was originally designed for worship, or was composed in consideration of the sacred.

But the instrument, when played as beautifully as it was by all concerned, does present some unique challenges to the listener, as well as unique rewards. No solo instrument can match it in dynamic, timbral, or spatial range. And the spatial aspect isn't merely the sense of from which particular direction a sound emanates, it is also and even more strongly the sense that the sounds occupy various regions in the chamber in which we listen, i.e. "That tune didn't come from over there, it is over there". Which is to say that the parts of the music become bodies in the room with us. The musical parts become concrete, other, out there. For me, this is always fascinating, and often disconcerting, almost generating a quasi fight or flight response. When a sound 'comes from' a point in space, I can accept it safely into my ear and allow its workings. When a sound has 'come into the room' with me, I'm never quite sure of my safety.

Playlist

2011-06-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

Recorded

June 4, 2011
Nights When I'm Lonely - Boswell Sisters
It Must Be True - Bing Crosby

June 5, 2011
Here Comes Cleo - Cleo Brown

I was so taken by Cleo's knockout recording Lookie, Lookie, Lookie (aka Here Comes Cookie) on Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune collection that I bought an album. Brown is the very model of supple articulation, both in her piano playing and in her singing. She has a lovely pianissimo, shivery-vibrato melodic tail-off to her phrases that is a world all its own. The later songs, some of them not much more than bad jokes, are a real heartbreak. I don't know the whole story, but if this is the only kind of material they would record for her, it's no wonder she quit the business.

June 7, 2011
Pickin' The Cabbage - Cab Calloway
Tall, Dark, and Handsome - Ivy Anderson
Zulu's Parade - Johnny Wiggs and his New Orleans Band
Brandeis - Elaine Barkin - Keith Eisenbrey

This is from my recital of November 5, 2005. These pieces are right at the edge of my capabilities as a pianist. Consequently I am so focused on notes while playing them that I find it difficult, at the same time, to project much of a coherent idea of what the piece is doing. Next time I perform this I need to spend more time recording myself and listening back. I think there is something there about the persistence of register within layered and tesserated fragments.

The Best of Lenny Bruce - Lenny Bruce

Even after all these years, and even remembering some of the punch lines, this made me laugh. A pretty amazing voice actor, among other talents.

My Special Lover - The Fleetwoods
The Ventures' "Rocketing Rhythms" Interview - The Ventures
Beaumont Rag - Frosty Lamb/Buzz Fountain
Bryd one Brere (studio recording) - Keith Eisenbrey - Aloysia Friedmann/Keith Eisenbrey

Aloysia was a classmate of mine at the UW back in mumbletymumble, and she graciously agreed to play this little violin & piano piece. She has since gone on to great things and a wonderful career, as we all knew she would. The title comes from a 13th century English song that had come up as an example in a music history class. Here is a link to a page about it. At the time my compositional method was to throw as many techniques as I could think of at the page and see which ones stuck. Use of quotations was one of them. The result in this case is kind of rollicking and showy. Aloysia negotiates my occasionally violinistic writing with pizazz. I do my best to keep up.

Playlist

2011-06-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

Recorded

May 29, 2001
My Special Lover - The Fleetwoods
The Stoned Guest - PDQ Bach
Fynne's Polka - Dwight "Red" Lamb
Leaving Here, Don't Know Where I'm Goin' - Joe K. Rakestray, Art Rosenbaum

The last two tracks are from Art Rosenbaum's magnificent 4 disc collection "The Art of Field Recording vol. 1".

Three: for Keith 1: text - Benjamin Boretz

May 30, 2001
Banned Rehearsal 218 - Banned Rehearsal
Banned Rehearsal 564 - Banned Rehearsal

A lesson in transparency and balance.

Hockets - Keith Eisenbrey

This is from my recital of November 5, 2005, and the only recording I have of the piano solo version. I am pleased that in spite of the mind-boggling complexity of composing the thing, the final effect is luminous and clear. The idea was to write a piece that was an essay in pitch-class-set content determinacy within a mod-12 syntax (the usual 12 notes), while at the same time was entirely composed of order-determinate row forms derived from a single index row within a synthetic mod-17 syntax (in which pitches 17 semi-tones apart are defined to be pitch-class equivalent). The challenge is that within mod-17 arithmetic, unlike within mod-12 arithmetic, all of the multiplicative transforms (except M-0) to pitch and order yield like-sized sets. In short, there are 17*17*17*17 distinct derivations that can be made of any row. Math types out there will realize that there are many duplications among them, but it still adds up to a huge matrix of possibilities. I had to write a computer program to calculate which mod-17 row forms would yield the required sequences of mod-12 pitch-classes. Otherwise I'd still be at it.

June 2, 2011
Gradus 173 - Neal Meyer

Neal says farewell to just three notes for many years. Next time, there will be an E involved.

Live

May 30, 2011
Gradus 193 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-05-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

Recorded

May 22, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 217 - Banned Rehearsal
Slow Blues X 2 - Keith Eisenbrey

An experiment - taking the recordings of both the solo and trio versions from the Jack Straw sessions and mixing them together. The result, as often with such experiments, is more interesting than successful. The respective piano parts proceed at somewhat different tempos, effectively unhinging the metrical and harmonic force of the written-down portion of the piece, moving it closer to the time-sense world inhabited by the improvised portion of the piece. The downside is that it is precisely the potent contrast of time-sense worlds that makes the trio version click.

Gradus 74 - Neal Meyer
Banned Rehearsal 772 - Banned Rehearsal

May 24, 2011
Meddlin' With The Blues - The Two of Spades

I was reminded of the giddily chaotic calliope music of the Bickleton Carousel in its hoary old age.

Wailing Blues - The Cellar Boys
Body and Soul - Benny Goodman
Ko-Ko - Duke Ellington

I love the pianist's percussive anacrusis. (What is the plural of anacrusis? anacrusi? anacruses? anacrusises?) The dynamic range is pretty compressed on this recording (the one on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz) - it must have really been spectacular live.

Get Happy - Harry Sweets Edison
Nice Work If You Can Get It - Sarah Vaughan/Miles Davis
That's All Right (live) - Elvis Presley

May 26, 2011
A Tall Cool One - The Wailers

The cuts generally improve through the course of the album. The piano on the first cut is kind of wimpy sounding, as though it were played on a spinet, or recorded poorly, or both. Isabella goes on my party mix any day.

Live

May 21, 2011

The "StormSound" Cycle - S. Eric Scribner
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
with S. Eric Scribner, Mike Sentkewitz, Ivan Arteaga, Neal Kosaly-Meyer, Matt Kocmieroski, Dale Speicher, Jay Hamilton, Keith Eisenbrey, Bruce Greeley, Ryan Burt, David Paul Mesler, and Clifford Dunn

First of all, my sincere congratulations to Steve on the successful accomplishment of this mammoth task. Putting together nine plus hours of music with twelve performers and running it as efficiently as he did is not easy. My hat is off to you. Well done!

Nine hours is long for a piece of music, but the scale is in keeping with a spacious spirit. Processes spin out hugely in their own sweet time. If they proceeded any faster they would be radically different processes. For me the experience was very like that of committing to and taking a long and occasionally strenuous auditory day hike. One can only move so fast and it takes as long as it takes. No shortcuts. Although I found it physically challenging to sit and listen the whole time it was entirely comfortable to stand up and quietly move about the space if I needed to. Karen brought me a nice hot dinner (thank you!!) and we ate in the narthex/lobby while listening. There were several of us that stayed the whole time, and quite a few who attended for several hours. In the end I found the "ordeal" aspect of it to be much less of a problem than I had feared.

The day hike analogy works for me pretty well in all sorts of ways. The procession of musical imagery is like that of scenery going by rather than like, for instance, a detective novel. There is a preponderance of natural-sourced sound in the prerecorded material - bird song, wind, fire, crickets, that sort of thing. Several times the birds in the actual out of doors seemed to be conversing with the birds of like species in the virtual out of doors. The sound made by the live performers might be the conversations we have along the path. Sounds returned over the course of the cycle variously transformed, as though the same geographical feature were seen from different vantages. Most of all it allowed me to hear the sounds as a part of what was happening in my world, rather than as a story or problem every detail of which demanded my attention.

The cycle consists of 21 sound files played into the room in sequence. Performers were assigned tasks of a generally musical nature to accomplish at certain times. The upshot of this is that the social interaction, and hence the musical interaction, between the players is essentially that of parallel play rather than ensemble play, i.e. we play at the same time, but aren't really playing together. There is little or no designed in detailed intent interaction between the people on stage. As a performer this is strangely not freeing, having more the effect of being set adrift or left in the lurch - neither having been given something specific, detailed, and socially engaging to do, nor being given carte blanche to completely be oneself in the situation - not enough score or far too much.

But all in all this was a splendid effort and I'm glad I took the time to experience the whole thing. It is a considered, imaginative, and brave project. There is much in this music to ponder, quibble though I might with aspects of its methodology.

Playlist

2011-05-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Recorded

May 15, 2011
Skoodlum Blues - Jimmy O'Bryant

If there is such a thing as hot, this is it. Punk rock eat your heart out.

Song of the Islands - Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra
Way Down Yonder in New Orleans - Ray Noble

There are an astounding number of arrangement ideas in this 3 minute piece. It made me wonder what the live dance-hall arrangements were like, since I presume they were longer.

Ko-Ko - Duke Ellington
Blue Skies - Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong
Southern Hospitality - Moon Mullican

It's such a little thing, the bluesy shake. But here it is rhythmically dead on.

Shake, Rattle and Roll - Elvis Presley

May 16, 2011
Symphony No. 8 - David Diamond - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

All in the acceptable muscular style of music as it was taught to be written.

Musique du Burundi - various

May 17, 2011
The Madcap Laughs and Barrett - Syd Barrett

The production of these records may have constituted a form of session-musician abuse, but the result is often nothing short of brilliant. They are quirky and deeply personal, not in the squishy heart-on-sleeve sense, but in the "nobody but Syd could have come up with this" sense. They veer wildly into near incompetence while simultaneously incandescing at white heat. His imagination may have pushed him toward ideas he didn't have the technical capacity to accomplish, but the fact that he tried so valiantly and so publicly is to his everlasting credit. One wonders if anyone else ever took the possibilities of Psychedelic Rock as seriously.

Gospel Noble Truths - Alan Ginsberg
A Different Kind of Tension - The Buzzcocks

May 20, 2011
One: twotext commentary - Benjamin Boretz

A slow progression over 35 minutes from single tones widely spaced through dyads widely spaced and pairs of dyads widely spaced through to sensual tetrads - widely spaced. The gold-standard for considered pianism.

Live

May 14, 2011
Seattle Opera at McCaw Hall
The Magic Flute - Mozart

I sincerely hope that one day I will have an epiphany in regard to this opera, but in the past 20 years or so I have liked it less and less every time it comes up. It's weaknesses as a piece of theater are legion, the foremost among them being that there is no conflict that isn't resolved within the space of TV commercial. On top of that the text is preachy and hopelessly outdated. It provides full employment for costumers, and the staging looked very good - I only wish it had been in the service of something worth doing.

