Playlist

Live

Talon at the Royal Room

October 11, 2016
Talon
The Royal Room, Seattle
Greg Sinibaldi - EWI (Electric Wind Instrument) and electronics, Ryan Ferreira - guitar, Ted Poor - drums

Salmon, Eagle, and Raven walk into a bar and pick up instruments.

I got to thinking about what sort of theater this music is. Masked dancers acting out ritual type-stories. The instruments and their accoutrements are very like ornate masks or puppets, allowing the musician freedom to inhabit their mythic parts, and to speak in tongues.

The drumstick died in a good cause.

Recorded

October 10, 2016
The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars - Tom Baker - Seattle EXperimental Opera, Julia Tai, Maria Mannisto, Paul Karaitis, Liz O'Donoghue, Alissa Rupp, Will Dean, Mark Johnson, Tom Swafford, Jesse Canterbury, Chris Stover, Tom Baker, Brian Cobb, Greg Campbell

from a single wick

slowly caldering plates of color and gesture

isolation

background radiation of the chamber of wilderness walls

the paper sky against which it plays

Tapes - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

A short audio collage poem: biography?

Banned Rehearsal 903 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (January 2016)

the man in the closet giving an interminably circling sermon

piano turning it to comic opera or a comedy of an opera

matching rhythm to phrase spoken

percussion and small pans

the creaks and squeaks of the machinery behind it all

October 13, 2016
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus II - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Exploring something eelish, elusive: a meta-tonality wrung from combinations of scale-degree function as they twist and writhe.

Keyboard Sonata in G Hob. XVI:27 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

Unmediated contrast. Tonal slippage. Haydn here is a storyteller, comfortable within a social framework.

Concerto in B-flat K. 595 - Mozart - English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, Malcolm Bilson

Mozart tells tales also, but paints the scenery with such magic that we are immersed. The original Virtual Reality.

Fidelio-Ouverture op. 72b - Beethoven - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

Ideas shape us.

3 Mazurkas Op. 63 - Chopin - Vladimir Ashkenazy

What is being invented here is a sense of music as a literature (rather than being a service), the immediate model being lyric poetry.

Fantasiestücke Op. 111 - Schumann - Peter Frankl

ladders to no where

shifting centers and spinning compasses

we gather to ourselves what we can

Wild Cherries Rag - Ed Morton [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Ragtime, american minstrelsy, jazz: sadly, each as much a ghetto as a genre, but also an open line of communication to the outside.

Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues - Ladd's Black Aces [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Continuing that line of thought, one presumes there was, even in the heyday of ragtime, american minstrelsy, and jazz, a music that was played within the community that possessed a similar sophistication to everything else that was going on at the time, but which wasn't picked up in the recorded sample.

Muskrat Ramble - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five - Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Lil Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr

Conflicted grace.

Travelin' Blues - Jimmy Rogers [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Those ghettos, and let's add country, cowboy, western, and blues, all had direct links to each other, and as they entered the recorded sample those links strengthened. Nice subtly structural use of yodeling, too.

Romeo et Juliette Troisième Tableaux - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juraitis

The violin tunes high in the register are a lyric equivalent of the texture of bow on string. Or: these tunes are designed with fret board in ear, leaping from string to string. I kept getting the sense that Prokofiev is playing charades with us, and we're not getting close. The best part of Prokofiev is the interior patterning of meter as rhythm, i.e. what is happening is a pattern of what happens within single beats and their tightly bound neighbors. The balalaika number is a dynamite stand-alone thing.

Lullaby To A Dream - Benny Carter [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

That 1940's microphone warmth, as though we are hearing through scrim of cigarette smoke in black and white.

52nd Street Theme - Dizzy Gillespie [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Tired of being sophisticated. Let's just amaze each other.

Bitten der Kinder - Paul Dessau

I'm still not sure what this is. Some fragment of a theater piece? The info on the CD is less than helpful.

Dancing In The Dark - Sarah Vaughan [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

Every note is a lovemaking.

Like, Long Hair - Paul Revere and the Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

Long hair referring, I suppose, to the Tchaikovskonzert opening salvo - and the tail-end "so there" cadence.

I Wanna Meet You - The Cryan Shames [a Rescued Record]

hokey, but OK about it.

October 14, 2016
Buried Alive In The Blues - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

instrumental vamp

The Montreux/Berlin Concerts Cut 4 - Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul

Circus clown music (or a rethinking of the Stravinsky of Renard or L'Histoire.) But these clowns are not portrayed, we are placed within their thinking.

Rivals - The Heats [a Rescued Record]

Distinctly Beatlesish, except that neither verse nor chorus is remarkable.















Stepping Stone - Sun Sect [a Rescued Record]

Demo quality post-punk (not quite ready to let go) - or rather aiming at a mid 60's vibe: Neo Proto Punk.

One(5) 1991 - John Cage - Stephen Drury

I scribbled a whole load of words about intervals - but nothing worth sharing. Is there any kind of equivalence between two consecutive pitches and two simultaneous pitches in the 'kind of two-ness' they exhibit? That is, to what extent are their respective intervals the same cognitive thing at all?

Call The Doctor - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Multi-stranded. Poetically perhaps too heavy a reliance on the rhetorical "they" and "you", the language of conspiracy theories, coercively displacing, alienating us from the big bad out there.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 9, 2016
Corollaries Omnibus - Keith Eisenbrey

Late at night along the Interspace, thinking about intervals: just what kind of animal they are.

October 10, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 920 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

I think Steve nailed it, just after I pressed stop. "What just happened?"