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Road Reports 2004
(click pics to enlarge)

For upcoming concert dates, go here

January

(photo by fred askew)
January 1 - Poetry Project Benefit Marathon at St. Mark's Church - NYC
This event is an annual tradition going for many years now and is an opportunity to see old friends, hear LOTS of words and music and raise some $$ for the Poetry Project. Other performers among the multitudes included Patti Smith, Nick Zedd, Marc Ribot, Steve Earle, Maggie Estep, Lenny Kaye, and Penny Arcade.
I've participated off and on since 1987 and try to do a little something different each year. For 2000 I brought the Terraplane brass band to perform Work Or Leave and in 2001 brought the same group with the addition of Eric Mingus to do Slow Drag. After taking last year off, I was happy to jump in again and brought the Godin. Announcing the title as "I'll Be Standing There Cheering when They Pull (From His Stinking Spider Hole) George W. Bush" produced some laughs and some confusion in the packed house. The response to the music was powerfully enthusiastic.

January 18 "Beyond The Curve" - Meridian Arts Ensemble - St. Luke's - NYC
This event celebrating three commissions is sponsored by Chamber Music America and takes place on a snowy Sunday afternoon at St. Luke's Church in midtown. Great acoustics, especially for brass! The Meridian Arts Ensemble is amazingly precise and are one of the few brass groups extant with the chops to play "Beyond The Curve" without blinking. They've performed it at Merkin Hall and in Havana, Cuba at a new music festival but this is my first chance to hear it and also to participate, processing the sounds of the brass and percussion separately in my Powerbook. I keep the processing subtle, using it to smear some of the brass sounds, to add dub effects to the drums in grooving sections, and to filter and resonate during some of the held chordal passages and blasting unisons of the finale. The audience is extremely enthusiastic! After Meridian is the great Bennie Maupin and his group in a fine set mixing his compositions with improvisation. Bennie's playing on "Bitches Brew" and on Herbie Hancock's "Mwandishi" record are the reason I picked up bass clarinet in 1972. He seemed pleased when I told him. Finally the Corigliano Quartet performs a somewhat backward-looking piece by Shafer Mahoney. My notes to "Beyond The Curve" are a quote from the eponymous short story by Kobo Abe: "If I were somehow deluded into thinking I recognized a strange place, then everything outside my immediate line of vision ought to have disappeared from memory - but, in fact, all that was missing was that town beyond the curve."

Velocity Of Hue Europe Tour

Jan. 20 Porgy & Bess - Wien - Austria
Despite the baby screaming for 90 minutes straight as if she was auditioning for Brotzmann's "Machine Gun" with a completely oblivious mother, the flight from JFK was quite fine - it helped to have an iPod to mask the unwanted sounds - playlist: Feldman "Coptic Light," Skip James "1931 Recordings," Monk "Solo."
The weather websites all predicted sub-zero temperatures, rain and snow and the Herald Tribune claimed that Wien was covered in heavy snow. On landing, I found typical middle-Europe January weather - grey, not-too-cold, no sign of snow or even rain here. I spent the day sleeping in the hotel then revived with a double-espresso and headed to the club. It's always a pleasure to return to Wien and the Porgy has a fine ambience, very competent technicians, and a good cook.
Soundcheck went a little too smoothly, especially with the computer which I planned use only in the second set. Between which elements are saved in a patch and the heat of the moment, there's always quite a bit of variability in what happens when I use the GRM Tools in performance. I was finding many wonderful sounds in the soundcheck and was a little hesitant to stop for dinner but hunger ruled. Did an interview for ORF Austrian television before playing. The journalist, Claus, had interviewed me twice before and I expected intelligent questions dealing with not only music but politics and culture and I was not disappointed.
First set went quite well and I stayed pretty close to the order of pieces on the Velocity Of Hue CD though combined them into one long suite. Some good surprises. Intermission spent greeting many old friends then back onstage. The Max patch produced no sound when I started the second set even after quitting and restarting. Necessary to reboot the computer so I played my New Year's Day piece during the process - the announcement of the title brought loud cheers. My title for the second set was Serf Music For A New Feudal Era. The comment of some friends after the show was that I was not being very optimistic! Halfway through the set I was also actually feeling that the sounds were describing an intense dystopia so I consciously set off to create a more positive state, creating idyllic gamelan-like patterns with the GRM resonator and finger-tapped harmonics. Strong response and two encores.