But my real complaint is that the music isn't even very good Mozart. Aside from the overture and the Papageno/Papagena duet at the end it is square and plodding, one damned thing after another. We look forward to the birdcatcher song IF the singer has enough charisma to pull it off, but then it just comes out as "hey, here's Mozart doing stupid".

May 16, 2011
Gradus 192 - Neal Meyer

May 19, 2011
Ensemble Rhizome - Cafe Venus / Mars Bar, Seattle

Amy Denio (vocals and accordion)
Jesse Canterbury (clarinet and bass clarinet)
Greg Sinibaldi (tenor saxophone)
Tom Baker (fretless guitar and electronics)
John Seman (bass)
Evan Woodle (drums)

Due to some confusion about bus schedules we didn't catch the first number or so, but I think we did hear most of this set by a big crew of the usual suspects. This is free jazz with no discernible heads, all scrapes and howls and rubbings and discovered intricacies of melody and rhythm. Gobs of fun - and balloons too!

We couldn't stay to hear the rest of the bands. Next time!

Plalist

2011-05-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

Recorded

May 8, 2011
Mudgett: Monologues by a Mass Murderer - J.K. Randall

An essay in envelopes and timbretypes presumably using some precursor to C-Sound. The combination of bleepbloop music with voice overtwined evokes an eerie air of dis-familiarity.

Symphony No. 22 "City of Light":" - Alan Hovhaness - Seattle SO/Hovhaness

No building of tension, nor any building of sonority really. Perhaps a building of presence or/and apartness. Cathedral, massy.

Two Interruptions - Keith Eisenbrey

My live performance in 2005, a bit clumsy.

War - U2

I love the way the drums sound, especially on the first cut. As though recorded in an empty room.

One: twotext - Benjamin Boretz

An expanding space in which each flotsamite also partakes of expanding space.

Banned Rehearsal 216 - Banned Rehearsal

Begins with a texture of ocarina and two plucked strummers, moving to two flutes and a single strummer. Whistleshrill and windup toys.

May 10, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 561 - Banned Rehearsal

Gently arousing sax & rattles, gradually cornet and larger percussion. Flatfooted drumming - a study in the delicate sense of what together is.

May 12, 2011
Hockets (midi version B) - Keith Eisenbrey
Gradus 172 - Neal Meyer

The idea of a note - franctured
The idea of pitch-class - melted

Playlist

2011-05-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

Recorded

April 30, 2011
Rhapsody for Orchestra - Roger Sessions - Columbus SO/Christian Badea
Interruption No. 2 - Keith Eisenbrey
Up The Hill Backwards/Crystal Japan - David Bowie
Pastorale for Helena - Aaron Keyt

May 1, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 215 - Banned Rehearsal

Develops an interesting sense of what a groove can be - instead of a base upon which to build, a transparent medium through which to sound the room. Participants were Karen, Aaron, and myself.

Banned Rehearsal 560 - Banned Rehearsal

orchestral, tantric, immovable. Participants were Pete Comley, Karen, Aaron, Anna, Neal, and myself.

Hockets (midi version A) - Keith Eisenbrey
Zoo Penguins - Keith Eisenbrey

May 5, 2011
Scratch - Blue Ribbon Syncopaters

Early punk jazz.

Night Life - Mary Lou Williams
Smiles - Charlie LaVere
Concerto for Cootie - Duke Ellington
Waiting for the Train to Come Home - Peggy Lee

This is about as perfect as a song can be. Peggy Lee genius!

Body and Soul - Lester Young
Partita for Piano (midi) - Benjamin Boretz
Symphony No. 2 - William Walton - Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell

Transformation anchored by head rhyme, with more than a hint of Debussy and Bartok.

Live

May 6, 2011
Seattle Composers Salon - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Double Play - Doug Palmer

Tony Rondolone played sax and David Mesler played piano. cheery and fun.

Selections for the Storm Sound Cycle - Steve Scribner

I'm looking forward to hearing as much as I can of this 9 hour epic on the 21st of this month. I'll be playing a couple of times, as will many others. Don't miss it!

Langsam - Yvonne Hoar

Jennifer Yu played piano. I was having trouble getting into this piece until about 2/3 of the way in. The register shifted up and the musical material started to consider itself more carefully. In my humble opinion the first part seemed to operate as a kind of creative scaffolding - necessary to have written in order to get where it got, but not necessary to keep once there. Removing it would leave a stronger piece.

Excerpts with discussion - Ben Hogue

Thinking about the behaviors of music in non-linear environments, and the possibility of music evoking images of non-linearity.

Playlist

2011-04-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Recorded

April 23, 2011
She's Cryin' For Me - New Orleans Rhythm Kings
Three Chants - Ruth Crawford Seeger - New London Chamber Choir/James Wood

Within the room within which these weave we are pulled within the space within what is woven.

April 24, 2011
Lookie Lookie Lookie - Cleo Brown

Not even showing off, just doin' it. Check it out. You're jaw will drop.

Moonlight on the Ganges - Benny Goodman Orchestra/Helen Forrest

Nothing left to chance. Arranged to the nth.

Mean To Me - Bill Harris

An odd thing to pick out, but I really dig the drummer's brushwork on this cut.

Singin' in the Rain - Dave Brubeck
Money Honey (live) - Elvis Presley
Skylark - The Fleetwoods
Corvair Baby (remix) - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Quartet in b-flat minor op. 138 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam SQ
Interruption 2 (midi) - Keith Eisenbrey
Tricolor Capers - Eric Mandat - Eric Mandat
Pastorale - Keith Eisenbrey - Fehrwood Ensemble
Banned Rehearsal 214 - Banned Rehearsal

Personnel: Karen Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and myself.

Banned Rehearsal 559 - Banned Rehearsal

Personnel: Karen Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and myself.

Postlude with Jim Randall in Mind (midi) - Benjamin Boretz

This is the third movement of Ben's String Quartet, in the midi arrangement that was my first acquaintance with the piece. I remember finding that I couldn't sit and listen but had to stand and move. Each new moment of sound pushed at me bodily, forcefully. This time through the global structure was clearly emerging from inside the experience of each sound moment, rather than from the remove of score-reading head-space. The determinate feel is not of a place within a trajectory, but of place and then place, now and then now. Not horizontal, nor not vertical - but as though pierced through at some right angle to now.

Zoo Night - Keith Eisenbrey

The "Night" portion of the "Day and Night" exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo, a few weeks before they shut it down. Then we step outside and walk to our car.

April 26, 2011
Charleston Charlie - Wilshire Dance Orchestra
Cryin' for the Carolines - James P. Johnson
Caroline - Louis Laskie
Old Man River - Snub Mosely
Big Chief Pawnee - Rex Stewart/S. Scott/E. Bostic
Flying the Coop - Chubby Jackson
Partita - Benjamin Boretz - Keith Eisenbrey

My performance from November of 2005. Still haven't got the tempos right, except for the third movement which is close. As usual for me, rushed. The notes are more accurate than my norm. I've only been working on these pieces for 25 years, and I still think I'll get them eventually.

Songs in the Wind - Lockrem Johson - Lorri Frogget/Keith Eisenbrey

Our performance from October of 2007. Lockrem was a much loved local composer and teacher who died in 1977, far too young. These five songs from 1960 are beautiful examples of his sophisticated pianistic imagination and sensitive vocal writing. Lorri sang magnificently, and I was even pretty pleased with my own playing.

Just Like Me (remix) - Paul Revere and the Raiders

Playlist

2011-04-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

Recorded

April 16, 2011
It Wouldn't Be The Same Without You - Elvis Presley
Runaround - The Fleetwoods
Blue Fox (remix) - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Just Seventeen - Paul Revere and the Raiders

One of those songs that redeem the band. Miles from teenybophood.

Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits - Throbbing Gristle

The dark underbelly of psychedelia. Bad trip music.

April 17, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 23 - Banned Rehearsal

For those who don't know, Banned Rehearsal is a free-improvisation group I have been involved with for many years. To the best of my recollection our public performances can still be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is a recording of our first such concert, given at the University of Washington School of Music recital hall in January of 1985. It features the "stack-o-decks" (a low-tech mix of cassette tape machines and boom-boxes), and the "funmaker", a 2.5 octave Wurlitzer electronic organ with chord buttons and pre-set rhythms that could all be played at the same time. Unsuspected by me, my wife-to-be was in the audience. Performing personnel were: Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and myself.

Banned Rehearsal 213 - Banned Rehearsal

By the time this tape was made, in 1990, Neal and Anna were in California, and Aaron was back in town, and Karen and I had moved to our current location in Maple Leaf. We were playing small instruments in a small room. Personnel were: Karen Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and myself.

Banned Rehearsal 558 - Banned Rehearsal

Ten years later, playing in the studio out in the garage, we make a big fat sax-y sound with a feedback humdrone up the middle. It veers toward the vaguely jazzy, mostly due to Aaron's alto sax and some piano tinklings, but the radio sound hits obliquely and we make our own slow fade out. Personnel were: Karen Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and myself.

April 19, 2011
Banned Rehearsal 678 - Banned Rehearsal

Six years ago, Aaron and Anna are on their various sabbaticals and Neal comes over to make sounds with us on a more-or-less weekly basis, alternating Gradus sessions and Banned Rehearsal. We start in a classic trio configuration, with Neal playing cornet, Karen on drums, and myself playing piano, and out from that jazzish environment we construct a space in which sounds hang suspended outside of music.

Zoo Day - Keith Eisenbrey

Last year I recorded a trip to Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. This is the segment in the "Day" gallery of the "Day and Night" exhibit, just before the zoo shut it down to save money. Great sadness.

Playlist

2011-04-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

Recorded

April 10, 2011
Gradus 73 - Neal Meyer
Banned Rehearsal 771 - Banned Rehearsal

April 12, 2011
Suite in G BWV 816 - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet
Six Little Piano Pieces op. 19 - Schoenberg - Paul Jacobs

These pieces explain themselves so well they could serve as an entry point to Schoenberg. It's all there.

Dirty Rag - Brownlee's Orchestra of New Orleans

April 14, 2011
Symphony of Psalms - Stravinsky - Russian State Academy Orchestra/Boys' and Male Voices of the Russian State Academic Choir/Igor Markevitch

Dynamite performance. The boys' choir has a sullen and murderous sound and the rest of the crew follow suit, brutal and thuggish. Listen at your own risk. Wear armor and bring friends.

The Prodigal's Return (The Things I Usta Do I Don't Do No More) - Hallelujah Joe
Spain - Bob Crosby's Bobcats
Swingin' on Central - Nat Cole
Liza - Al Haig

Live

April 11, 2011

Gradus 191 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-04-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

Recorded

April 3, 2011
Suite in g minor BWV 808 - JS Bach - Colin Tilney
That Beautiful Rag - Stella Mayhew/Billie Taylor
Careless Love - Oscar Celestin's Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra
Symphony of Psalms - Stravinsky - Radio SO-Berlin/Riccardo Chailly
Throwing Stones at the Sun - Willie Bryant
Contrasts - Harlan Leonard
What More Can a Woman Do - Sarah Vaughan/Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra
Love Lies - Jack Teagarden
I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone - Elvis Presley
Beatnik Sticks - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Action - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Gone Movin' On - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Interruption #1 (midi) - Keith Eisenbrey

April 5, 2011
The River - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

The first three sides of this album have a similar structure. Each begins with several songs arranged for the full band sound and performed in Bruce's "young tough prick" persona, painting an eloquent picture of the rage of young blood at the adult world and the obligations and restrictions it imposes, while frustrated at every moment by the realization that the desire of that blood is for, precisely, the freedoms of the adult world and the knowledge that the freedoms come at a price. Each of these first sides ends (if I remember correctly) with a more introspective song in an acoustic arrangement that offers a view inside the persona of the adult as it slowly chooses itself. The last side consists almost entirely of this more introspective aspect, and finishes with a kind of warning - "There but for my acceptance of my adult self go I". Considered together they function as a song cycle in four parts offering a moving account of the pain and sorrow of choosing manhood over adolescence, with an epilogue of where a failure of that choosing would have ended - the 'river' being that flowing through Cautionary Valley. The varying style of arrangements works well structurally, and the song-writing is quite strong (even for Bruce) throughout. I have often said that the only album of Bruce's I liked unconditionally was Nebraska. I amend that opinion now to include this extraordinary work.

April 7, 2011
1/3 Poem x N - Neal Meyer - Banned Rehearsal

I remember the name of this piece of Neal's, but I didn't remember that the whole band, including myself, joined in its performance, nor what the piece was like. We intoned repeated phonemes above a feedbacky sort of ground. Quite an unexpected pleasure.

Banned Rehearsal 212 - Banned Rehearsal

Magnificently blatant.

Banned Rehearsal on KSER- Banned Rehearsal

My recording of our moment of glory on Chris DeLaurenti's "Sonar Map" program on KSER back in 2000.

Playlist

2011-04-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Recorded

3/26/2011
Youkali (Tango Habanera) - Kurt Weill - Diane McNaron/Shari Boruvka
Sweet Substitute - Jelly Roll Morton
Symphony in 3 Movements - Stravinsky - London SO/Colin Davis

I keep getting a sneaking suspicion that the three movements of the title are not the three obvious ones, but that at every moment there are three afoot.

3/37/2011
Dancing on the Ceiling - Barbara Carroll
I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine - Elvis Presley

a live recording with a honky-tonk piano player in the back.

Rosace - Henri Mulet - David Di Fiore

I've heard David perform this piece live on numerous occasions, and it always comes back to the question of how we put meter together in our heads as the music goes along. The issue is right up front with this piece, because the metrical appearance on the score is pretty straightforward, but as the notes speak into space our sense of where the downbeat is is dis-moored.

Momente (1965 version) - Stockhausen - Symphony Orchestra of Radio Cologne/Martina Arroyo/Aloys Kontarsky/Alfons Kontarsky

This piece pre-figures, using low-tech labor-intensive means, much of what later electronic music found itself doing. The signal produced by a sound source (the soprano) is split apart and transformed by the mechanism (the rest of the crew).

String Quartet #7 - Otto Klemperer - Philharmonia SQ

Not a great piece, but it comes across as a valiant attempt at static pathos, like still photographs that ought to evoke stories, but refuse to.

Big Foot Feller - Buell Kazee
The Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic Circle vol. 2
Pastorale 850114B - Keith Eisenbrey - The Fehrwood Ensemble

This tape is the same take layered onto itself 16 times, combined with a tape of an ice storm on my window in Red Hook to cover up some of the tape hiss.

Banned Rehearsal 211 - Banned Rehearsal

3/29/2011
Banned Rehearsal 557 - Banned Rehearsal

Early on in the life of Banned Rehearsal we coined a word to describe certain sessions that seemed ready to fall asleep at any moment, in which nothing could be done to move anything or do anything. Often these were lovely things to listen to, as is this quintessentially sedatory recording.

3/31/2011
what remains . . . - Tom Baker

Among other things, a selection of the surfaces of recorded sound. The structure is strictly intent on getting out of the way of just what a thing sounds like, whether it be a thing of body or a thing of ether.

Gradus 171 - Neal Meyer

Live

3/28/2011
Gradus 190 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-03-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

Recorded

3/20/2011
Suite in e minor BWV 810 - JS Bach - Colin Tilney

There is a deep frustration in Bach's unstoppable imagining. He knows what he is doing and he knows that he knows what he is doing. But there is more that he needs to do, and that more that he needs to do cannot be done without breaking free of the repletely homogenous stylistic constraints within which he knows what he is doing. To do the more that he needs to do he would have to do without knowing. No can do. It is the frictive heat raised by the impossibility of transcendence from within the music that provides the aching possibility of transcendence in its contemplation.

Waltz in A-flat Major op. 69 #1 - Chopin - Peter Katin

The first trio fractures horizontally, becoming multiple musics.

Fantasia Contrappuntistica - Busoni - Wolf Harden

Busoni's obsession with Bach as the image of intellectual strength founders in the aesthetic world within which he worked, because the actuality of that strength is based on a homogeneity that had vanished. It is, however, a grand obsession and a grand wreck is made of it.

3/22/2011
Nightingale Rag Blues - Hitch's Happy Harmonists
Symphony of Psalms - Stravinsky - RCA SO/The Robert Shaw Chorale/Robert Shaw

A big performance for a big space. Alas, the sound is less-than-transparently scrunched into a phonographic broom closet.

Live

3/24/2011
Operation ID at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Karen and I were amused to find ourselves far up into the upper percentiles of age at this well-attended and energetic show. She commented that my shows don't often attract the quantity of pulchritude on display. Alas, the vagaries of tribal demographics.

In the context of the Is That Jazz Festival a few months ago this band impressed me as having more rock & roll energy than jazz. This time, in the context of last week's Spinning Whips and Ancient Warlocks, the impression was decidedly more jazz than rock. Some of each, obviously. From rock, they bring an emphasis on ensemble playing, a stage presence full of crouching jumping weaving sorts of dancing, and a fashion sense that (as much as I might be qualified to comment) seemed more 80's geeky than cool. From jazz they bring impressive melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sophistications, and a compositional sense at several removes from the verses, bridges, and middle-eights of pop song formatting.They behave on stage less like any band I'd ever seen and more like an on-line gamer guild out to vanquish monsters and have a blast at it. The music is played with a raucous-tight abandon that reminded me of recordings by the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande under Ernest Ansermet, in which the orchestra seems as ready to riot as to play. With Operation ID, it helps to be able to see them, because they all seem far too friendly to act out the energy they release into their sound.

Playlist

2011-03-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

Recorded

3/12/2011
Pastorale 850114A - Keith Eisenbrey - Fehrwood Ensemble
...the one that got away... - Elaine Barkin, Paul Humphreys, Robert Kyr

3/13/2011
Banned Rehearsal 556
Wrong Shape to be a Storyteller - Nate Wooley

A 50+ minute solo improvisation with a huge dynamic range that absolutely knocks it out of the park from beginning to end. I was completely grooving on the transparency with which every ugly-gorgeous sound was laid out into the room, always with plenty of time to sink in, never overstaying its welcome. Trumpet sound, feedback sound, other-room sound, all of it exquisitely raw.

3/15/2011
Banned Rehearsal 770

Live

3/14/2011
Gradus 189 - Neal Meyer

3/17/2011
Koko and the Sweetmeats, Ancient Warlocks, and Spinning Whips - live at the Columbia City Theater, Seattle

It was nouveau metal night at the Columbia City Theater, and we heard three energetic young bands demonstrate what full-on rhythm sections can do. I don't have much to say, other than that it was lots of fun, and that I kind of geeked out on the Spinning Whips' hollow-body bass.

Playlist

2011-03-12T14:58:00.000-08:00

Recorded

3/5/2011
Suite in d BWV 811 - JS Bach - Colin Tilney

3/6/2011
Waltz in A-flat op. 34 #1 - Chopin - Peter Katin

A little family group of waltzes: Papa Waltz, Mama Waltz, Handsome Bro' Waltz, and Giddy Little Sister Waltz - all introduced with great fanfare.

That Lovin' Rag - Sophie Tucker
Cataract Love - Hitch's Happy Harmonists
Symphony of Psalms - Stravinsky - CBC SO/Stravinsky

The material: a complex of infra-referential sounds that carry an image of coherence. They are parts of a thought and we recognize the parts of it as being the parts of that thought. How? Parametric set identity certainly plays a part, but also, I think, a plastic sense of parametric set proximity, or set similarity, as grasped and measured on the fly. Part of our psycho-acoustic apparatus is the bundling of raw sounds into the sounds of some thing in particular - the sound of that note, that violin, that choral voice, that phrase. Stravinsky's compositional ear loves to twist our habits of bundling into paths that astound us: "How did I make that connection?"

3/7/2011
Xango - Villa-Lobos - New York Chamber Orchestra/Gerard Schwarz/Robert Bonfiglio
Variations for Orchestra op. 30 - Webern - London SO/Boulez

See above, re: Symphony of Psalms.

Ebony Concerto - Stravinsky - Netherlands Wind Ensemble/Edo de Waart/George Pieterson

Probably the most interesting conversation that Stravinsky and Ellington never had. Wish I'd been there.

Solitaire - Stan Kenton

3/8/2011
Hearts of Stone (recorded live) - Elvis Presley
Wind Quintet #2 - George Perle
Mikrophonie II - Stockhausen - Studio-Chores fur Neue Musik Koln/Herbert Schemus/Alfons Kontarsky

The heavy ring-modulation throughout leaves me with a sense of oppression, or suppression.

3/10/2011
Psalm 23 Dominus pascit me - Ivan Hrusovsky - Tirnavia/Andrej Rapant/Stanislav Surin
Quit Kickin' My Dog Around - Delbert Spray, Art Rosenbaum
Tattoo You - The Rolling Stones

The antiseptic engineering gives the stripped-down arrangements on this album an interesting edge.

Live

3/11/2011
Christopher DeLaurenti at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Christopher improvised two sets on his laptop, each of which ended with an extended exploration of his recent recordings of local singers rendering the torch song You're My Thrill. In the first set we heard untreated field recordings as well as sounds from at least one earlier work that I recognized. In the second the source sounds were heavily treated before being allowed into the loudspeakers.

Sounds simple enough, but as usual with Christopher's shows I was left with more topics of thought than there is space here to discuss: The experienced relations between textual fragments and a presumed underlying song form, the relations among live sounds from out- and in-side the performance space and sounds brought in from the outside and then broadcast to the inside, time past and time present, multiple times past and multiple times present, what counts as treated and what registers as treated, the relation between the experience of registering a sound as being treated and the experience of the particular treatedness of the sound, the peculiarities of hearing the "same thing" twice in two different settings (does it make the same thing sound more the same or less the same, and does it make the two different settings sound more different or less different - or is it a fascinating shading among the various possibilities?), etc.

All this and it was often quite ravishingly lovely too. An extended segment in the middle of the second set in which two pitched sounds were imperceptibly perceived to shift downward was breathtaking, and the concatenate performance of Thrill, chopped into phrase segments and shuffled tenderly together, was both sexy and poignant, occupying a personal space not quite so distanced as to prevent a blush, and just near enough to tempt the feeling of an intrusion on an intimacy not our own.

