Playlist

Live

February 6, 2014

Seattle Improvised Music Festival

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

Matt Ingalls, clarinet

 

Flatfooted figurations gradually gouged pounded beaten scraped squeezed throttled and elsewise desperately distressed into outer stratosphere. It comes across like manic tone and tonguing medicine: play this twice every morning and call me in a week.

 

Joe Morris, Bill Horist, Jeffrey Taylor, guitars

 

Deference to each other's distinct approach.

 

Matt Ingalls, Paul Hoskin, Beth Fleenor, Jenny Ziefel, clarinets

 

By the time we got to this set I was so zapped out my notes are nearly blank: machine-y creaks out.

 

There is a shared assumption here that the purpose of Improvised Music is to display or demonstrate individual virtuosity, not just as the raw skill of producing amazing sounds but also as the imaginative invention of technique and as the profoundly sensitive listening required to play happily with others. I have no complaints on that score - everybody on stage was fabulous - but I do note that this isn't the only way to think about what one might do with an improvisational mind-set, and that this approach fits more comfortably into the concert-music world or club-music world than it might care to admit. I'm not pointing fingers here, the vast bulk of my own musical work has imbedded within it similar assumptions.

Recorded

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 782 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 2010

 

one draws a constant line

one seeks a change

one works a thing

February 4, 2014

Seven Last Words - Thedore Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

 

From my mom's archive. A motorcycle roars by outside a different past than that of the music.

 

Sudden Songs Rehearsal - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

Neal's got new shoes and three songs: The Picture On My Wall, I Can't Get Out, and It Hurts.

 

Greenwood 1985

Gradus 184 - Neal Meyer

 

The game is to keep the resonance afloat, aloft, like a balloon chase. The treble is a signal through fog or interplanetary void. The activity here is so completely absorbed in its own doing as to be utterly unrelated to music as a projected image. In exactly the sense that otherwise any other music positions itself rhetorically as music, this music doesn't.

February 5, 2014

O Holy Night - unknown arrangement - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

Flying Upside Down - Ken Medema

 

Among the many problems with this music is that it tries to be so many things without managing to really hit any of them. As a pastiche of particular pop-styles it comes across as phoned-in and lame, and as the theatrical projection of a preacher it is distinctly substandard. Bob Dylan has the hellfireandbrimstone shtick locked up tight, and Springsteen's channeling of Sister Amy can't be touched. Ken doesn't stand a chance.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 852 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle