Category Archives: Compositions

In the Ground and Overhead

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Kris Tiner: In the Ground and Overhead
14 miniatures for muted trumpet

In the Ground and Overhead is the sixth release on Bakersfield-based Epigraph Records. Previous releases on digital, vinyl, and cassette have featured new music from local artists as well as guest appearances by unclassifiable musical innovators from around the world.

This set of 14 miniatures for solo muted trumpet was inspired by the sights, sounds, and creatures of one of California’s most serene and historic places. The music was created, performed, and recorded by Kris Tiner while in residence at Montalvo Arts Center in the forested foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Incorporating the natural reverb of the John Bluth painters’ studio along with ambient recordings of the Montalvo grounds, In the Ground and Overhead is a focused and heartfelt meditation on nature and solitude by Tiner, a veteran of many acclaimed West Coast jazz and creative music ensembles including the Empty Cage Quartet, Tin/Bag, Psychic Temple, the Vinny Golia Quintet, and the Industrial Jazz Group. The Bandcamp download includes a PDF score and session photos. Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services.

“Definitely a winner… It takes courage to make music this sensitive. It requires insight and good taste to be this sensitive without falling into the abyss of sentimentalism. It takes strength to reduce the feelings and musings to their bare essence, like a Japanese zen-drawing with only a few lines and lots of white space. Tiner’s tone is warm and precise, pure and velvety, subtle and nuanced. It takes a lot of artistry to produce something so personal with such universal value. Yes, it’s only 15 minutes long, but you just listen to it twenty times in a row. It’s guaranteed to be a fascinating listen, even after the twentieth time. And that’s a lot more than can be said about many much longer albums.”
– Stef Gijssels, The Free Jazz Collective

“Kris Tiner’s In the Ground and Overhead: 14 Miniatures for Muted Trumpet was composed and recorded in residence at California’s Montalvo Arts Center by the Santa Cruz Mountains, the physical setting of which inspired these short pieces for muted trumpet. The opening and closing improvisations as well as the twelve compositions in between are in effect symphonic poems for a solo instrument; each is made up of brief phrases or motifs that Tiner develops or departs from with a brisk economy of means. Most are of constrained compass or dynamic range—the mute certainly has a role to play there—but some break out into broader expressive territory. Tiner intended the pieces to reflect the beauty of his natural surroundings and the feeling of being alone within them. That he has done quite effectively.”
– Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News

Previous reviews for Kris Tiner…

“Kris Tiner is a superbly fluid trumpeter, with a clean articulation in the upper register, deft valving, and a winning lyrical bent.”
– Jason Bivins, Cadence Magazine

“Extraordinarily inventive… suggesting still-untapped potentials in Miles Davis’s legacy – it’s as if Tiner has plumbed the most daring, piercing moments in Davis’s music to propose a boldface musical language utterly different from the usual stylized fragility of Miles disciples.”
– Nate Dorward, Signal to Noise Magazine

“Kris Tiner’s trumpet is perfectly suited to the moment.”
– Dave Cantor, DownBeat

Recording in the John Bluth Studio at Montalvo Arts Center.

Upcoming at Metro Galleries

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This Sunday will be the last Epigraph Records-sponsored concert of the year at Metro Galleries. Superb Sacramento guitarist Ross Hammond is bringing his trio (featuring Steuart Liebig on bass and Trevor Anderies on drums), and I’ll play in the opening set with the trio version of my new trumpet-synth project Not Twice (check here for a recap of our San Francisco performance back in August). Both sets will be recorded live. More info at this link.

Here’s a preview of the music I’ve written for our set:

 

sky folding over

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Please take a minute to check out hibari, an ongoing aid project for earthquake victims in northeastern Japan. It’s now in it’s 43rd week featuring new music weekly by 100 contemporary composers.

This week they are featuring a flute/piano duet I composed earlier in the summer, BEAUTIFULLY and impeccably performed by Reiko Manabe and Kaori Ohsuga. Scroll down for a reproduction of the score.

You can download the full seven minute performance by donating $5 or more. My piece will be available for the next seven days.

Not Twice in San Francisco

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Sadness Variations (after Ornette Coleman)

NOT TWICE

Kris Tiner – trumpet, compositions
Phillip Greenlief – tenor saxophone
Motoko Honda – keyboard and electronics
Jordan Aguirre – keyboard and electronics
Andrew Koeth – keyboard and electronics
Allen D. Glass – 16mm film projection

Thursday, August 2, 2012
Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series
San Francisco, CA

for emptiness

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for emptiness is a video collaboration with Parisian sculptor/media artist Stéphane Thidet, completed during our residency at Montalvo Arts Center and filmed at Castle Rock State Park outside Saratoga, California. The context, setting, and production were created and conceptualized by Stéphane, the music is my own solo trumpet improvisation.


for emptiness from Stéphane Thidet on Vimeo.


Montalvo, Week One

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Some images above from the first week of my three-week residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. It’s been a productive time — while doing my best to soak in the glorious stillness and natural beauty of this area, I’ve finished several composition projects that will be featured at two performances in San Francisco next week.

One is a set of variations on Ornette Coleman’s “Sadness” – no doubt one of his most poignant and alluring melodies – which will be performed on August 2 at The Luggage Store Gallery with a new ensemble I’m calling Not Twice, featuring Phillip Greenlief on saxophones, myself on trumpet, and Motoko Honda, Jordan Aguirre, and Andrew Koeth on keyboards and electronics. We will be accompanying the silent 16mm film projections of Los Angeles film artist Allen D. Glass.

Another project is a long overdue tribute to my former composition teacher and mentor Leroy Jenkins, who left this world in 2007. I’ll be playing this and several other recent compositions with my new trio that includes bassist Scott Walton and drummer Donald Robinson at the SIMM Series on August 5.

More info at my events page.

tenuous refuge

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Working out a few new things for Empty Cage Quartet‘s three-day residency at Montalvo Arts Center this week. This will be the first of the third-generation Gravity compositions, utilizing only non-transposing gravity points (the longer pitch sets in the square boxes). These sets indicate two distinct intervallic relationships both above and below the central pitch ‘B’. The pitch and rhythmic material are all based on permutations of the numbers 11-11-11.

This piece is essentially a “tuning element” that will set up a harmonic space to be explored in the next few compositions.

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Transpersonal Suite

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The Transpersonal Suite is a series of compositions that I have been working on for several years. I have performed them with a number of different ensembles, but they have acquired a particular focus in recent performances by Tin/Bag, my longstanding duo with New York guitarist Mike Baggetta. During the more than five years I have been performing with Tin/Bag we have developed a musical rapport that has enabled the ongoing creation and performance of these very special compositions. The inspiration for these works may lie in the world of books and ideas, but the music itself is the product of years of exploration and dedication to the project of uncovering a very personal, intuitive, and compelling musical language for creative improvisation.

In these single-page compositions the compositional objective is to compress as much potential recombinatorial value into as few notes as possible, creating a melodic contour which can function as a theme in the traditional sense but can also be expanded systemically by the improvising performer. The individual pitch and rhythmic elements may be divided, reorganized, repeated, rerouted (via jumping repeat zones), reversed, condensed, aggregated to create distinct chords or harmonic centers, and/or otherwise elaborated upon. The outer simplicity of the composition is such that each performer may immediately and effectively grasp the basic materials, though the internal compositional logics will ultimately yield an array of possible connections.

Each of these compositions has been named in honor of a writer, philosopher, or spiritual thinker whose work has motivated the kind of intuitive and integrated processes that inform and enrich my aesthetic world: Sri Aurobindo, Abraham Maslow, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Osho, and Lama Anagarika Govinda. Within each composition I have embedded certain distinctive systemic relationships that embody some dimension of the philosophical world view of each writer.

The Transpersonal Suite (consisting of the first five compositions in this series) was recorded by Tin/Bag in New York City in January of 2010 with the support of a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum. That recording is scheduled to be released in late 2010.

The first composition from this series to be completed was “Aurobindo”. This composition was recorded by the Empty Cage Quartet in July, 2006 and released in 2007 on the CD Stratostrophic (Clean Feed Records CF103) – that recording is embedded below. It consists of flugelhorn, alto saxophone, and contrabass working from the written melodic material, with electronically processed percussion improvising on the rhythmic relationships:

Aurobindo by kristiner

“Maslow” is the next composition in the series. Embedded below is a video recording from a live performance by Tin/Bag in Boston during the Fall of 2007. The audio quality is not ideal, but it should provide an adequate representation of how these compositions work:



This performance begins with solo trumpet playing the theme, at first unadorned, then gradually expanding and improvising upon some of the repeated areas before the guitar enters with a chordal accompaniment based on pitch aggregations derived from the various melodic fragments. Both instruments then engage in a bit of free melodic counterpoint alternating with sustained tones and guitar harmonics. This opens up into a more improvisational middle section, which eventually settles back into the melodic material of the third and fourth staves. Trumpet then drops out as solo guitar meditates for a moment on the theme. When the trumpet re-enters, the pace slows dramatically, and we end by focusing on the last six written notes of the theme (G-Ab-F-G-G-F).

In this particular case the only decision that was agreed upon beforehand was that we would begin with a trumpet solo. Every other performance decision is made in the moment, with regard to the flow of the music and the information that is contained within the piece.

In 2009 I received a Subito Quick Advancement Grant from the Los Angeles/SF Bay Area chapters of the American Composers Forum to fund the recording of the full Transpersonal Suite with Tin/Bag at Systems Two studios in Brooklyn. I wrote about that session and the brief Northeast tour that preceded it in this post. Here is the audio from the master recording of “Maslow”, recorded on January 16, 2010:

Maslow by kristiner

Following are the remaining three compositions in the series in their order of completion: “Inayat Khan”, “Osho”, and “Govinda”. I would be happy to discuss these in the comments section below if anyone would like any further information.

Click on a thumbnail image to view the larger version:

Opposing Wings

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gravity2

This is the first of the second-generation Gravity compositions which will utilize non-transposing gravity points (the longer pitch sets in the square boxes). The emphasis here is on symmetry, hence the repetition of 4s and 3s (major and minor thirds). These intervals yield a non-transposing set that duplicates the octave at 12, returning to A in order to re-route back into the piece.

The ascending version of this set (A-C-C#-E-F-G#-A) is basically the “Bitches Brew” scale transposed to A; the descending version incorporates the same intervals going in the opposite direction (A-F#-F-D-C#-Bb-A).

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Gravity No. 1

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Empty Cage Quartet records in Brooklyn, NY, September, 2008

Empty Cage Quartet records in Brooklyn, NY, September, 2008

Gravity No. 1 is an 11-part open-instrumentation composition that was written in 2007. It was the subject of a presentation at the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Society for Improvised Music at Northwestern University in December, 2007, and funded in part by a Subito quick advancement grant from the American Composers Forum.

Subito quick advancement grant ($1,500) from the American Composers Forum’s Los Angeles
and San Francisco Bay Area Chapters

The composition was recorded in New York City by the Empty Cage Quartet in September, 2008. That recording (which is excerpted below) will be featured on an upcoming CD on Clean Feed Records.

Gravity No. 1 is the first in a series of compositions that examine my concept of gravity points. This system provides a method of selecting pitch and harmonic material via a conception of symmetrical intervallic relationships in which prescribed intervals above a given frequency are duplicated as a “mirror image” below that frequency. The notation is borrowed in part from musical set theory, where semitones away from a central pitch ‘0’ are numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. to 11 (the major seventh interval) and then the series starts over again.

In this composition the written material is designed to establish a systemic structure from which emergent zones of expanded group interaction become possible as new connections are discovered during an improvised performance (improvisation here having to do with the selection of material from the score as well as personal extemporization). The goal is to learn to channel temporary states of spontaneous musical activity into solidified sound-structures that are either derived from the composition or arrived at via the improvisation. As each new performance builds upon the last, these structures can be analyzed, catalogued and mapped, and the development of an ensemble consciousness can be measured against the decreasing degree of dependence upon the written material.

Download PDF: Gravity No. 1 (score + composition notes)

Excerpt – Gravity No. 1: Section 4

Gravity No. 1: Section 4 by kristiner

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