Playlist

2011-03-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

Recorded

2/26/2011
The Unashamed Accompanist - Gerald Moore

I don't want to make too much of this recorded lecture by the eminent accompanist, the main point of which is that accompanists have a difficult but rewarding job and that 19th Century art songs are duets in which both pianist and singer have important roles. Hardly earth-shaking propositions. But a common attitude about words and music hangs unexamined throughout: that the point of the music is to reflect the meaning of the words, to act as an illustration for the poem. The problem is that we are postulating that the composer intended to construct a music that disappears into a visual or poetic image, that he intended to write a music that we listen to without hearing. We are asked to play so as to deflect attention from possible musical experiences in favor of something else. Should this really be our default attitude?

Fool, Fool, Fool - Elvis Presley
String Quartet in f-sharp minor, op. 108 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam SQ

Skeletal, ghastly, and icily pure, this is the thinking person's Shostakovich - frantic structuralism barely clinging to the pretense of continuity.

2/27/2011
Mikrophonie I - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky, Johannes Fritsch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fred Alings, Harald Boje, Jaap Spek, Hugh Davies

Episodes without trajectory, the structurally sensual now.

Pole - Stockhausen - Harald Boje, Peter Eotvos

Popular, in that the greater culture leaks in, is roughed up, is consumed.

Tierkreis - Stockhausen - Markus Stockhausen

Little studies in continuity, lyricism, and contrast. Personal and lovely.

3/1/2011
Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey

My live performance of June 6, 2009. The various species of pauses and interruptions are more clearly distinguished here than in my other performances, and I managed to refrain from rushing as much as I usually do. The Chapel piano sounds good.

Pastorale 85 01 13B - Keith Eisenbrey - Fehrwood Ensemble

For this run-through I had the players cut each note short - not quite staccato, but using only enough duration to voice the pitch. As I recall, I later did some cheap overdubbing of this cut (using two cassette decks, to one of which a switch was added to toggle the erase head).

Banned Rehearsal 210 - Banned Rehearsal
Rough throughout, but exquisite right at the end.

3/3/2011
Mad Science ca. 2000 - John Eisenbrey

This little two minute tape showed up in a box recently. My son John had made it at an after school class when he was 9 or 10 or so. Among the over-amply-reverberated fart noises the big surprise was a spontaneous and enthusiastic performance of a little song we invented to amuse the kids in the car: "Do the Weedy Weedy at the Bop".

Two by Four - Tom Baker - Jesse Canterbury, William O. Smith

Allowing time for complex steady states to unfold, to define themselves, to allow thinking in their terms.

Strange Flower (album) - The Tipton Saxophone Quartet

Something about the flattened melodicism of the vocal lines in the last cut reminded me suddenly of Brian Eno. The mind does odd things now and then.

Live

2/28/2011
Gradus 188 - Neal Meyer

3/4/2011

Seattle Composer's Salon at the Chapel Performance Space, Seattle

Wayne Horvitz

Wayne provided a brief overview of his life in composition, with samples - a window into the inherent chaos of a creative mind. I was left with the image of a vital exploratory imagination rooted in a deeply personal demotic sensibility. I would also like to hear that piece for rainstick and paper bag he mentioned, whether Schoenberg comes back from the dead to write it, or whether Wayne writes it himself.

Playlist

2011-02-26T13:44:00.000-08:00

Recorded

February 19, 2011
Suite in d BWV 812 - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet

Entrances burst in. The phraseology is not based on classically balanced thesis - antithesis, but on an image of flowering cumulus. Ms Verlet plays with an elegant inegalite, especially in the Sarabande.

Sonata in f-sharp op. 11 - Schumann - Peter Frankl

A study in quickly doubled modulation, coupled with Schumann's signature fragmentation through repetition.

3 Little Orchestra Pieces - Schoenberg - CBC SO/Robert Craft

Why is it so difficult to find recordings of these fabulous little pieces on-line? Has anybody recorded these since Craft did?

St. Louis Blues - W. C. Handy - Bessie Smith/Louis Armstrong

February 21, 2011
Symphony in g op. 42 - Albert Roussel - Orchestre National de France/Charles Dutoit

Throughout, a whiff of danse macabre.

When Johnny Comes Marching Home - Roy Harris - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

February 22, 2011
The Incredible Flutist Suite - Walter Piston - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

February 23, 2011
Metamorphosen - Strauss - New Philharmonia Orchestra/Otto Klemperer

Live

February 20, 2011
1977 Theme Night at The Comet - Seattle

The Downstrokes
The Blue Ribbon Boys
High Class Wreckage
Hollywood 77

The first three bands are local, the fourth visits from Hollywood. Bands 1, 2, and 4 more than ably hook into the New York sound legacy of The Ramones, offering non-stop doublefast doubleloud dance music, The Downstrokes showing their hometown roots with an occasional dollop of a lick from the Ventures. I've been a Ramones fan since Neal turned me on to them in, of all places, a music theory class at the UW back in 1981 or so. It was good to hear this music played so well, and to hear all these young people having so much fun with it.

But the reason Karen & I went to the show was to hear High Class Wreckage provide the local-historical context for punk and to make a case for its present and future. The relevant root music for HCW, a trio of bass, guitar, & drums, isn't The Ramones of 1977, but the legendary 1960s Puget Sound band The Sonics, who could lay a pretty valid claim for having invented punk rock. HCW has that louder faster Seattle beat and then some, playing with an abandon that catapults them off the stage. This is music for which the moshpit is the band's safety cushion, keeping them near, if not on the stage, finding mis-flung microphones, and generally looking out for the general safety. This music wasn't a Big Apple import. It's from here. And it's still here, very much alive in all its livid brilliance.

Playlist

2011-02-19T13:45:00.000-08:00

Recorded

2/12/2011
Young Americans - David Bowie

Especially on the first side, the song-ness of these songs are subsumed in the engineering of the ultra-sophisticated arrangements. Of course, that's the point.

2/13/2011
Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey
Pastorale 850113A - Keith Eisenbrey - The Fehrwood Ensemble

2/15/2011
Banned Rehearsal #209 - Banned Rehearsal

This recording was made in 1990, at a time when the active band was Karen, Aaron, and myself. Neal and Anna were in California, and the kids had not yet arrived. The sessions from this time are occasionally haphazard, low-energy affairs veering into a giggly cleverness. This session, however, is tight as tight for a full 40 minutes. It withers just a bit but then settles into a nicely drummy groove to the end.

grey angel - Christopher DeLaurenti - Michael Nicolella

Bathyspheric and supraspheric at once.

The Abyss - Keith Eisenbrey

recorded "live" at a performance in 2006 at our church.

Extracts 7 - Keith Eisenbrey

A thin set with holes. Artifacts: the residue of intention - interesting because I read into them my ideas about my intention in making them, and also discover in listening to them an image of their own intention.

Live

2/14/2011
Gradus 187 - Neal Meyer

2/17/2011
The Threepenny Opera - Kurt Weill - Bertolt Brecht - English adaption by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Stephanie Shine
The Seattle Shakespeare Company at Intiman Theatre, Seattle

A far more interesting piece than pleasing. For three acts we are berated bluntly and harshly with a disillusioning moral Realpolitik, propounded by demons. There is little here by which we can redeem our humanity, except the occasional deeply anxious pause of an actor as he lets the sound of marching fascists pass in the street. The play itself is a reworking of Don Giovanni twisted upside down. We watch a charismatic male lead, accustomed to being above the law, as he repeatedly fails, losing his grip at the hands of three female revenge seekers, only to be snatched away at the gallows. But rather than being pulled into hell by demons he is plucked into a Victorian materialist's heaven.

Playlist

2011-02-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

Recorded

I took the week off from listening to recorded music in order to devote that time to work with Karen on a new song that Benjamin Boretz sent to us. We were under a deadline to get a recording to him by next week. This was a significant musical challenge for both of us, but I believe we were modestly successful. More concerning this project anon.

Live

2/9/2011
Composer Spotlight at Jack Straw Foundation, Seattle

The Nature (of) Sounds in the StormSound Cycle - S. Eric (Steve) Scribner

I have known Steve for a couple of years now and have grown to admire his tirelessness in getting people together to perpetrate music. He performs all over the area, but never grandstands. As present as he is in the Seattle new music scene, it's never about him, it's always about what he's up to.

To introduce himself, Steve sat with his back to the audience, faced an unassuming array of small percussion and, without speaking, spoke in music. After a few lovely minutes he stood and, speaking, demonstrated how difficult it is to explain what probably can not be, exactly, explained. Although I found myself quibbling with the concepts he propounded, I soon realized that what he is attempting to do in music is to mirror a view of the cosmos that has never yielded easily to verbal formulation: that particular view in which the clearest expression is the paradox, and in which there are no useful concepts that aren't bald oxymora - in short, the stance of faith. Despite my quibbles, that is a position I must and do most heartily support.

And of course this standpoint can no more easily be successfully mirrored in musical terms than in verbal. But the attempt is heroic, and at 9+ hours the scale upon which he is attempting it is monumental. The artifacts of Steve's musical quest are full with a broad and moving poignancy. In so fully striving, where success is categorically unobtainable, the particulars of failure form an aesthetic image of intimate clarity.

Playlist

2011-02-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

Recorded

1/30/2011
Violin Concerto - Roger Sessions - Orchestre Philharmonique de l'Office de la Radio diffusion-Television Francais/Gunther Schuller/Paul Zukofsky

Robustly lyrical counterpoint.

Tango - Stravinsky - Noel Lee

tight as tight can make it

Mean To Me - Dizzy Gillespie & Orchestra/Sarah Vaughan

chromatically adept - a perfect picture of transparent subtlety.

Symphony #4 - Walter Piston - Seattle SO/Gerard Scwharz

The back ends of these movements sink down into some very interesting holes.

2/1/2011
The Sun Sessions - Elvis Presley

2/3/2/11
Perfidia - The Ventures
Love Is Strange (album) - Mickey & Sylvia

It is difficult to imagine a modern engineer allowing such a completely integrated sound, where every sound bleeds into every other. This pair was complete dynamite. The songs as songs vary in quality but the chemistry makes it impossible to really dislike anything about it.

Japan - Stockhausen

Live

1/29/2011
The Barber of Seville - Rossini - Seattle Opera/Dean Williamson - at McCaw Hall, Seattle

A wee bit of disclosure: Dean and I were high-school classmates, and used to play piano duets together (I remember mostly Ravel & Brahms). Since he is a foot or more taller than I am it was quite a sight.

A light farce, amazingly enjoyable after all these years. I had forgotten how few women's voices there are in the show. It portrays a society of men, in which women must scheme like the dickens to get what they want. This subversion is shared with Le Nozze de Figaro, although that story has subversion to spare.

1/31/2011
Gradus 186 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

2011-01-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

Recorded

1/22/2011
The Bewitched - Harry Partch - University of Illinois Musical Ensemble/John Garvey

A magnificent beat-era mytho-poetic gesamtkunstwerk. One wonders whether any composer has ever been more dead serious about what they were up to and what they were up to it with. It could be a text book for sui generis aesthetic potencies in the same way that Ben Boretz claims that Pulcinella is a text book on orchestration.

1/23/2011
Outside My Window - The Fleetwoods
Action Plus - The Ventures

I'm sure I'm not the first one to make a connection between what these guys were doing and some art-rock bands of the 70's, King Crimson of Discipline, for instance.

Pole - Stockhausen

An odd affect of these sounds is that the positive energy is that of suppression and filtering. I get the impression that the sounds self-assert. If the performer were to stop working the sounds would flood in completely and drown us utterly.

Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
Singles Going Steady - The Buzzcocks

1/24/2011
Banned Rehearsal #22 - Banned Rehearsal

An extremely noisy recording from early in 1985 with odd echo-effects that don't seem to add up to a predictable result. Sometimes the echoes precede the incitement, sometimes they follow, sometimes they are equal in volume, sometimes apparently non-existent. It took me near to the end before I remembered how it was done. Each of the four of us had our own cassette tape recorder upon which we recorded the session. These were then mixed together using extreme low-tech means.
The echoes are the result of differentials in tape speed and start times, and the echo dynamics are the result of the different mic placements and pickup patterns. I assure you these are over fancy words for the facts of the case and the modest recorders we were using. In the end I found listening to this much more interesting than pleasing - which is one of the things about Banned Rehearsal that has continued to fascinate me for all these years.

1/25/2011
Banned Rehearsal #208 - Banned Rehearsal
Sylvian's Wood - Christopher DeLaurenti

Shimmery sibilance.

Devils and Dust - Bruce Springsteen

It goes without saying that Bruce is a fabulous and prolific song writer. He is a less consistent arranger and performer of his own songs. For my own ear every time one of his arrangements adds an instrument the song loses something in distinctness. The bigger it gets the less I like it. I would greatly prefer to hear nothing but voice and guitar. His strongest performances are those in which there is no obvious put-on vocal persona. This stripped-down album is heading in the right direction, but it's no Nebraska.

Extracts #6 - Keith Eisenbrey

I made twelve of these empirical studies in pitch-class-set filtering as a tool for musical analysis. It is a midi-synth arrangement of twelve horizontal slices of Scriabin's Prelude op. 74 #4, each slice consisting of all and only the pitch-classes contained in a single transposition of the (0, 3, 4, 7) tetrachord. The theory under consideration is that this tetrachord is referential to the piece. The experiment is to hear what the piece sounds like in terms of only that tetrachord. Each slice is given a separate midi-synth instrument so that they can be distinguished. Extracts #1 is just these bare slices one after the other. At the tempo I chose for this project it takes about 29 minutes. Each of the succeeding Extracts consists of pairs of slices at each transposition level. For whatever other value it has it sounds kind of cool, and offers some potent compositional possibilities about which I am beginning to cogitate.

1/27/2011
Suite in c minor BWV 813 - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet
Polonaise in e-flat minor op. 26 #2 - Chopin - Peter Katin
The Camp Meeting Jubilee - Male Quartet
St. Louis Blues - W.C. Handy - Prince's Band
Yes Sir, That's My Baby - Blossom Healey
Three Chorale Preludes - JS Bach/Respighi - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

Live

1/22/2011

Is That Jazz Festival - Chapel Performance Space at The Good Shepherd Center - Seattle

Operation ID - Jared Borkowski, David Balatero, Evan Woodle, Rob Hanlon, Ivan Arteaga
Dana Reason

Disclosure: once again, Karen and I volunteer both at this event and on the 28th.

Operation ID
Almost from the moment these guys came on stage I was hitting on bands they reminded me of - but just a little - The Who (if R&R had never been invented), Pink Floyd of Umma Gumma, Captain Beefheart maybe. All sorts of things. They certainly come on stage with a distinctly r&r vibe and the giddy high energy of youth. Is it Jazz? Perhaps. I ended up not caring much even if they do have a saxophone. They were a blast. Young people should be trying crazy stuff like this as often as possible. Please contribute to their Kickstarter campaign so they can release their CD.

Dana Reason
I love Seattle for putting things together that are planets apart. Dana's performance was, in contrast, a quieting missive from the colony of the jazz diaspora that speaks in the expressive language of (loosely) lounge piano, but lifts it toward high-art. For one piece she turned the bench sideways and lay on her back, lifting her arms above her face to the keyboard. This could have been simply gimmicky shtick, but the effect was truly weird, seeing elbows bent that way to the ivories. The piece itself was clean and lovely.

1/28/2011

Is That Jazz Festival - Chapel Performance Space at The Good Shepherd Center - Seattle

Amy Denio and Lucio Menegone
Douglas Detrick's Anywhen Ensemble with guest Wayne Horvitz - Douglas Detrick, Hashem Assadullahi, Shirley Hunt, Steve Vacchi, Ryan Biesack, Wayne Horvitz

Amy Denio and Lucio Menegone
This was a literally disconcerting set. Although the sounds they made invariably resolved into music, and even into pieces of music, the effect was not of a concert given but of a buoyantly delightful conspiracy joined in.

Douglas Detrick's Anywhen Ensemble with guest Wayne Horvitz
A young man with the beginnings of an interesting idea and a fine band to help him out with. They play with a low-key virtuosity that brings forward the ensemble sound (trumpet, drums, cello, saxophone, bassoon, and piano) more than the individual players. Wayne took one extended blues solo, but it was far more thoughtful than showy, as I would expect from a performer of his experience and sensitivity. Douglas is exploring different corners of folk tradition than are usually associated with jazz - the folk song John Hardy, the ballad Awake, Awake - not exactly the standards found in most jazz fake-books. It ends up being pretty heady stuff. I look forward to hearing where this goes.

Playlist

2011-01-22T14:57:00.000-08:00

Recorded

1/15/2011
Patti's Parlour Pieces 9-12 - Ken Benshoof - Keith Eisenbrey
Postlude with Jim Randall in Mind (midi) - Benjamin Boretz

An image of immediate thought - cleared of anything that isn't now. Midi exerts no body-english to the tone production, leaving us frozen cleansed phraseless breathless - a stillness through which we hear the earth spinning beneath our feet.

Blood and Fire Hallelujah test B - Keith Eisenbrey

I had completely forgotten having done this one. Please see my post of 12/4/2010 for the first idea behind this project. I was thinking that if the recorded piano part and the live piano part were too much alike in sound the performance would just end up a kind of mush. So I recorded 10 minutes of accelerating piano chords and then ran the result through a digital distorter - probably one of the guitar amplifiers in Sound Forge. As a stand-alone thing it works spectacularly well in a ham-handed way.

1/16/2011
Suite in b minor BWV 814 - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet
Wenn wir in hochsten Not sein BWV 668a - JS Bach - Michael Chapuis
Polonaise in c-sharp minor op. 26 #1 - Chopin - Peter Katin
Symphony in D (#9) - Mahler - New Philharmonia Orchestra/Klemperer

I love the part in the 3rd movement where the harp run keeps changing the slides on our interior nostalgia show. This performance is engineered to give the listener a podium seat. Too much really, though it isn't either.

1/17/2011
Blame it on the Blues - Victor Military Orchestra

1/18/2011
Lament for Beowulf - Howard Hanson - Seattle SO/Schwarz

Flabby reliance on rhythmic grounds to set off colorless figures, treating the moodcolor as a given invariant rather than as material to be manipulated.

Symphony in C (#4) op. 47 version 1930 - Prokofiev - Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Neemi Jarvi

Juicy concentrate intricate innards

1/20/2011
Viola Quebrada - Villa Lobos - New York Chamber Symphony/Schwarz/Robert Bonfiglio
Symphony in C - Stravinksy - London SO/Colin Davis

Lovely and transparent - as though listening from just the right seat in a very fine space.

Up Jumped the Devil - Wooden Joe Nicholas
Symphony #3 - Paul Creston - Seattle SO/Schwarz

first movement: wiggly stands for active - arrival stands for triumph
second movement: I fared better with this one. I love how it ends spectrally with high violin and low bass ppp
third movement: If A cooperates with B in manner C it will always do so. Gets big and stops.

Live

1/15/2011

Karin Blaine - Live at Egan's Ballard Jam House - Seattle

Disclosure time: Karin is a cousin of mine - we share a set of great grandparents. (McAbee, that's we!)
Just voice and acoustic guitar (a pretty, used looking red Gibson), Karin sang us two sets of folkish arch-pop. She has a supplely worn alto vocal persona that pairs nicely with her fancy but unshowy guitar playing. Altogether quite enjoyable and we had a lovely dinner as well. Thank you for schlepping all the way down to drippy Seattle!

1/21/2/2011

Is That Jazz Festival - Chapel Performance Space at The Good Shepherd Center - Seattle

Empty Cage Quartet - Paul Kikuchi, Kris Tiner, Jason Mears, Ivan Johnson
Sun Ra Tribute Band - Stuart Dempster, William O. Smith, Lynette Westendorf, Greg Campbell, Dan O'Brien, Jim Knodle, Tom Baker, Michael Monhart, Greg Sinibaldi

More disclosure: I volunteer at this event. Karen & I ran the box office.

empty cage quartet

old dudes bar riffing on a grump
transfigure wallowy gruff trip the
grime ecstatic

sun ra tribute band

vehicular
motocross
gocart
low to the road
haulingass

parade float mardi gras

swamp raft

pimped out cadi

silent canoe sneak

Playlist

2011-01-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

Recorded

1/8/2011
Symphony in d, op. 40 (#2) - Prokofiev - Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Naemi Jarvi

Bracing - like a brisk early morning run through a shelling.

1/9/2011
Symphony #6 Aria and Final - Vierne - Douglas Cleveland
The Lord's Prayer - Malotte - Jerry Sams/Kia Sams
Symphony in C - Stravinksy - CBC Symphony Orchestra/Stravinksy

Symphony as ancient myth.

Lover Man - Sarah Vaughan
Song of the Wanderer - Al Hibler

1/10/2011
Symphony #6 - Piston - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

Dreary and heavy.

No Trespassing - The Ventures
Gone - the Fleetwoods

1/11/2011
Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon

A public diary entry, unembarrassed to have been cobbled together clumsily. A stunningly dirty sound.

Whistler's Waltz - Kirk Brandenberger, Art Rosenbaum
Scary Monsters - David Bowie

1/13/2011
Pastorale 850106 - Eisenbrey - Fehrwood Ensemble

This was an early rehearsal of a recorder quintet written in 1984 for my mom's amateur ensemble. I wrote the piece with the intention of exploiting the recorder's pinpoint intonation to explore a wildly strained pitchspace.The pacing is as slow as breath will allow, holding long tones out to their exquisitely saggy conclusions. Unfortunately this aspect of the piece is problematic socially. The experience from the performer's side is of valiantly attempting to play everything with perfect intonation. Failure at this is a foregone conclusion, and from the listener's standpoint success on the performer's part would wipe out the whole point of the piece. The Fehrwood Ensemble were singularly game, but I'm not sure a professional outfit would put up with it.

Banned Rehearsal 207 - Banned Rehearsal
James Brown's Funky Christmas - James Brown

Playlist

2011-01-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

Recorded

1/1/2011
Banned Rehearsal #206

1/2/2011
Patti's Parlour Pieces 5-8 - Benshoof - Keith Eisenbrey
Polestar - Francis Houle - Jesse Canterbury and William O. Smith
PCKE 100124 - Pete Comley & Keith Eisenbrey

1/3/2011
Suite in a, BWV 807 - JS Bach - Colin Tilney
Von Gott will Ich nicht lassen, BWV 658 - JS Bach - Michael Chapuis

Bach draws the listener miles deep in a few notes. On any path within the intricate web one cannot step solidly down and be in a place. The ground will shift and fall you will.

Nocturne in D-flat, op. 72 #2 - Chopin - Claudio Arrau

Chopin accomplishes much the same result, but from behind a stagy curtain. His actor emerges suddenly hyper-ornate. Taken aback, the ear reels.

St. Louis Tickle - Pince's Orchestra

1/4/2011
Symphony in D, (#9) - Mahler - Columbia SO/Bruno Walter

Manfred carefully eviscerating himself with his own reflection.

1/5/2011
When You're a Long Way From Home - John Sawyer's Persia Garden Orchestra

Live

1/6/2011
Chamber Cybeline
Seattle Shakespeare Company - Center House Theater

I want those bells. Wow!

1/7/2011
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space at The Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

5 (of 6) Gemtian Songs - Christian Asplund - John Teske, Jesse Canterbury, Greg Campbell, Tom Baker, Stuart Wheeler

Prelude (title undetermined) - Michael Nicolella

Found Soundscape (excerpt) - Christopher DeLaurenti

Two (of 6) Graphic Scores - John Teske

Encore (title undetermined) - Scott Teske

I'm afraid I wasn't able to hear all of Christian's songs, as the effects of a long and exhausting week caught up with me. I was nodding off from the start of #3 to near the end. I'm sorry, and would like to apologize to the performers. It had nothing to do with them. My spouse informs me that I did not snore, for which I am glad.

Michael's intricate little prelude for classical guitar deserves more than one listen. Amid the pleasing ostinato lull sudden scrabblyquick figures drew sparks. I was like whoa dude, what just happened there? Devious.

There are just too many ways to think about what Christopher was up to in his presentation of an excerpt of an electro-acoustic project involving an historic recording of a well-known string quartet performing a mid-20th-century European avante-garde work of some renown, and so I will only mention the odd sense I had that the performance of it began precisely with his own spoken prelude to it, with his purported explanation of what he had done, and continued as much in the theater between his bemused face tilted in pallid macbookglow and the expansive shared space between him and us, as in the relation between the sounds of the example itself and the astonishingly un-present piece of repertoire music. So much to chew on!

After the break the floor to the right of us was filled with a huge orchestra - 20 players for John's piece, and 19 for Scott's (with a conductor): 2 violins, 2 violas, cello, 4 to 5 string basses (I kid you not!), flute, oboe, bassoon, two clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 trombones (one of which doubled on didgeridoo), and a trumpet. For Scott's piece one of the bass players conducted. We all turned our chairs to face the music.

This was my second time with John's Graphic Scores. In September, in this same space, two smaller ensembles performed the whole cycle. Due to the wide layout and the size of the orchestra the arc from which sound came to us was much wider this time, accentuating the dialogue these scores have with focus and diffusion, collectivity and individuality, coherence and sequentiality. I am pleased that these quick performances are still not pieces in any easy way. They are not demonstrations of solutions but problems for (and of!) sharing.

Scott's composition returned us to more comfortable musical ground, and struck me as being un-finished, which for the composer is a good way for a piece to be. The more work there is to do on a project the more fun there is still to be had. The sound of the band, with all those heavy low strings and brass, was awesome. Go to!

Playlist

2011-01-01T15:41:00.000-08:00

Recorded

12/26/2010
Symphony #6 - Nielsen - Danish Radio SO/Herbert Blomstedt

Nielsen's toy symphony. The material has an arbitrary, offhand, scribbly sensibility to it - no better or other than it needs to be - devoid of stage-business, or at least where all gimmickry is full exposed - the propagation of imperfections into a system - a strangely anti-social vibe to the whole affair, as though all and each party were playing its own thing for its own self - a patchwork.

Symphony #2 - Hanson - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

It wells up to evaporate. "Romantic" only from an American-Impressionist, sentimental-triumphalist stance. Far from the hard-edged "Romantic" symphony of Bruckner, or the HonestToGod Romanticism of Schumann's Rhenische.

Riddle Rhythm - Farr Brothers
New Falling Down Blues - Cliff Bruner
Did You Ever Love a Woman - Gatemouth Moore

Three more fine cuts from Allen Lowe's killer "That Devilin' Tune" collection.

Samba-Classico - Villa Lobos - New York Chamber Orchestra/Gerard Schwarz/Robert Bonfiglio

12/27/2010
Symphony #2 "Mysterious Mountain" - Hovhaness - Seattle SO/Gerard Schwarz

This is a strong, exquisitely sumptuous piece. A mood without interruption or progression. Seamless to a fault. What his music could sound like if it hadn't turned into a brand.

12/29/2010
Mr. Blue - a capella version - The Fleetwoods
Dick Tracy - The Ventures

Riff gloves off right in the kisser. Pow!

Music From The Body - Waters/Geesin

12/30/2010
Two Sides of The Moon - Keith Moon

Keith's party mix. Enjoyably unpretentious.

12/31/2010
Remain in the Light - Talking Heads

An image of tabla: tight, staccato and narrow. Carefully restrained.

One: onetext commentary - Boretz

Can we talk in music, and not concern ourselves with making a music out of it?

Live

12/31/2010
The Distract Band at Le Pichet, Seattle

Jim Knodle and his band were at their sweetest last night to bring the new year to Belltown. Like Bill Evans at his best, their sound was deceptively smooth, only occasionally hinting at their hoch-bebop potential. But slip just once through into the depths and be lost. A fine evening of music and food and wine.

Happy New Year!

Playlist

2010-12-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

Recorded

12/19/2010
Suite in F BWV 809 - JS Bach - Colin Tilney
Trio super Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV 660 - JS Bach - Michel Chapuis
Symphony in D-dur K213a(204) - Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music/Schroder/Hogwood

Odd clunky grand design for last movement.

12/24/2010
Nocturne in c-sharp op. 27 #1 - Chopin - Arrau

What oppresses or represses also grounds.

Quasi Waltz in F op. 47 - Scriabin - Ponti
String Quartet op. 3 - Berg - The Weller Qtt
Three Tone Pictures - Griffes - Michael Lewin

Live

12/20/2010
Gradus #185 - Neal Meyer

Neal usually plays two rungs of Gradus when he comes over, and this was no exception. Unusually though, each rung exhibited a radically different compositional obsession. The first was a study in singularities and dualities, the second in episodes of repetition and episodes of nilpetition.

Playlist

2010-12-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

Recorded

12/10/2010
Our Father - Slaus - Prospect Singers
Banned Rehearsal 21 (part 1) - Banned Rehearsal

12/12/2010
Banned Rehearsal 21 (parts 2 and 3) - Banned Rehearsal

At the heart of the Banned Rehearsal project is a hunch that the need to be musically good is a stifling burden upon creativity. The musically good can certainly have its place, but one must take great care to keep it there, and not let it seep into invention and experimentation.

12/14/2010
Banned Rehearsal 205 - Banned Rehearsal

12/16/2010
Essay - William O. Smith - Jesse Canterbury, William O. Smith

Two clarinets concern themselves with space: the room of reverberance and the created rooms of the images of reverberance made by the image of echo and the abstraction of rooms of reverberance. The classical notion of ensemble: a togetherness that eliminates the individual performer in favor of the image of the voice or part. The players disappear behind the scrim projected by their performance.

Patti's Parlour Pieces 1-4 - Ken Benshoof - Eisenbrey

This was from a recital given in 2006. The recorded sound isn't too bad, but I think I could have taken more time with these. Often I sacrifice clarity of phrasing to an obsession for continuity and steady beat, which I don't really manage either. I need to relax and allow the phrases their space, not rush.

Cymbalism - Tom Baker - Chris Leonard, Dale Speicher

This recording sounds so luscious it obscures the thought behind it - but in a good way. I love love love the chalkboardsqueal sounds toward the end. Yowza!

Vertigo - Jesse Canterbury - Tom Baker, Jesse Canterbury, Joanne de Mars, Chris Stover

Grunge minimalism. Completely plain but utterly alien. Devastatingly sensual.

Live

12/17/2010

Dennis Rea and James DeJoie
Wally Shoup Quartet - Gust Burns, piano; Paul Kemmish, bass; Mark Ostrowski, drums; Wally Shoup, alto saxophone
at Gallery 1412, Seattle

I couldn't find much to hang on to during the Rea/DeJoie set. It consisted primarily of James doing "spoken word" with Dennis accompanying on electric guitar. James has an attractively smoky baritone voice, but I fear "spoken word" is the name for a kind of poetry that I just don't like very much - vaguely hip sentiments and dream images, devoid of either humor or fervor. Dennis' guitar playing is always pretty, but tended strongly toward the bland. For one segment James stopped talking and played bass clarinet. This was an improvement.

The Wally Shoup Quartet is kickass, muscular, breakneck punkjazz. Ecstatically loose - wildly bang on.Their sound exploded and the room shrunk tiny.

Playlist

2010-12-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

Recorded

12/5/2010
Symphony in c-minor (#8) - Bruckner - Staatskapelle Dresden/Eugen Jochum

Lives on what it seems about to do, long deferred. I often get strong whiffs of late Schubert piano sonatas while listening to Bruckner. In addition to that, something about the way entrances appear out of nowhere was giving me a shiver of Varese, an image of dire spiritual necessity. Seeking, then re-seeking. Expanding, then re-expanding. Dreaming, then re-dreaming. In-radiating, then re-in-radiating. Blazing, then re-blazing. Opening an inner space of infinite depth.

Three-Page Sonata - Ives - Clive Lythgoe

12/6/2010
Streichsextette in F-Dur, op. 118 - Reger - Die Kammermusiker Zurich

Contrapuntal expressionism. The way out is long from here and night deepens. No sweetness without poignance.

Three Orchestral Preludes from "Palestrina" - Pfitzner - Berliner Philharmoniker/Ferdinand Leitner

Concerning: a desire to let the world have its evil if only we can remain unsullied.
Concerning: worldly business and domestic business
Concerning: responsibility and conculpitude

Lovin' Sam from Alabam - Mamie Smith

12/7/2010
Symphony #1, op. 35 - Alexander Krein - London PO/Martyn Brabbins

Voluptuary.

Sweet Sweet Woman - Douglas Finnell and his Royal Stompers
String Quartet No. 1, op. 7 - Hans Erich Apostel - LaSalle Q

A frantic plea - shriller - desparater

A Good Man is Hard to Find (exerpt) - Miff Mole
Don't Blame Me - Billy Eckstein Orchestra/Sarah Vaughn

Most of the jazz & blues stuff that gets thrown into the listening comes from the collections That Devilin' Tune, and Really The Blues put together by Allen Lowe. I can not give Mr. Lowe a big enough shoutout for these. Bravo!

Quintet for Clarinet, Two Violas, and Two Cellos - Diamond - Chamber Music Northwest

It isn't that Diamond is deaf to the high histrionics of Apostel & Co. or even trying to pretend they didn't happen, but that he is attempting to comfort us in the face of it. The music runs a risk of flippancy for all its musical sophistication, a notion that, in spite of what has just occurred, we can can continue as we were.

Sunflower Sutra - Allen Ginsberg

Mr. Ginsberg begs to differ.

12/8/2010
Mr. Blue - The Fleetwoods
Diamond Head - The Ventures
Radio Spot for Hawaii Five-O Album - The Ventures

An afternoon of local bands on the make.

12/10/2010
The Who by Numbers - The Who

Default move: Go to power. This quickly runs into diminishing returns. It is always a pleasure to listen to Keith & John do their thing, but the general bad-feeling of the album gets tiresome.

Live

12/6/2010
Gradus #184 - Neal Meyer

12/10/2010
Crosstalk (website)
Jesse Canterbury, clarinet & bass clarinet; Brian Cobb, bass; Paul Kikuchi, drums; Tiffany Lin, piano
at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

#3 - Jesse Canterbury

Arrangement of "Cage" - Charles Ives
Improvisations
Steady - Brian Cobb

I lost track of what the pieces were, and also of who did the arrangement of the Charles Ives song Cage (??), though Jesse gave credit from the stage.

One aspect of jazz that can distinguish it as a mode of musical discourse is the play between images of tight and loose. A typical expression of 'tight' comes during the high-bebop, wickedly syncopated, unison performance of the head, that of 'loose' during the more strictly improvisatory solo bits. The joy of it is in how this works out in the wild of the event, the loose invading the tight and the tight the loose. Crosstalk is a newly formed group with strong players still learning to deal with each other in this configuration. Personally I love listening to learning happen and I was having a great time. I look forward to hearing this group as their tight gets tighter and their loose gets looser.

Being a pianist myself, in ensembles like this I tend to root for the keyboard player. I was sitting where I felt I had the best chance of hearing what Tiffany was doing, but even at that she may have been working at an acoustic disadvantage. Much of what distinguishes the piano sound from the timbrally similar clarinet & upright bass (slightly amplified) is the quality of its attack. The Kimball at the Chapel has a lovely, subtle, rich attack, but it is asking too much of it, without help, to compete with a drum-kit's huge dynamic. When Paul was playing with brushes (low incidence of attacks) the balance was just about perfect. I'm not sure there's a good solution to this. Amplification of the piano may be the best. What gets lost in the process may not have been audible live anyhow. None of this should be a problem on well-engineered recordings.

That aside, I really loved what this crew was doing and enjoyed myself immensely. Thank you!

Playlist

2010-12-04T13:58:00.000-08:00

Recorded

11/28/2010
String Quartet (midi version) - Boretz
Blood and Fire Hallelujah (first tests) - Eisenbrey

Coincidentally, this first concept test run comes up on the listening list within a few weeks of my performance of the finished work at the Chapel. The original idea for the piece was to record a track of solo piano playing slow big chords that would gradually increase in speed and intensity to a head-banging end. In performance I would try to do essentially the same thing, but squeezing the live chords between the canned ones. I was going for an overtly theatrical image, with an undercurrent of Petroushka. To that end I recorded several takes of the canned bit last January, playing the old Kingsbury upright grand out in the studio. This is not a bad sounding recording, but I ended up being disappointed both with the effect I was getting and with my playing. Before ever getting around to trying again the concept of the piece had developed considerably.

S. Eric Scribner found some interesting things to say about the live performance of the finished work on his blog. Some of his comments surprised me considerably, but thinking it over I can certainly understand what he was reacting to. It proves once again that the most we can hope to do as creative people is stimulate the imaginations of our collaborators. We are powerless to control the image itself. If we wish we can control the facts, the texts, of what we make, but the images awakened by those facts and texts, in the wild, always get the final say. This is, in a nutshell, the dissonance that propels creativity.

11/30/2010
Suite in E-flat (Franzosische) - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet
Trio super Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend, BWV 655 - JS Bach - Michel Chapuis

12/3/2010
Andante in C K315 - Mozart - Marriner/Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Claude Monteux
Symphony in E-flat (Rhenische) - Schumann - Seattle SO/Schwarz

Playlist

2010-11-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

Recorded

11/20/2010
One Trick Pony - Paul Simon

11/21/2010
One: Onetext - Benjamin Boretz

subject matter: thought, continuity, progress, stillness, microcosmoid growth, number (in the palpable sense), -spectives both pro- and re- :: all prying open an inhabitable space.

11/23/2010
Banned Rehearsal #204 - Banned Rehearsal
Patti's Parlour Pieces - Ken Benshoof - Lisa Bergman

The pleasant-after-dinner-treat-ness of these pieces is a conceit behind which lurks a hyper-sophisticated dialogue of harmony, meter, and melody, and from which emerges a dark poignance, like that of being.

Live

11/20/2010
Pieces from the Stormsound Cycle
Music by S. Eric Scribner, with Beth Fleenor and Bruce Greeley
at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Desert Bloom - Scribner
Frogscape - Scribner
Improvisation - Fleenor/Greeley/Scribner
Spherics - Scribner

An enjoyable performance with some excellent musicians. Strikingly, the acoustically produced sounds here emerge from the electronically produced as though born of them. The common metaphor is turned on its head.

Playlist

2010-11-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

Recorded

11/14/2010
Quatre etudes de rythme - Messiaen - Martin Zehn

Developing a principled vocabulary. Strict, severe, earnest.

Sun's Golden Hits - Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Carl Mann, Charlie Rich, Bill Justis
String quartet in c op. 110 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam SQ

We meet as survivors on this stricken plain.
We dance the tunes we are given.
We rage and weep into voided space.
We circle back.

Life Christmas Treasury (ca. 1965)

11/16/2010
Mantra II - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky/Alfons Kontarsky

Stockhausen's Mantra I and Mantra II don't gel for me. The sound world created by the pitch/rhythm structure overpowers the sound world created by the modulations. The addition of new instruments seems like a failed attempt to launch the pig. It could just be that I am hearing it on a poorly transferred tape of a noisy phonograph. Even so, these strike me as not-so-interestingly wrecked piano duos. I end up wishing I could just hear the piano parts straight.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - Hovhaness - Seattle SO/Schwartz/Michael York

Surface without features - background without purpose - following the dictates of an impenetrably personal mythos - empty. I really do keep trying with Hovhaness, but so far I just don't get it.

Live

11/18/2010
Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer at the Chapel Performance Space - Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Three Bagatelles - Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Foliage - Keyt
Blood and Fire Hallelujah - Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Gradus: for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler - Meyer - Neal Meyer piano

First of all I want to extend some big "Thank yous":
to Neal for arranging this concert,
to Steve Peters and the Wayward Music Festival for allowing the use of the space and instrument,
to Cristina Valdes for having the piano tuned,
and to Moe Provenchal and her assistant Amy for the sound design and recording.

Aaron's intricately delicate Bagatelles are a pleasure to perform. Though they are not difficult in the Lisztian manner they present a challenge not unlike constructing a house of cards in a tight space. Any stray movements and the whole thing could fall apart. I loved the tin-foil sound world of Foliage, though since I had just performed, and was just about to perform, I was unfortunately distracted and don't have a good sense of what the piece does.

This performance version of Blood and Fire Hallelujah consisted of my 31' mix played over speakers while I improvised on the piano. The underlying theatrical conceit was "piano concerto". Since I was engaged onstage I don't yet have a clear idea of how it went or came across or even really what it is, so I'll just throw some facts in. The mix on the CD was constructed from recordings of percussion instruments and my multi-tracked performance of William Cowper's hymn Western Melody. I sang the arrangement found in a 1953 shape note hymnal "The Old School Hymnal No. 9". The title comes from a Salvation Army book-plate found in a 19th Century family diary.

My thoughts during this hour-long performance of 3 rungs from Gradus centered on the theatrical aspect. From the back of the hall the lines and knobbiness of Neal's face, reminiscent of drawings by Goya, backed by black curtains, set off by his dark clothing, fairly glowed in the stage light, as though transported. I especially loved one long moment several minutes in duration in which Neal remained perfectly still, his arm suspended above the keyboard at just the apex, neither just having been released from the keyboard, nor about to sink back in.

Playlist

2010-11-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

Recorded

11/6/2010
Symphony in e - Mahler - Concertgebouworchester, Amsterdam/Haitink

Large swaths of peace. Macabre dry clack of wood bone. A valiant attempt at salvation through counterpoint.

11/8/2010
Seven Sketches - Bartok - June de Toth
Symphony en mi bemoll majeur op.82 - Sibelius - Grand Orchestra Symphonique Radio Television USSR/Rojdestvenski

I found myself thinking about Webern while listening to this. Webern is about its intervals, an extraordinarily conceptual sense of what musical material can be. I wonder if it is any different here?

Wang Wang Blues- Paul Whiteman
Sweet Georgia Brown - The Tennessee Happy Boys
Skyland Rag - The Rector Trio
Psalm XIII - Zemlinksy - Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Chailly
Major and Minor Stomp - Jimmy Dorsey
Air Mail Special - Billy Eckstein Orchestra

Brutally fast.

Concert - November 18, 2010 - 8 pm

2010-11-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

Chapel Performance Space - Good Shepherd Center - 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle, WA

Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer have been conversing, collaborating and engaging in creative discussion for nearly three decades. This program represents the current state of the discussion through four new compositions.

Blood and Fire Hallelujah by Keith Eisenbrey is a large-scale concerto for piano and canned sound. The canned portion is the latest entry in Keith's Music as Film project, and is constructed as a collage of sequences of thousands of sound-frames of various durations. The piano solo will be improvised.

Foliage by Aaron Keyt was composed in 2009 as a recorded piece for simple electronics (e.g. feedback loops of piezo disks), small percussion, and assorted other sounds.

Keyt's Bagatelles were composed in 1999 for solo piano. This will be their first performance.

Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler is Neal Meyer's work-in-progress for solo piano. Since January 2002, Neal has been devoting extended sessions of improvised exploration to each single tone and each possible combination of tones on the piano. The November 18 performance will explore three different combinations of the pitch class A, in a performance lasting about an hour.

Sliding admission: $5 to $15

Playlist

2010-11-06T11:21:00.000-07:00

Recorded

10/30/2010
Assembly Rechoired #52 - Assembly Rechoired

11/2/2010
Suite in E (Franzosische) BWV 817 - JS Bach - Blandine Verlet
Trio super "Allein Gott in der Hoh' sie Ehr" BWV 664 - JS Bach - Michel Chapuis
Symphony in D "La finta giariniera" K207a[K121] - Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music/Jaap Schroder
Waltz in e (1830) - Chopin - Peter Katin
Zigeunerleben op. 29 #3 - Schumann - Gachinger Kantorei/Helmut Rilling
Symphony in E-flat op. 97 "Rhenische" - Schumann - Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner

This kicks some rowdy.

