Thursday, August 5

The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St. @ 6th St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

Outsound Presents

8pm Key West

9pm tptflm – Films by Allen D. Glass
music w/Kris Tiner – trumpet

Admission: $6-10 sliding scale

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Friday, August 6
5-6pm

Kris Tiner-trumpet + Phillip Greenlief-saxophones

Live duo performance @ KFJC 89.7 FM
Los Altos Hills, CA

stream live

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Sunday, August 8
4-6pm

Dagny’s Coffee Co.
1600 20th St @ Eye St
Bakersfield, CA

FREE ADMISSION!

Kris Tiner-trumpet + Phillip Greenlief-saxophones

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The Invisible-Astro-Healing-Rhythm-Quartet
Brenden Morlan-guitar, bass, effects
Andrew Koeth-keys, bass, effects
Jordan Aguirre-keys, guitar, percussion, effects
Alex Sarad-trap drums, percussion

click here for the event page on Facebook

Thanks to Hans Fjellestad for another fantastic evening at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, and to Tatsuya and Jeremy for their beautiful music!

All photos below by Allen D. Glass.

Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge photos. Click here for the concert preview posted previously.

Thursday, May 13

10 p.m. (please note revised start time)

JAZZ AND IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC AT METRO GALLERIES

Tatsuya Nakatani – percussion
Kris Tiner – trumpet
Jeremy Drake - electric guitar

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Tetuzi Akiyama - acoustic guitar
Toshimaru Nakamura – no-input mixing board

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Future Cosmic Collective

Metro Galleries
1604 19th St.
Bakersfield, CA 93301
$5 Admission

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Metro Galleries Presents Improvisational Music from LA and Japan

The Metro Galleries Concert Series continues on Thursday, May 13 with a very special concert featuring several of Japan’s greatest living improvising musicians.

Tatsuya Nakatani is a contemporary percussionist hailing from Osaka, Japan but currently living in Pennsylvania. He has developed a dramatic and intensely moving approach to improvised music that incorporates drumset, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows. His incredible solo performance opening for the Industrial Jazz Group at Metro Galleries in 2008 is still being talked about; this time he will be joined by Los Angeles electric guitarist Jeremy Drake (Nels Cline, Eleni Mandell, Vinny Golia) and local trumpeter and Bakersfield College music professor Kris Tiner for a set that will be recorded live.

Sharing the bill will be two figureheads of Japanese underground experimental improvisation: the enigmatic and extraordinarily dynamic acoustic guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura who plays “no-input mixing board” — by connecting the input of a mixing console to the output he is able to manipulate the resultant audio feedback as a live, interactive musical instrument. The music this duo creates has been dubbed “Zen Impressionism” and can range from dreamy, mysterious serenity to fiercely raging sonic supernovas.

In-between sets, dig the analog beats laid down by Bakersfield’s own Future Cosmic Collective.

Metro Galleries is located at 1604 19th St. in downtown Bakersfield. Admission to the show is $5; tickets are available at the door only; all ages are welcome. Doors open at 10 p.m., music begins shortly afterward.

Click here for the event page on Facebook

For more information…

Tatsuya Nakatani: http://www.hhproduction.org/TATSUYA_NAKATANI_WORKS.html

Nakamura & Akiyama: http://www.tokafi.com/news/toshimaru-nakamura-tetuzi-akiyama-searching-zen-and-beer/

Jeremy Drake: http://www.jeremydrake.com

Kris Tiner: http://www.kristiner.com

Metro Galleries: http://themetrogalleries.com

Brought legendary LA guitarist G.E. Stinson up to do a series of workshops for my students at Bakersfield College on Tuesday. Directly afterward we played a duo set at Dagny’s – G.E. on guitar, effects, and laptop beats and me with the new electric trumpet rig. I’ve played with G.E. before in various trio and quartet combinations as well as in a few large ensembles, but what a blast to try to keep up with him in a duo – the man can definitely throw down some sound!

Thanks to Frank Maccioli (who also wrote a nice preview of the show) for taking these pics…

Some pics above (and video below) from the Empty Cage Quartet double CD release concert at The Stone in New York City, April 17, 2010 (click here for the gig announcement + promo that was posted previously). We had a great time, an intense 3-hour rehearsal of new music, and then a lovely walk around Greenwich Village before the show. The Stone was full nearly to capacity, and it was great to see so many friends and supporters come out. Thanks to Tiflin and Mike Baggetta for the photos.

Celebrating the release of two new CDs – Gravity on Lisbon-based Clean Feed Records and Take Care of Floating on the French label Rude Awakening Présente, the Empty Cage Quartet takes the stage next Saturday, April 17 at the world headquarters for creative and improvisational music, The Stone in New York City.

This event (and all of April at the Stone) is curated by the eminent Seattle-based pianist and composer Wayne Horvitz and his wife, pianist Robin Holcomb. We’re grateful to both of them for their gracious support.

We hit at 10pm, admission is $10 at the door, students age 13-19 are $5.

Click here for the event page on Facebook.

Concert preview in Time Out New York.

A recent photo of Charles, courtesy of Doug Davis

There are a great many people who only know Charles Brady as the cornetist on the legendary 1961 recording of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat Suite with the composer conducting. Indeed, that recording alone was enough to secure his place among the pantheon of great trumpeters. Just 22 years old, what he accomplished was almost superhuman – blazing through those tricky Stravinskian rhythms while projecting such a clear, consistent, colorful, focused sound that has been the envy of every serious trumpet player who’s ever heard it.

There is a great story about this session at Thomas Stevens’ website (Stevens and Brady were college roommates):

“In an effort to clarify the cornet notation for what was intended at the time to be the definitive L’Histoire recording conducted by the composer, Stravinsky worked with Brady for over an hour in an one-on-one session during which time the maestro specified the articulations for the complete cornet part. Consequently, it would be fair to assert the recording, which was subsequently released in the CD format, does indeed represent the definitive performance of the cornet part…”

Charles went on to study with William Vacchiano at Juilliard (other Vacchiano students include Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Charles Schlueter, and Gerard Schwarz), worked with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Pops with Arthur Fiedler, performed with conductors Bruno Walter and Aaron Copland, and served a six-year stint as principal trumpet of the National Symphony in Washington D.C. And then he moved his family back to Bakersfield, just a short distance from his birthplace in Delano, California. He spent thirty years performing with the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra, teaching middle school band during the day and giving private trumpet lessons every evening in his living room. That’s how I met him.

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It was a total honor and a joy to study with this man for nearly five years as an undergraduate trumpet major at CSU Bakersfield. Every week I’d show up at his door and he would greet me the same way: “Hey, trumpet player!” — with all the enthusiasm of a baseball coach welcoming his cleanup hitter back to the dugout. I’m sure I wasn’t the only student he met this way, but it was a hell of a welcome regardless. We worked through all of the routine methods: Schlossberg, Charlier, Arban, Brandt, transposition etudes, Bach violin sonatas; as well as the standard trumpet literature: Haydn, Hummel, Arutunian, Halsey Stevens, Vivaldi, Hindemith. Occasionally Charles would contract me to perform a 4th or 5th trumpet part with the Bakersfield Symphony, and so we’d work on Verdi’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The performance of the latter was, by the way, a life-changing experience for me; I was so awestruck being in the center of that glorious music that I could hardly play a note of it. The next week when I tried to explain to Charles what had happened, he just smiled and nodded. At some point it occurred to (stupid) me that Charles was just about the same age when he first performed with Stravinsky himself…

But some of our best lessons were the ones when I hardly played a note. Often we would just sit and talk there in his living room; I’d listen to stories about his performances with Stravinsky or his tours performing Quiet City with Aaron Copland. He told a hilarious story about a moment when Copland solicited his opinion of the solo trumpet part – he actually teased the composer that the opening sixteenth notes sounded to him like a “little stuttering Jewish boy!” Only Charles could pull off a gag like that without fear of offending. Ever the devout Christian, he always wore a cross around his neck, except when he would replace it with a Star of David, which he’d show proudly as he pronounced himself a “Friend of Israel!”

And he was indeed. One quarter my assignment was to compose a piece for solo trumpet with the title “The Seventh Trumpet.” Along with these instructions came a stack of photocopied religious tracts, esoteric numerology charts, and Biblical references. Another time he spent an hour lecturing me about the primacy of Hebraic religion in the music of Schoenberg (12-tone music as an allegory for the equivalence of the twelve tribes of Israel) and Stravinsky (from pagan rites to Noah’s flood). The message he was trying to get across to me was to know where you come from, in order to know the mark you will make. I was in the middle of a typical twenty-something existential-artistic crisis, and these words hit me like a ton of bricks. It was some of the most solid advice anyone ever gave me.

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Charles passed away last Tuesday. As I’ve been talking with people who knew him, studied with him, or performed with him, the one thing that’s coming through most clearly is that this is a person who really lived those words: know where you come from. My brother-in-law James Sproul, who also studied trumpet with Charles, wrote on his blog:

“He was one of the most settled people I knew about who he was and why he was here.”

Along the same lines, local musician and educator Susan Scaffidi wrote a wonderful article for the Bakersfield Californian with the title “Trumpeter was a great musician, an even better man.” It’s true. If you knew Charles, you know that his greatness as a musician wasn’t the most impressive thing about him. There were many dimensions to who Charles Brady was, and yet he was one of the most consistent, self-aware, confident, and humble people I have ever encountered. To be such an accomplished artist, and yet to leave behind a legacy that is overwhelmingly rooted in one’s greatness as a human being… I can’t think of a better example of a life well-lived.

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With Charles in 2001, after my undergraduate trumpet permissions.

The last time I played with Charles was a few years ago. We were, oddly enough, backing Pat Boone in the pit orchestra at a pro-Israel rally. I had no idea what the gig was until I showed up; Charles was tickled by the whole thing, and kept us all in stitches for the duration of the show.

I had just finished my MFA, and I gave Charles copies of a couple of CDs I had recently finished. He was, as always, abundantly curious and enthusiastic about the projects I was working on, and he promised to listen to them promptly. I’m certain that he did. It’s been a while, but I’m sure the last thing he said to me was “See you around, trumpet player!”

Charles has left behind hundreds, probably thousands of students and colleagues whose lives were touched so deeply by his influence. He will certainly be missed.

On February 18-19 I teamed up with two tremendously creative West Coast trumpeters (Dan Clucas and Jeff Kaiser) to welcome the great East Coast cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum to town for, believe it or not, his Los Angeles debut. Our first meeting was for a set on Hans Fjellestad‘s ResBox series at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, and the following day we were invited to CalArts to do a performance and discussion for Wadada Leo Smith‘s graduate program in African-American Improvisational Music. This was the program I graduated from back in 2003, and so it was a great honor to be invited back.

Both performances were overwhelmingly positive experiences and everyone is talking about putting this together again at some point. Thanks to Jeff Kaiser, Keith McMullen, and Louis Lopez for the photos above; unfortunately there was no audio or video documentation, but you can imagine what kind of sounds were swirling…

tptflm is an interdisciplinary collaboration between film artist Allen D. Glass and trumpeter Kris Tiner. The project is rooted in an aesthetic that embraces the exclusive use of analog technology (16mm celluloid film and acoustic brass instruments) and improvisation as the fundamental creative principle. Although the procedural parameters are clearly defined, the logics that govern the interaction between music and film are subject to an emergent reflexivity that manifests in a unique way during each performance. Glass deploys both completed works on a variety of subjects and in-progress or “scrap” footage on up to three projectors simultaneously, speeding up and slowing down or reversing the film, and covering or uncovering the lenses to create a continuously changing field of visual activity. Tiner (whose performance background comprises jazz and experimental musics to various classical, popular, and world music styles) improvises extensions of melody, timbre, sound and space on trumpet and flugelhorn, synthesizing, enhancing and interpreting the film narrative in a kind of shamanistic way. The result is a collision of semi-autonomous aural and visual elements strong enough stand on their own, yet when they are experienced together a “third thing” emerges, triggering a complex and fascinating web of possible connections and meanings.

Allen D. Glass II is an international film artist, psychologist, musicologist, archivist, chemical dependency specialist, hallucinaturalist and member of the Photo Archive Group which preserves the American history of genocide in Southeast Asia. His films and photographs have been exhibited by The British Film Institute, The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Festival International Nouveau Cinéma Nouveau Medias Montréal, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, Black Maria Film Festival and the international film festivals of London, Melbourne, Tehran, Toronto, Tokyo and Luxembourg among others. He has collaborated extensively with Wadada Leo Smith, Revolutionary Ensemble and Empty Cage Quartet. Poet Dorothea Grossman once wrote this text about his films: “Humankind in the unfamiliar landscape, composing itself rhythmically and even lovingly into poetry. Nature as mammal music. The Life Dance. Foreign smells. And silences that are, of course, their own music.” Allen D. Glass II was born in Indiana and currently lives in Elysian Park.

Kris Tiner is a California-based trumpet player, composer, and improviser. His music has been described as “extraordinarily inventive” (Signal to Noise Magazine), and capable of turning “barbed wire to beauty” (LA Weekly), with a “folksy sort of lyricism that one does not usually find in avant-jazz.” (JazzReview.com). Kris has performed at concert venues and festivals throughout North America and abroad, and he appears on over 40 recordings for Clean Feed, pfMENTUM, Nine Winds, and other labels. Kris has received awards from ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, the International Association for Jazz Education, and the John F. Kennedy Center’s Jazz Ahead program. His primary musical projects include the Empty Cage Quartet and Tin/Bag with NYC guitarist Mike Baggetta. Kris is a regular member of the Industrial Jazz Group and a founding member of the Los Angeles Trumpet Quartet, and he has collaborated with Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Donald Robinson, Gerry Hemingway, Nels Cline, Mary Oliver, Ken Filiano, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jeff Kaiser, G.E. Stinson, Alicia Mangan, Lukas Ligeti and many others. Kris holds an MFA in African-American Improvisational Music from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Music from CSU Bakersfield. He has lectured on both music and visual art, and currently teaches courses in jazz and popular music at Bakersfield College.

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We recently completed our debut performances at Metro Galleries in Bakersfield, CA and at the Artists Union Gallery in Ventura, CA. For both shows we were accompanied by the brilliant San Diego-based electroacoustic duo KaiBorg (Jeff Kaiser + David Borgo). Click here for an excellent recap of those shows (with more photos) at Jeff Kaiser’s blog.

Below are video excerpts from both performances. Thanks to James Sproul for the video at Metro Galleries.