Jan. 21 Vagon - Praha - Czech Republic
I first came to Praha on tour solo together with the band V-Effect in May 1983. My image of the city was a conglomerate of Kafka, the Plastic People of the Universe, and the 1968 Soviet invasion. On that trip we stayed at the house of David Nemec and his mother, Dona, and family - all associated with the Plastic People, Charter 77, and the Czech samizdat cultural movement. Our "official" concert in Praha was cancelled because of an anti-New Wave campaign and a hastily organized event in a pub was shut down by the irate owner when he heard the "forbidden" music. We finally played in the garden of a house on the outskirts of town facing a railroad yard. The invited audience, all notified by word-of-mouth, could not applaud for fear of tipping the authorities off that a concert was taking place and so, after each number, they mimed applause without ever letting hands touch. The surreality of the event was further enhanced by the combustion and inhalation of homegrown "Prague Green". After the event, for dinner we descended into a downtown Russian nightclub with tuxedoed maitre'd, well-dressed Arab businessman, and flashy hookers. The entertainment was a combo of clarinet, a primitive synthesizer sounding like a plastic accordion, and a drummer who seemed to have learned his chops by listening to a cheapo Rhythm-Ace. For the "rock n roll" numbers, the portly and balding clarinetist would don wraparound shades and twang away on a Russian Telecaster-copy. Ahoj! In NYC in 1989 I took part in a benefit organized by Giorgio Gomelsky at the Kitchen for the latest Plastic People project, a band called Pulnoc, and later performed with them in Chicago and New York during their US tour. On that first trip and later ones, I met many beautifully strong-willed people and heard wonderful, dark, powerful music, especially the MCH(e) band and soon after began an association with the Agon Orchestra.
A return to Praha is always something of a reunion for me and it was fine to meet again with David, Ivan Bierhanzl (of Agon and now in the latest version of Plastic People), Josef Vlcek (who helped organize my first concerts there) and others. The Vagon is an underground cavern and was packed with hundreds of people who listened very attentively and responded mightily. The computer worked perfectly this evening. Two hours of sleep back in the hotel and awake to light snowfall and a careening taxi ride through the slippery streets to the Hlavna station, like a low-budget movie set of hustlers, thieves, beggars, itinerants, babushkas, and drunks. I was happy to enter the overheated train though my compartment seemed poured out of plastic in a single mold - I couldn't imagine a more uncomfortable accomodation but exhaustion won out and I slept two good hours to the border near Nurnberg and my change of trains.

Jan. 22 Sudhaus - Tübingen - Germany
Another old haunt, the Sudhaus' "Something Noise" program is run for some years now by Pit Schmidt and Ulrike Helmholz. Their concert schedule is cut way back as funding from the city for culture is also disappearing. The venue, an old factory, seems to be used mostly for 60's English blues bands these days. The German trains, formerly the model of precision have become a joke since privatization, rarely on time. I stop in Frankfurt for lunch with Bernd Leukert - he informs me that my recent CD for the HR-Media with "Calling" and "Racing Hearts" has won a German record-critics prize!
My train from Frankfurt to Stuttgart is 20 minutes late and I miss two possible connections to Tübingen so Pit has to drive to pick me up. This causes soundcheck to be diminished but not a problem as the sound in the room and on stage is fine. Two sets again with good intensity in the acoustic set and new areas in the second though still somehow unsatisfying - possibly tiredness, possibly the need for a new approach to this material. I use a D9 tuning for the second set, different from the usual DADGAD for this set.

Jan. 23 Corsico - Milano - Italy
Don't want to take any chances on missing my connection to Milano in the tiny town of Horb as there is only four minutes for the change from the Tübingen train - in the old days, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I decide to play it "smart" and backtrack in direction and give up one hour of needed sleep for an earlier train to Stuttgart where I can meet the Cisalpino to Milano at its source. Pit tells me that this earlier train is only on time 2 or 3 times a year but it still gives me a larger margin for error. In fact, the train arrives early in Stuttgart where I find out that the Cisalpino has been cancelled as it stayed in Zurich the night before because of brake problems. An alternative has been arranged: a train to Singen and another to Zurich where I get the Cisalpino and arrive in Milano on time.
The Corsico is just outside the city which means a one hour start-stop crawl through the rush-hour traffic. The venue itself is an old train station taken over by a cooperative and used as a gallery and concert place. The walls and ceiling are a continually-changing exhibition of local artists, mostly sculpture and the acoustics are fine. The room is delicately scented with incense and oranges. After soundcheck, we repair to a local ristorante for a much-needed and incredibly delicious restorative of local cuisine and a rosso from Puglia followed by a doppio ristretto.
The house is packed when we return and the first set traverses an hour in a blink to incredible response. Again, I'm not enjoying the computer set as much and will try find a new approach to it in Torino. I feel the audience is a bit exhausted by it as well though I do enter for ten minutes or so a beautiful realm of "khoomei guitar" using the resonator. D- for the first set and back to DADGAD for the second. Great to hang out with Steve Piccolo and Gak Sato during the break and after the concert.

Jan. 24 Piccolo Reggio - Torino - Italy
A brief ride to Torino at a very civilized hour. After hotel check-in, off to the music school operated by the Centro Jazz Torino to address an assembly of interested students. Of the 40 or so in attendance, many are guitarists. The arc of my talk takes the form of a condensed musical autobiography with necessary tangents into blues, politics, the mathematics of chaos and the Fibonacci series, the question of technique, improvisation, intonation, post-modernism, and approaches to composition. I perform a 10-minute solo on the Godin and also play from the harddrive the Parisian sax quartet Xasax' recording of their premiere performance of "Approaching The Arches Of Corti," a composition from 1998 for four straight soprano saxophones using leg mute extensively and therefore played standing on one leg. The students ask cogent questions - my favorite was a puzzled plea from one who could not understand the technique by which I could mix blues with mathematics. I explain that the process of performance at its best is not necessarily about decision-making and strict definitions but an active process of great porosity between modes of manifestation, of trying to eliminate the interference of the conscious mind. After class, the organizer, Mario, and I go to a pasticerria where he offers me the local hot chocolate - like a thick soup of the darkest richest flavor, not sweet and highly aromatic. A brisk walk to the opera house for soundcheck follows.
The Piccolo Reggio is a 300-seat room in the basement of the opera house with excellent acoustics both onstage and in the house. On the main stage is Puccini's "Sweetheart of the Wild West" - the production uses real horses of which there is ample evidence. Soundcheck is quick so we're off to the caffeterria for snacks then out to a local bar for espresso and pastry before the concert.
First set flows quickly and after short intermission, dig into the second. Some good results from the sliding metal bar plus E-bow, also an interesting dance with the shuffling delays trying to hook into strange attractors. A quick acoustic encore then out to the foyer to meet and greet, then finally, a last wonderful dinner in Italy before heading to Switzerland in the morning.

Jan. 25 Espace - Lausanne - Switzerland
This club was formerly and infamously known as La Dolce Vita and was probably a tram station in its first life. I performed there in 1983 in duo with Charles K. Noyes when it was in its punk incarnation. The club is now squatted and operated as an "autogere." Perhaps needless to say, heat was in short supply during soundcheck and I doubted the ability of my digits to remain flexible enough to play a guitar. We fortified ourselves at dinner with red wine and espresso and by the time of my solo set, the club was packed and nearly comfortable. I compacted the two sets into one which proved to be very satisfactory, moving freely between the acoustic and processed material. Very good response! After a short DJ set, the duo of keyboardist/samplist Pierre Aubutant and drummer Christophe Calpini took the stage and played 20 minutes of a jaggedly unique and grooving set mixing noise, hip-hop, and jazz grooves. I joined them for another 40 minutes that passed in a flash - we were joined by toaster Nya in a few sections. Great listening and interactions all helped by an excellent sound on-stage, not too loud. The next day we went to Studio Flon to record some improvisations for the next disc of Pierre. An excellent facility with SSL console and lots of good outboard gear. The good feelings of the night before carried through this session.

