Showing posts with label Seattle Improvised Music Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seattle Improvised Music Festival. Show all posts

Saturday, February 8, 2014

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

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Playlist

Live

February 2, 2013
The Sonics and Mudhoney
Showbox at the Market, Seattle

Two quintessential Puget Sound bands of yore did what they have always done: rock the planet down to its roots. When we caught Mudhoney's act at Neumos a year ago in October they were the old guys, showing us how it was done in the old days. Put them on stage with The Sonics and suddenly they're the upstart kids. Both bands played fabulous sets, but it's hard to understate the impact, even 50 years along, of hearing The Witch, the song that launched 10,000 punk bands, played full out by the makers. Punkest geezers ever.

February 9, 2013
Seattle Improvised Music Festival
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

LaDonna Smith, Tari Nelson-Zagar, Monica Schley

Bartokian nightmusic found in the back of the cupboard. Nobody was looking so it got frisky. Violin and viola imitating theremin imitating violin and viola. Viola using woody side of the bow as steel. Harp and violin and viola con-pluck and con-bow. "Have a bow. You need one." Boxes with strings to make them go.

Craig Taborn, Greg Campbell

A common complaint about improvised music is that it too often follows the same trajectory: starts soft and slow, gets loud and fast. But it is not so very often that it occurs with the carefully measured increment and just perceptible gradations from bells & gongs bending pianissimo tones to the ten simultaneous games of speed chess that these gentlemen brought to life. Followed by a poem.

Tucker Dulin
Tucker Dulin

Landscape: a nocturnal plain hours from everywhere. Highways variously distant. None near. An immense dark sky. Trucks doppler by, interrupted by unseen landforms, twisted by airmasses shifting.
Trombone and mute and chair and human.
Complete and lovely.






Recorded

February 5, 2013

King of May - Allen Ginsberg

Another day in the life of Mr. Ginsberg.

Banned Rehearsal 33 - (May 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

A chorus of liberated intonation. We must have decided to do an entirely vocal session, and for quite a while it finds wonderful places and textures. After about 25 minutes I think we got light-headed, so it went all silly.

February 7, 2013
Banned Couple 8 - Banned Rehearsal

Two early sessions mooshed together - miniatured - tightly bound - a mutual interruption upon a murky hum.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 4, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 829 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Upcoming
Since 1984, an argument in creative musical expression
Friday February 22, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Banned Rehearsal at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

"Let's try a session playing instruments we don't know how to play." This simple suggestion in June of 1984 among three newly re-united musicians wrought an improvisational project of uncommon longevity and abundance. Nearly 29 years along, and with 829 recorded and numbered sessions behind us, we are still not entirely sure what we are doing. Charter members Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer will be joined by long-time collaborator Karen Eisenbrey, and by our recent adoptee Steve Kennedy in an evening of noise and exploration. Having persisted these several decades happily in private workshop mode, the February 22 event will be the group's first public performance since 1997.

Saturday May 4, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey and Neal Meyer at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Music for solo piano:
Eisenbrey: Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano