Playlist

A recent picture by Allen Welsch

Coming Up This Week

Preludes in Seattle Part 4

A considerably less recent picture

Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Saturday, October 20, 2012, 8 pm
Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle
$5 - $15 sliding scale


Seattle composer/pianist (and your blogger) Keith Eisenbrey will present a recital on Saturday, October 20, 2012, at 8pm, in the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle. Keith continues his tour through the Prelude cycles of Seattle composers Ken Benshoof, Greg Short, and Lockrem Johnson. In addition he will perform the entirety of his own set of 24 Preludes for Piano (2009 - 2011).



Live

October 6, 2012
Reverb Festival, Seattle

At New York Fashion Academy, Seattle
Perpetual Ritual

A boy and his gear. I can't help wondering what exactly the point is behind all this knob twiddling. It flattens out pretty quickly for me. Passionless and bland.

At Tractor Tavern, Seattle
The Foghorns

A quick walk up Ballard Ave brings us to this local crew, complete with three dude backup singers introduced as the "Bucket O' Bourbon Choir" or something to that effect. A bass-clarinet provided an unusual focus at the low end. Musically they are in the solidly familiar rootsy territory scoped out by The Band or by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Easy to take in, nothing fancy. Comfort food.

At The Sunset Tavern, Seattle
Chastity Belt

An all-girl four-piece band from Walla Walla playing in-your-face whiny teen punk. I suppose I'm just old, but I'll be more interested in this outfit when they discover it isn't all about them.

At the 2 Bit Saloon, Seattle
Full Toilet

Nobody likes satire. Full Toilet's show is a masterful theater of misanthropy and world-loathing, clothed (or costumed) in the garb of a late '70s punk band set. For my part, this 30-minute show simultaneously rendered both the Dead Kennedys and Frank Zappa unnecessary. Can't fault them there!

At Conor Byrne Pub, Seattle:
Shannon Stephens
Whitney Ballen
Rachel Harrington
Shelby Earl

After supper (at my company party in Fremont) we felt like sitting chill for a while. We knew we wanted to hear Shelby, so we staked out seats near the stage at Conor Byrne and drenched ourselves happily in She-bards. They were running late so we were fortunate to hear 3 or 4 songs at the end of Shannon's set. She has a pleasantly straightforward mezzo voice, full of experience. Whitney, though certainly swimming in the same pool, has a distinctly colored soprano, with tangy notes of Appalachia and high-in-the-back-of-the-head Betty Boop. Quite an interesting sound. Rachel is completely at home in the deep end - really superb grown-up music. And of course Shelby and her shine-from-the-mountain-top anthems made the night her own. We were fortunate to hear the first performance of a new song, featuring poison-tipped swift arrows and rock solid leaps into the low dusky part of Shelby's range. Her back-up band was nigh perfect, with special kudos to Faustine Hudson on drums, incandescent in her own right.

October 11, 2012

Live at The Can Can, Seattle
Vince Mira

It was our anniversary and we had just had a splendid dinner at Sitka and Spruce. Instead of catching the bus home we booked a room and wandered into the market in search of something interesting going on. We sat down in The Can Can not having a clue what would be in store. Vince has a big bass voice, just made to cover, or channel, Johnny Cash, which he proceeded to do, and then some. Cash, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and probably a few other Memphis legends - I lost track - throwing in some fine original songs as well. His guitar playing is rich in detail, his right hand a study in weight and placement. All that, and he's a nice looking boy for the ladies too.

Recorded

October 9, 2012
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott BWV 80 - Bach - Gächinger Kantorei, Helmut Rilling
Capriccio in D - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

October 11, 2012
Fantasia in C - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

I picked up a box-full of CDs recently from my uncle Jim Meyer, which is why there is a bunch of older music showing up in the listening all of a sudden. The lutenist/composer S. L.Weiss is new to me, but I'm digging it. The Capriccio in D has a bizarre lengthy coda to it, coming out of the blue and turning the whole sense of D Major sideways.
 
Sonata in E K380 - Scarlatti - Vladimir Horowitz
Symphony in C (30) - Haydn - Cantilena, Adrian Shepherd

A study in lopsided themes.

Symphony in E-flat (43) - Haydn - Cantilena, Adrian Shepherd

In Session at The Tintinabulary

October 8, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 822 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Upcoming

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short.

Friday October 26, 2012
Your Mother Should Know, at The White Rabbit, Seattle

Playlist

Live

October 4, 2012
Live at Blue Moon Tavern, Seattle
Andrew James Robison, Red Ribbon, Peterman, Your Mother Should Know


I have a soft-spot for throwbacks, and for all that Andrew is singing songs that are mostly pretty recent his delivery is straight ahead old-fashioned American bard - just a singer and his guitar. The effect is to highlight the old deep roots of the new. An able chanteuse joined him in a delightful cover of Chips Mormon and Dan Penn's The Dark End of the Street.

After Andrew's strong opening set Red Ribbon blew me away. I don't even know where to begin. The lead singer is a tiny woman with a big, world-weary, battle-rasped alto voice that drapes itself over the sound like a teen walrus on an armchair. The cognitive disconnects were palpable. To look at them you would think they were merely pretending to play their instruments, and in a grand Seattle tradition they don't fuss much about subtle transitions. It really shouldn't work, but it does, and in a big way. Sleater-Kinney meets Yoko Ono meets Velvet Underground meets Billie Holiday meets Jad Fair. A potent brew. Deep punk.

Peterman once again steered their rocking ship into the turbulent waters between punk and metal,  tightly wound and loosely jointed all to once. Great fun. Their cover of I Can't Help Falling In Love With You was to die for.

Your Mother Should Know is, of course, my wife's band, so I am completely biased. I thought they played well and sounded great. Neal's newly acquired white 12-string, "Daisy", looks superb and has a sweet fat sound.

Recorded

October 2, 2012
Konzert in C minor BWV 1060 - Bach - Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Kahane, Hilary Hahn, Allen Vogel

In Session at The Tintinabulary

October 1, 2012
Gradus 215 - Neal Meyer

Upcoming

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short

Editor's Note: I found this languishing in my "Draft" bucket. I'm pretty sure it had been posted at some point. Not sure how it landed back in my lap. - 10/19/2013

Playlist

Coming Up This Week

, shouldn't she?

Your Mother Should Know
with Peterman, Red Ribbon, Andrew James Robison, at Blue Moon, 712 N 45th Street, Seattle
Thursday October 4, 2012 9pm to Midnight

Neal and Karen share the bill with some exciting young bands. The show will feature the debut performance of Neal's freshly acquired 12-string, and a new tuning of Karen's venerable Ludwigs.



Live

September 29, 2012
broken bow ensemble - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

murmur - John Teske

The stage was full of chairs, and later of young people dressed in black. Surely this mass of twenty one string players and a wind quintet is the largest ensemble gathered at the Chapel to date! Before even getting to the music, plaudits must be given to John for sheer organizational bravado.

The piece consists of 45 minutes of lusciously resonant hush - never rising much above pianissimo, rarely a single voice asserting. It was as though they were each playing out only enough for their nearest neighbor to hear. To the audience the sound was communal, but not blended into a singularity, richly detailed from top to bottom and from side to side and from then to now to hereafter - undulatory but not squishy, focused to the nth degree at all points possible.

Strangely, I kept thinking about hierarchical systems - wherein the smallest details are of least import, wherein the uncountable surface is mere accident, and wherein the crucial matters are the big changes of mass to mass, where the fewer times an aspect changes the more that aspect rules. Here all that is upended and shattered. Here the image is of a solid time-mass of surface.

Recorded

September 23, 2012
O nata lux de lumine - Tallis - BBC Singers, Bo Holton
Alleluja, haec dies - Ignazio Donati [from Rassegna Internazionale di Capelle Musicali Loreto 15-19 Aprile 1998]

September 24, 2012
Ave verum corpus - Byrd - BBC Singers, Bo Holton

Heinrich Schütz

September 25, 2012
Musikalischen Exequien - Schütz - La Chapelle Royale, Philipe Herreweghe

It is tempting, while listening to musics at a significant cultural and historical remove, and especially while listening to them in more or less chronological order, to place them in a progression, so that their divergent and convergent styles tell a story. We started here, we added this, we got to here. In such a story, Schütz shines as a brilliant figure in whose music is embodied a struggle between the subtle choral homogeneity of the Renaissance masters and the robust dance rhythms of the late Baroque. From moment to moment the ground shifts beneath us, as unstable as Mahler but without the self-absorbed hyper-dramatic camera angles.


Plovate filii Israel - Giacomo Carissimi [from Rassegna Internazionale di Capelle Musicali Loreto 15-19 Aprile 1998]
Tota pulchra es Maria - Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki [from Rassegna Internazionale di Capelle Musicali Loreto 15-19 Aprile 1998]

September 26, 2012
Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn BWV 132 - JS Bach - Gächinger Kantorei, Helmut Rilling
Amore traditore BWV 203 - JS Bach - Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmut Rilling

September 27, 2012
Konzert de 2 Violinen, Streicher und Continuo BWV 1043 - JS Bach - Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Kahane, Hilary Hahn, Margaret Batjer
Am Abend aber dasselbigen Sabbats BWV 42 - JS Bach - La Chapelle Royale, Philipe Herreweghe

In Session at The Tintinabulary

September 24, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 821 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Upcoming

Thursday October 4, 2012
Your Mother Should Know at Blue Moon, Seattle

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short

Playlist

Kelp Bed, Deception Pass, Washington 9/17/2012

Recorded

Horse Heaven Hills, Washington 9/22/2012

September 18, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 688 (October 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

September 19, 2012
BF Percussion Chorus - Keith Eisenbrey
Kyrie et Gloria dalla Missa Aeterna Christi Munera - Palestrina

September 20, 2012
O bone Jesu (a 6) - Palestrina - Chanticleer
In jejunio et fletu - Tallis - BBC Singers

Deep pitch-class hocketing.

Deception Pass, Washington 9/17/2012

Upcoming

Thursday October 4, 2012
Your Mother Should Know at Blue Moon, Seattle

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short.

Deception Pass, Washington 9/17/2012

Playlist

Live

September 14, 2012

Back Burner
The Gypsy Trader Cafe, Seattle

I have sat in the tenor section of our church choir with Dave Campbell, the banjo/bass player and occasional vocalist with Back Burner, for more years than I care to acknowledge. His bluegrass/swing outfit doesn't get into town very often, but it is always a pleasure when they do. What struck me most on this lovely evening, the big doors open to a quietly humming Stone Way North, was how well balanced the blue-grass string band is as an ensemble. Guitar, dobro, upright bass, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle - or nearly any subset thereof - forms a mixed choir capable of remarkable subtleness and astonishing supplety. The prevailing performance practice valorizes the collective mix, rather than the strutting soloismus of many another popular idiom. The pleasure is in the playing with, and in the sharing with.

Recorded

September 11, 2012

Righteous

Righteous Blues - Blind Blake [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Kalvierstück VIII - Stockhausen - Kontarsky

Crystal sparks: each note from a different cognitive plane, only gradually, and partially, coalescing.

Free Jazz (excerpt) - Ornette Colman [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

From this distance in time, after free jazz has developed itself for decades, it is hard to recognize this as much more than some really great players barely managing to poke their toes into the pool.


Nowhere to Run - Martha and the Vandellas [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Nail Soup - Benjamin Boretz, Doug Henderson [from Inter/Play]

Trying to keep it heaped. Knocking it together.

September 12, 2012
Three Chapters from the Book of Dreams - Richard Boulanger

String sound (live violin?) with heavy reverb & electrosound finds a trajectory moving from ordinary music, or like ordinary music, to space-age. It is finally taken up into the hold. B'bye!

Banned Rehearsal 241 (December 1990, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

September 13, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 586 (October 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

In Session at The Tintinabulary

September 10, 2012
Assembly Rechoired 54 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

Assembly Rechoired is any improvisation made by Karen and me that doesn't also involve one of the other founding members of Banned Rehearsal. A sizeable number of the sessions were made in the late 80's when we were left holding down the fort in Seattle while Neal & Anna started their family in San Diego and Aaron was at school in Berkeley.

Upcoming

Thursday October 4, 2012
Your Mother Should Know at Blue Moon, Seattle

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short

Playlist

Live

September 1, 2012

Sidewinder

Sidewinder

 

- University Heights Farmer's Market, Seattle James DeJoie: Reeds/flute, Jim Knodle: Trumpet, Everett Sarono: Guitar, Ryan Berg: Bass, Dylan Savage: Drums
On a perfect Saturday afternoon we sat on the grass in the shade sharing excellent El Salvadoran Pupusas and enjoyed this fine local souljazz outfit. I believe this is the first time I have heard an instrumental cover of the Lennon/McCartney song The Word, a song so precisely of its era that it sounded dated within a week. And yet, turned just a bit to the side and it became a Chicago-pop nod to Miles Davis. It got a bit warm for us, so we took a bus downtown to catch the last day of a gallery show only to find the door locked. So instead we stopped in at SAM to see the exhibit of Australian Aboriginal art. If you missed it, like we almost did, you missed the loudest music ever seen on Seattle walls. Ear purge jacked in through the eyes.

September 4, 2012
Empty Words/Indeterminacy - Jack Straw Studios, Seattle
Celebrating the One Hundredth Birthday of John Cage
in order of appearance: Stuart Dempster, Neal Meyer, Roger Nelson, William O. Smith, Doug Haire

This show ran from noon to midnight, and included performances of Solo for Sliding Trombone, Empty Words, Indeterminacy, Sonata for Clarinet, Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake IV, and In a Landscape, all by John Cage, and Seattle Environmental Recording by Doug Haire. We were able to attend from just past 7 to just past 9, hearing some of Neal's intonation of Empty Words, some of Roger's readings from Indeterminacy, and also his performance of In A Landscape. I scribbled two and a half pages of notes, consisting for the most part of an unsuccessful attempt to figure out how or why emptying a word would be a good idea. For my part, emptying a word of meaning is the same as emptying out my responsibility from my utterance - as though emptying myself of ego would render me innocent. I'm not buying it.

For all that, the event was an heroic effort and I heartily thank all those involved for this presentation of some of Cage's thorniest expressive artifacts.

September 7, 2012
Seattle Composer's Salon - Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Matthew Briggs had the first presentation, but since I was up next I'm afraid my brain was not fully engaged. His piece opened with canned crickets, into which big bass-y piano sonorities were ladled, with slow violin and cello. At the end the drums played a slow beat, as though descending into prog rock out of a thick fog.

I performed Preludes 9 - 16, from my 24 Preludes for Piano. 

John's bass wagon

John Teske presented a short version of a long ensemble piece that will be performed whole in a few weeks. I was still post-occupied with my own performance (the real drawback to having a piece on the show) so I am eager to hear the whole thing with the full ensemble. It is interesting how, in working largely with textures and transformations of textures, this piece throws into relief an aspect of music that is otherwise often overlooked, and which is completely and pointedly absent here: any image of number and quantity. To steal a turn of phrase from J.K. Randall, it matters a great deal that counting things does not matter.

Recorded

September 3, 2012
Got The Farm Land Blues - The Carolina Tarheels [from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music]
Klavierstück VII - Stockhausen - Kontarsky
Gloria - Jan Novak
New York's A Lonely Town - The Tradewinds [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Alleuja Psallat - William Matthias
Sequence Symbols - James Dashow

An interesting disjuncture between the textural rhythm and the harmonic rhythm.

September 5, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 240 (December 1990, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

Lots of big.


September 6, 2012
Confessions of a Polyphonist - Keith Eisenbrey - Neal Meyer

Neal reads my textsound score.

Gradus 83 - Neal Meyer
YMSK Drums - Neal Meyer

An early thought about how to record a Your Mother Should Know song, all parts to be performed by Neal. I think it got as far as these 60+ minutes of drum tracks.

Upcoming

Thursday October 4, 2012
Your Mother Should Know at Blue Moon, Seattle

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short

Playlist

Recorded

August 28, 2012
Will You Love Me Tomorrow - Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology, Rhino Records]

J. K. Randall

Mystery Train - Elvis Presley [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Kiddierama - J. K. Randall, Linda Smukler [from Inter/Play]

sfloppydrum, tightdrum, thuddrum, twangngngngng

August 29, 2012
Roger Sessions: In Memoriam - William O. Smith

W.O. Smith

Huge hangtime allows a natural pseudo tape delay effect. Nobody makes the extended clarinet sound as poetic as W.O.S.









Over The Rise - Bruce Springsteen [from Tracks]
Confessions of a Polyphonist KEE - Keith Eisenbrey

Mad Trio - Mad Trio (Alan Lechusza, Carolyn Lechusza, Mark Weaver)

An earthquake turned sideways. As though attempting to conjure a Machaut motet as an exercise in free jazz.

Banned Rehearsal 777 (July 2010, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A study in the liquidity of steady states.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

August 27, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 820 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt

For the most part each sticking to a single station, if not a single instrument: Karen on drums, me on guitar/piano/percussion at hand, Aaron on trumpet.

Upcoming

Thursday October 4, 2012
Your Mother Should Know at Blue Moon, Seattle

Saturday October 20, 2012 concert begins at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey - piano recital at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Preludes in Seattle Part 4: Preludes by Ken Benshoof, Keith Eisenbrey, Lockrem Johnson, and Greg Short