Reverie - Debussy/Smith - Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy

Live

10/30/2010
Triptet www.triptet.com at Egan's Ballard Jam House

After a lovely dinner at the Bastille, Karen and I, dressed to kill, made our way to Egan's Ballard Jam House for Triptet's CD release party. The music they shared had a propensity to pare itself down to the barest hint of a shadow of the merest trace of a continuity. Lovely, intimate, and completely engaging, it was absolutely perfect for the venue. We were fortunate enough to win the Halloween costume prize - a big stack of 17 CDs (my number!). Here we are in full regalia:

11/1/2010
Gradus 183 - Neal Meyer

Neal came over and played a three-rung set of Gradus, in anticipation of our concert on the 18th.

Playlist

2010-10-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Recorded

10/23/2010
The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail

10/24/2010
Murmur - REM
We Are The World - USA for Africa

10/26/2010
Banned Rehearsal 203 - Banned Rehearsal
Ode Tounami - Joshua Kohl - Michael Nicolella
String Quartet - Benjamin Boretz - Dafo Quartet

A difficult path through a strange land.
Attempts are made to familiarize it - we to it.
Far further along we are no more familiar - we to it - less so in fact - far less so - just further - far further along.

Live

10/25/2010
Banned Rehearsal 781 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer

10/28/2010
Hamlet - Shakespeare - Seattle Shakespeare Company

One effective sound-design element stood out in this fine production. The uncle King bursts onto stage in the second scene in a blaze of light and wedding whites to take a microphone at the center. As he speaks his voice is echoed lightly through the sound-system. It is as though one were hearing his voice amplified into a large room, complete with echoes off the walls. But what stands in the place of the main, amplified signal is just the un-amplified voice, and what stands in the place of the un-amplified echo is the actual amplified sound-system. This may be an effect common in stage-craft, but it worked brilliantly here to turn the character's pretense inside-out. We could hear, in intimate detail, an image of the insecurity at the heart of his pomp.

Playlist

2010-10-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

Recorded

10/19
String Quartet #8 - Shostakovich - Borodin Quartet

10/21
Introitus - Stravinksy - Columbia SO - Stravinsky/Craft
Mantra I - Stockhausen - Kontarsky/Kontarsky

Live

10/21
Gradus 182 - Neal Meyer - Meyer

Neal came over and recorded the 182nd session of his cosmically-scaled piano/self work Gradus: for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler. I was struck this time around by the dissociation of the sounds within the decay envelopes from the particular attack envelope/attack rhythms which gave rise to those sounds.The particularly impoverished pitch material of those attacks (Neal is still playing only A-naturals), and Neal's extraordinary spacious presentation allows time for the sound resulting from any particular key-strike to move noticeably from the localized attack location to the dramatically different spatial location of its decay. The resulting musical image is of several musics operating upon each other from a distance. The relative registral location of the attack pitches is pushed back in importance by the music of the tonal shifts arising from them. As Neal strikes a key the image of the intent of that strike is not so much to play a note as to allow its blossoming sound to enter the cloud of sound hanging above it, mingling and altering and being altered and being mingled thereby.

Playlist

2010-10-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

Recorded

10/9
Symphonie in E-flat "Rhenische" - Schumann - Berlin SO/Karajan

10/10
Quintet in G op. 111 - Brahms - Budapest Quartet with Walter Trampler

10/11
Symphony in c op. 43 "Le Divin Poeme" - Scriabin - RSO Frankfurt/Inbal

10/12
Promethee - Le Poeme du Feu op. 60 - Scriabin - RSO Frankfurt/Inbal/Saschawa
Songs - Rachmoninov - Tourel/Kahn
When Shadows Fall I Hear You Calling - Isham Jones
Suite op. 25 - Schoenberg - Jacobs

10/15
Quartet op. 22 - Webern - Tashi
Prelude for Piano - Nancarrow
Lundu da Marqueza de Santos - Villa Lobos - Seattle SO/Schwarz/Bonfiglio
Rifftide - Coleman Hawkins/H. McGhee
Poet's Gold - various - Helen Hayes, Raymond Massey, Thomas Mitchell
Study #30 - Nancarrow

Live

10/9

Reverb Festival
Karen & I wandered around Ballard from the middle of the afternoon until we got tired.

Eric Reimnitz - Hattie's Hat
A pleasant baritone with an attractive glint in his eye accompanied himself on guitar. I was on his side as soon as he sang Woody Guthrie's Take Me Riding in the Car Car. We stayed for the whole set.

John Ramberg and Tripwire - Hattie's Hat
An excellent guitar strummer that reminded me of T-Bone Burnett. He was joined by another guitarist (whose name I didn't catch) for most of his set, and then by Kurt Bloch of The Young Fresh Fellows (and numerous other local bands) for one number. These guys knew what they were doing. Wonderful set.

At this point we walked down to Bad Albert's with Neal and had dinner.

Yuni in Taxco - The Tractor Tavern
I wasn't that excited by this band, so we only stayed for their first two numbers.

Dawn Clement & Jeffrey Harper (sp?) - Volterra
A reasonably sophisticated lounge singer with a nimble soprano voice accompanied herself on an electric keyboard and shared the stage with a bass player. We caught the last four or five numbers in their set.

The Low Hums - Sunset Tavern
We caught just the end of this trippy band's set.

Massy Ferguson - The Tractor Tavern
These guys were pretty good, but I kept wishing they'd pick up the tempo. I wasn't entirely convinced they were in it to have fun.

Nettle Honey - Conor Byrne
Fiddle, Bass, and Guitar playing hoedown. They were a blast though sometimes hard to hear over the audience. We were sitting just a few feet from the stage and people were up dancing and stomping. I think some were trying to punch holes through the wood floor with their heels.

**********************

10/12
Pastoral: The Color of Water - Meyer
Neal came over again and ran through this piece to rehearse for the concert in Snohomish on the 14th.
The Day I Heard Shelby Sing - Meyer
And then he played a new song he wrote.

**********************

10/14

An evening of ambient and experimental music with Wayne Lovegrove, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner, and myself - Thumbnail Theater, Snohomish

N - Eisenbrey - performed by me
High and Inside - Eisenbrey - performed by me
Snohomish Piece #1 - Eisenbrey/Scribner - live portion performed by Neal Meyer and me
Pastoral: The Color of Water - Meyer - performed by Neal
Snohomish Piece #2 - Eisenbrey/Scribner - live portion performed by Neal and S. Eric Scribner
Oceanic Music - Scribner - live portion performed by Wayne Lovegrove and S. Eric
***
Zigzag - Lovegrove - performed by Wayne
Chamber - Lovegrove - performed by Wayne
Here and There - Lovegrove - performed by Wayne and S. Eric
Snohomish Piece #3 - Eisenbrey/Scribner live portion performed by S. Eric and me
Song from Deep Silence - Scribner - live portion performed by S. Eric
Snohomish Piece #4 - Eisenbrey/Scribner live portion performed by Neal, S. Eric, and me

This was a friendly and pleasant concert to be associated with. Thank you Steve for inviting me to participate!

The performance space is small and has a warm almost living-room-like ambiance. The piano is older and not in perfect condition, but serviceable. I was pleased that it had more upper-end sound than I was expecting. It doesn't allow for a great deal of subtlety, and I think Neal struggled with that a bit in Pastoral: The Color of Water, but it wasn't so much a problem that the piece got lost. The sound-system was perfectly adequate for the space. Next time we do the Snohomish Pieces (if we do) I think we could turn up the canned portions some more. These contain some fun sounds and it was too easy to drown it out. Wayne's guitar sounded scrumptious.

Our audience was tiny and unfamiliar with the sorts of music we performed, but they were not afraid to speak right up and ask perceptive questions. In general the mix of pieces was good though I think there was nearly enough for two concerts, especially given the amount of chatter between the audience and the performers. The talking as such wasn't a problem, but it did lengthen the evening out longer than planned.

Playlist

2010-10-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

Recorded

10/3
Assembly Rechoired #51

10/6
Schwingt freudig euch empor BWV 36c - JS Bach - Kammerorchester Berlin/Peter Schreier
Praeludium und Fuge in h BWV 544 - JS Bach - Stanislav Surin
Schmucke dich, o liebe Seele BWV 654 - JS Bach - Michel Chapuis

10/7
Symphony in C K213c "Il re pastore" - Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music/Jaap Schroder
Waltz in E-flat (1830) - Chopin - Peter Katin
Waltz in E-flat "Sostenuto" - Chopin - Peter Katin

Live

10/4
Pastoral: The Color of Water - Neal Meyer

Neal came over to the house to reacquaint himself with how his 1982 score goes on a grand piano, in anticipation of his performance in Snohomish on October 14 at Steve Scribner's concert. Back in the day Neal was concerned that an audience would be unable to hear the details of a piano's high partials in their moil, but his experience with Gradus (more about this massive long-term project in subsequent postings) has led him to a different conclusion. After reviewing the textual material, he played through the piece twice, each time clocking in at about 20 minutes. The leisurely tempo seemed comfortable and right to me, and I look forward to hearing it in public this week for the first time since 1985 or so.

For details on the upcoming concert in Snohomish, which will feature music of Steve Scribner, Neal Meyer, Wayne Lovegrove, and myself, please visit Steve's blog.

Playlist

2010-10-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

Recorded

9/26
Library of Congress Recordings third disk: Woody Guthrie
9/27
I'm Confessin': with Lil Armstrong, Jonah Jones, J.C. Higginbotham;
Move Members Move: Rosie Hibler & Family
San Francisco: Harry Partch
Out of the Cradle: Paul Creston
Imaginary Landscape #4: John Cage
Two Madrigals from the Triumphs of Thusnelda: Peter Schickele
9/28
Still Crazy After All These Years: Paul Simon
Los Angeles: X
9/29
Theme (Update)/Three Sides to This Story: Young Fresh Fellows
Banned Rehearsal #202: Banned Rehearsal
O for piano: Benjamin Boretz
9/30
String Quartet: Benjamin Boretz

Live

10/1

Seattle Percussion Collective
Presents the Music of John Cage
at Gallery 1412

Child of Tree
Composed Improvisation for Frame Drum and Composed Improvisation for Snare Drum (performed simultaneously)
Five
A Flower
51'15.657" for a speaking percussionist

The last, performed by Bonnie Whiting-Smith, is a combination of 27'10.554" for a percussionist and 45' for a speaker, from The Ten Thousand Things. This was the most thought provoking work of the evening, in part because it plays out an underlying difficulty of Cage's work and thought in general. The text falls into a peculiar interstice between fragmentation and comprehensibility. I hear a desire to sever the connection and the inimical influence that verbal thought has upon musical perception. But my hearing has its own desire when faced with text, which is to comprehend the sense, or the intended sense, of it, even though I understand that this attempt may be exactly what the sense of what I am hearing is trying to tell me not to do. In the end it was very lively. Bonnie is a fabulous performer and always a pleasure to hear.

Kudos to the SPC and their intrepid performers. Becca Baggenstoss dismantled vegetables to lovely sonic effect in Child of Tree, and the rest of the crew: Greg Campbell, Paul Kikuchi, Dale Speicher, Denali Williams, and guest Sarah Bassingthwaighte all did their duly well throughout. A lovely evening.