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:
Had a nice weekend in New York to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Empty Cage Quartet, and our new LP. The videos below (courtesy of our friend Kevin Reilly) contain our entire performance at Douglass Street Music Collective in Brooklyn. Video from our concert at The Stone should be ready soon…
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.
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.
2008 was a productive year for the Empty Cage Quartet. During the summer we spent two weeks in Montpellier, France where, with support from a Chamber Music America French-American Cultural Exchange grant, we collaborated with the brilliant French duo of Aurélien Besnard (clarinets) and Patrice Soletti (guitar) on a series of rehearsals and performances of original new music for the sextet, culminating in a three-day recording session at Studio Lakanal in Montpellier. The result of that collaboration is the new recording Take Care of Floating, recently released in Europe on the Rude Awakening label.
Despite limited time and a language barrier that was sometimes problematic, Aurélien and Patrice were an immediate and natural fit with our quartet, and these sessions forge a pretty fascinating union of European free improvisation with American jazz-inspired creative music. While we were in France I documented the collaboration in a fairly extensive photo blog that is archived here and here.
Tech-savvy listeners will appreciate the fact that this CD is being released with two distinct mixes embedded on the disc – one engineered specifically for traditional hi-fi stereo systems, and another that is optimized for mp3 listening (the mp3 files appear in a separate folder when the disc is inserted into a computer drive). This innovative solution to the nagging problem of digital audio fidelity is the result of a process that was created by engineer Pierre Vandewaeter at Studio Lakanal.
Take Care of Floating is available now on the Rude Awakening website, and you can listen to an exclusive preview at Last.fm. The album is scheduled for US release shortly, and will be available on iTunes, eMusic etc. soon after.
Following the France trip, in September of last year we spent a week on the East Coast, giving performances at Bennington College in Vermont, the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY and in Manhattan where we performed a concert that was sponsored jointly by the annual Clean Feed Festival and the Festival of New Trumpet (FONT) Music. Directly following these performances we hunkered down for two days at Park West Studio in Brooklyn to record two new extended works – the Tzolkien series by Jason Mears and my own first series of Gravitycompositions. That recording is out now on Lisbon-based Clean Feed Records. Here is the official press release:
Gravity is the new release by the Empty Cage Quartet, a group that The Wire magazine has called “one of the best things in jazz to emerge in the new millennium.” Saxophonist Jason Mears, trumpeter Kris Tiner, bassist Ivan Johnson and percussionist Paul Kikuchi are featured here in one of their most focused and exciting performances on record. The music is comprised of two extended compositions that incorporate improvisational systems based on harmonic palindromes and melodic sequences derived from the cycles of the Mayan calendar. Although these musicians are well-schooled in contemporary and experimental methods of composition, there is nothing overtly intellectual or academic about the musical result. This band is equally at home whether navigating the intricacies of modern chamber music, pounding out a funky groove, or blazing through waves of freebop energy. And they do it all with a bold intensity that is well-honed from years of touring and performing together. This is music that forges a rare union of numerological complexity and visceral groove, brain and guts. And that’s what makes this band so special – their music continues to expand and deepen with each new release, reaching toward, in the words of one critic, an “urban folk music of the future.”
And here’s an early review (a good one, thankfully!), by Troy Collins at All About Jazz.
We are planning several CD release concerts (possibly a full-on tour) for early in 2010. Keep an eye on this site for updates, or become a fan of the Empty Cage Quartet on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.
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).
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
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.
