DREWDANNICK

Dan Blacksberg, Nick Millevoi, Roscoe Mitchell

Got back from Oakland a few days ago.  Met up with Dan Blacksberg, Nick Millevoi (who i met when i lived in philadelphia) in order to work with Roscoe Mitchell on the piece we recently commissioned from him.  If the work we did last week is any indication, this is going to be a great piece.  Roscoe had us catalogue every single sound we were able to make on our instruments.  For me that meant Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bari Sax; Bb and contrabass clarinet; C flute; and a reeded trumpet.  After everything was recorded and a method for notation was devised.  Roscoe had us move between different combinations of sounds he thought would sound good together and listened to see how we operated within a given assignment.  It was an incredible time and I can't wait to see what Roscoe comes up with.  Hopefully we'll get a nice gig to premier this piece.  If you know of anything let me know!!!

In addition to the work with Roscoe, I organized a couple of recording sessions with the philly guys (nick and dan) and some good bay area friends; chris golinski-drums, alex christie-laptop, and ryan smith-piano.  The recordings sound great and some really good music was made.  It's really amazing to get a group of musicians together who have never played together and immediately feel a sense of trust and deep listening I usually only find in groups that have played together extensively.  These sessions have completely re-energized me for the year and I can't wait to put out a record of the recordings made during this trip.  I'm sure I'll post when that comes to fruition.

L-R-G 2.0?

After rehearsing and playing L-R-G in Philadelphia for the Ars Nova Workshop gig, Archer Space (Nick Mellivoi + Dan Blacksberg) as well as myself realized how personalized this composition is for the musicians it was originally composed for (Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis and Wadada Leo Smith).  The piece uses the familiarity of the players and their abilities as improvisers to compose in a free flowing style that is both strict and flexible at the same time.  The difficulty comes from the hyper personalized way in which the music is composed and gets even harder when an outsider tries to decipher the code it was written in.  Because of this, Nick, Dan and I came up with the idea of commissioning Roscoe to compose a piece based on the premise of L-R-G but modeled after our sounds and playing styles.  After I got back to California I met Roscoe for our regular session and brought the idea up to him and was very excited when he got excited!  So now the name of the game is finding money to make this all happen.  So if you find yourself with some extra money...I do take personal checks....

Here is some video from the gig: