On Sunday, November 15 we will be performing this piece again!
This time it will be at Luso Food & Wine in White Center, as part of a weekend of festivities to celebrate their fourth anniversary as well as gracious owner Fátima's birthday. It's an intimate storefront/café space, and there will be yummy food!
$25 gets you a full Portuguese buffet dinner (wine/beer are extra) at 6:30 PM + the concert at 8 PM. $10 gets you in for just the concert at 8 PM, but snacks will also be available for purchase.
Seating is limited to 50 people. Advance tickets and more details are available here.
If you missed the show at the Chapel in September, this may be your last chance to hear this piece in Seattle. I'll have the same wonderful musicians with me as last time: Lesli Dalaba, Beth Fleenor, Paul Kikuchi, Naomi Siegel, and Greg Sinibaldi. We hope to see you there!
Presented by the Portuguese Club of Seattle, with support from 4Culture and Artist Trust.
Last night's show went very well. Bigger audience + my birthday + tasty treats. The music was a little different last night. Not better or worse, just different. This is the nature of improvisation: What happened the last time won't necessarily happen the next time. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes I miss stuff. Impermanence. So it goes. But what was clear was that the musicians had really found their way into the piece and felt at home in it, which is very gratifying.
Fresh pasteis de nata were provided by Fátima at Luso Food & Wine
Throughout the process of making this piece, I've complained to various people that I wanted it to surprise me, that it felt too familiar. Looking back on it now, there actually were quite a few surprises. As mentioned in an earlier post, I never make things that have a such a strong narrative arc. It's not what I typically think of as being "what I do." Someone else pointed out that my work is usually much more minimal and quiet. That is true — this piece is in no way minimal. It is expansive and boisterous, at times even loud. There is a lot going on, and actually very little empty space. And then there are the live musicians. I've worked with singers in the studio on a couple of installation pieces, but I've never done a soundscape piece with other musicians playing live in a concert setting, and they add a whole other dimension to the work that is very different for me. So it turns out this piece was full of surprises after all.
Composer Steve Scribner has written a nice review on his blog. His one critique is that maybe the last section was unnecessary, and I get his point. The section before has a very natural cadence that sounds like an ending. I almost ended it there, but decided I really had to acknowledge the persistence of the diaspora in the new world, so a final section was added. It might not hurt to shorten that a little, though. I'll see how that feels in the future.
Due to the terms of the grant I received from 4Culture, we'll be presenting this at least once more in 2015. I'm not yet sure where or when that will be exactly, but discussions are in progress. Plus someone just wrote to me about possibly doing it in the Azores next year. I have a fantasy about touring it to Portuguese community halls in California and New England. I'm also working on plans to make a good studio recording with the musicians. So stay tuned!
Perhaps you already read about the saxophone saga? The short version: I hadn't played my grandfather's horn in twenty-five years. I promised him/myself that I'd play it in this piece. I took it in for repairs in February. Six months later, the repair guy said I should take it elsewhere. The new repair guy said he might have it done in time for the show. No promises.
Honestly, I had completely given up on having it back in time to play it in this piece. At this point I was prepared to just be a listener to the performances. But I got the call on the day of the show that the sax would be ready by 3:30 PM. By the time I got over there and home it was 4:30. Then I had to go set up for the show, and by the time I was done with that it was 6:00. The house would open at 7:30. That left me with about 90 minutes to remember what little I ever knew about how a saxophone works. No pressure…
A couple of things happened. One is that, while not quite like riding a bike, it didn't take long to remember my previous level of in-expertise. The lips were totally out of shape; playing long quiet notes was damn hard. Certain things were clearly beyond my capability, so I decided to steer clear of anything I wasn't sure I could pull off. However, playing behind the audience in a dark room with a bunch of other great musicians made it so much easier. I was actually able to enjoy myself, and felt like I played pretty decently, all things considered.
The band nailed the piece, best version so far. I was so pleased. And we had a good audience, about fifty people. Tonight we do it again, and I suspect it will only be better in every way. Did I mention that I love my band? Also, special thanks to Scott Granlund for doing such a beautiful job of restoring my grandpa's saxophone and powering through to get it done for the show. It's a thing of beauty.
The rehearsal process this week has been very exciting for me, because I finally get to hear the piece coming together into its final form. Until now, it was just a bunch of ideas in my head about how it might sound. But now it's becoming real!
Traveling to the Azores and making recordings in the field was of course interesting and fun, but then there was a year spent going through them all, obsessively editing, assembling, mixing, composing, adjusting. All of that is done alone, staring at a computer for many hours, often under headphones. And in fact most of my work is made this way. Technology allows for an amazing amount of control and freedom in making the work (I basically have a recording studio inside my laptop) but it also leads to isolation. I'm a reluctant performer myself, but I love working with musicians, and I often miss the social aspects of music making.
Since 2004 I've played with the Seattle Phonographers Union, a collective that improvises with unprocessed field recordings. That's been enjoyable, but we never work with other musicians. And in my own work I haven't really combined field recordings with live musicians. Likewise, most of my work takes the form of sound installations in galleries or museums; at that point the piece is set in stone and I'm not usually there with the audience. But at nearly an hour long, this piece felt too long to present as an installation and I couldn't think of a suitable venue. Also, several times in the past year I've used field recordings while improvising with other musicians and enjoyed it, and realized how much I missed that interaction. So inviting other musicians into this piece opens it up to a new dimension and other possibilities I can't predict.
Something I learned early on as a composer was that choosing the musicians for a particular piece — not just the instrumentation, but the actual people — is a kind of score in itself. This is especially true when improvisation plays such a major role. Good improvisers have very distinct, individual sensibilities, sounds and techniques, and I absolutely consider that when choosing them. And for me, part of what is exciting is to hear what those unique personalities bring to the project at hand. I feel very fortunate to have such a terrific band helping me out this time: Lesli Dalaba, trumpet; Beth Fleenor, clarinet/bass clarinet; Paul Kikuchi, percussion; Naomi Siegel, trombone; Greg Sinibaldi, tenor sax/bass clarinet.
There are no written out parts or musical notation of any kind, just a timeline for the recorded part so the musicians know when each section starts and ends. Of course, I have some general ideas about what I want them to do in certain sections, but I also want to stay out of their way and let them do what they do best. Each time we run through the piece, they find their way deeper into it and come up with different ways to approach it. I'm acting as a kind of director/editor, letting them know what I think works or doesn't, encouraging them when they do something especially effective and hopefully making helpful suggestions. In this way it's very much a collaboration. The process requires a lot of mutual trust and respect, and an ability to remain open to what arises in the moment without being too stuck on preconceived ideas.
It's been so gratifying to work with this particular group of people, all of whom I greatly admire. Some of them are friends I've known for many years, some I've worked with on other projects, and some are people I've never worked with before. Some of them have played together in other contexts, some haven't. But they are all excellent musicians and composers in their own right, and each of them brings something special to this piece; it would be very different without them.
In addition to researching Azorean folk music, I also wanted to find out what has been done in a more contemporary, experimental vein in the islands. I found a few things, but I suspect there is more out there. If there's anything I missed, please tell me!
The first thing I learned about was the project O Experimentar Na M'Incomoda, introduced to me by my friend Eugénio Viana at CASA tea house and bar in Horta, Faial. Founding member Pedro Lucas of Faial works with venerable (and maybe related?) vocalists Carlos Medeiros and José "Zeca" Medeiros and a team of other musicians to create a mash-up of traditional Azorean songs (foliões, whaler songs, chamarrita) with techno-influenced musical backing. Possibly inspired by projects like David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, they often blur the line between documentary recordings and studio wizardry. I would love to know more about their working methods. It's hard to tell how much they sample or re-purpose old archival recordings, or if they record the singers a capella and then match that to their own music, or if they work with the singers in the studio from the beginning. Or perhaps it's a combination of all of those? You can stream their first album here and their second album here.
And speaking of Zeca Medeiros… While I would not exactly call his music "experimental," he definitely does some adventurous things working within a variety of more popular forms such as fado, cabaret, ballads, folk, jazz, and rock (including this totally over-the-top version of Roxanne by the Police). Medeiros' distinctively gravelly voice can rival Tom Waits. He's a ubiquitous polymath, working not only as a singer and composer, but as a writer and director of theater, film, and television. He was born on São Miguel, but I believe he's currently based in Lisbon.
Violinist/violist, composer, and improviser Ernesto Rodrigues lives in Lisbon but also has a house on Pico and runs the Creative Sources label, which appears to be a great entry point into current Portuguese improvised music. I first encountered him in a video by artist Emanuel Albergaria, improvising with Gianna de Toni, an Italian guitarist and bassist living in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, where she teaches guitar in the conservatory. She's involved in various musical activities, playing classical guitar, in symphonies and jazz groups, and in a contemporary folk group with Rafael Carvalho (she's also featured in the version of Roxanne mentioned above). Rodrigues and de Toni can be heard together on the CD Trees, an album of beautiful free improvisations with cellist Guilherme Rodrigues, soprano saxophonist Christophe Berthet, and electric bassist Raphael Ortis. Here is a live recording of Rodrigues in a quartet with Guilherme Rodrigues, Jassem Hindi, and Tisha Mukarji.
I feel the need to mention Gianna de Toni's partner, Biagio Verdolini, who is a fantastic vocalist, instrument builder, and visual artist, and probably more that I don't know about. I saw him improvise with a 12-year-old cellist at a party one night and he was amazing. I can't find much of anything about him on the web — links, anyone? Here he is singing with Gianna and Rafael Carvalho, but this is a pretty straight forward folk piece and barely hints at what he is capable of.
Angela da Ponte is a young composer from São Miguel. She's spent the last few years living in the UK, working on a PhD at University of Birmingham. Now she is back in mainland Portugal, living in Porto. Coming from the contemporary classical tradition, she makes very interesting orchestral, chamber, and electroacoustic music. Recently she acquired a viola da terra and has been making pieces with it using extensive electronic treatments. Her music can be heard on her SoundCloud page and her YouTube channel. 21KHz is her electroacoustic duo with Dimitris Andrikopoulos:
Angela told me about Nuno Estrela, another Azorean composer currently living in the UK and working on a PhD at the Univeristy of Bristol. He composes contemporary classical music for acoustic ensembles as well as electronic music.
She also told me about another contemporary composer from Terceira, Duarte P. Dinis Silva, who now lives and teaches in Castelo Branco on the mainland.
What is significant about these younger composers is that none of them still live in the Azores. It is a beautiful place, but small, without much money, and lacking in opportunities. For these and other reasons there is a long history of emigration from the islands, and it continues to this day, with creative people leaving to do their work elsewhere. But this is really not much different than anywhere else. If you grow up in any small town or faceless suburb in the US, you will probably have to leave to find work and other like-minded people.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I suspect there are more people doing interesting and experimental contemporary music in (or from) the Azores who I don't know about, and I would love to hear them. I encourage anyone who wants to educate me to send me some links and I will add them to this post.
