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| 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.
In that time our playing has changed so much both personally and as an ensemble. In our other albums each track is a kind of self-contained composition where we consciously tried to show our diversity. However, in this new album we worked on it more as a traditional composition, meaning that we had written music (gasp!) on stands and worked out how the music would flow ahead of time. I personally feel that this allowed the music to reach a new level due to the fact that we were free to focus on much smaller aspects of the music because the larger structures were worked out prior to the performance.