Jan. 27 Eremitage - Schwaz - Austria
A welcome return unfortunately marred by a moderate but steady snowfall sure to cut into attendance (some people drive for two hours over mountain passes to attend events here.) Still, the house was comfortably full. As in Lausanne, I played one long set seguing from the Velocity material into the computer-processing to a very receptive audience. Play "I Will Stand There Cheering..." for an encore - this piece has settled into a coherent structure - a rhythmic and snappy country-blues on slide with excursions into harmolodics and noise. Called back for another encore, I start from a blank canvas and the D9 tuning. I'm not so sure if I painted anything memorable on the canvas or not - it was a truly a struggle although at times I felt connected to the flux.
After returning to the hotel, I received a phone message that Sam Furnace had died after battling cancer for a number of months. Besides being an incredible saxophonist and great musician, Sam was blessed with a huge heart, keen intelligence, and wicked sense of humor. It was always an intense pleasure to be working and touring with Sam, whether in Terraplane, Orchestra Carbon, or other projects. He will be greatly missed!

Some more pics of Sam may be found here

Jan. 28 KV Roda - Steyr - Austria
Steyr was a major industrial city during WW2 and the logo of the SteyrWerks is ubiquitous. Promoter Mike Glueck had previously brought me to Steyr both solo and in duo with Zeena Parkins at a cave-like basement called the Kellar. Now he is part of a group that runs a culture center and bar down near the river called the KV-Roda. The 200-seat auditorium sounds quite good but for a 200ms slapback that disappears when the room is filled with standing people but my seated audience doesn't really tame it. Two sets again with good flow and response. Back to the hotel too late and up too early to get to the airport in Linz. Because of a snowstorm in Frankfurt, my flight is delayed but makes up the time, passing rapidly through many turbulent regions.

Jan. 29 Camera Municipal - Guarda - Portugal
In Frankfurt I catch a very relaxing flight to Oporto in Portugal passing over the French countryside before turning south over the Atlantic at Nantes. I'm met by the organizers and driven 2.5 hours up the mountains to Guarda, elevation 2600 meters. It's quite wintry there - my thoughts of relaxing in the Portuguese sun are soon forgotten. It's already dark when I arrive and there's time only for a shower and coffee before soundcheck and the concert.
The auditorium is in the modern city hall of this medieval town of 40000. Acoustics are good and the house is full and spontaneously breaking into applause during certain sections making me feel almost like a flamenco guitarist. I do a single set of 60 minutes mixing the acoustic and electronic material to good effect. Encore then it's off through the foggy cobblestone streets to dinner. Time for one hour of sleep at the hotel then a harrowing ride back down through the mountains at breakneck speed weaving through areas of fog and heavy rain and passing lumbering trucks. It's exhausting on top of exhaustion and I finally sleep a bit before reaching the airport for my return flights to Frankfurt and NYC, both quite tranquil.

Jan. 30 Elliott Carter At 95 - Orensanz Center For The Arts - NYC
Land punctually at Newark and have time at home for a shower, a too-short nap and a big pot of bean then off to the Orensanz Foundation for the 95th birthday tribute to Elliott Carter organized by the NYC-based Sospeso Ensemble and the London-based Arditti Quartet. Carter's music is intense, thorny, and complex : like a continuous stream of tangled narratives. I studied his first two string quartets extensively during my university years. Carter was one of the first composers to use metric modulation as a major part of his vocabulary and I hear a certain relationship between his use of contrapuntal lines and their concurrent usage in the free jazz of the same era.
For this concert I composed a piece for Arditti augmented by the Sospeso bassist, Jeremy McCoy, titled "95 For EC From E#" with a strategy of using some of the things I've learned from Carter's approach filtered through my own. The piece is 95 measures long and begins in the key of "E#", the equivalent of F-natural and finishes in superposed keys of E and C. There are episodes of shifting rhythmic unisons, free counterpoint, and a finale that combines metric, harmonic, and timbral modulation to create a pulsing mesh of sound. Arditti is a magnificent group and I was thrilled with how they and Jeremy played the piece despite a paucity of rehearsal time.
Highlights of the evening for me included Carter's amazing Fifth String Quartet which I had never before heard, a collection of luminous settings of poems in Italian sung by Lucy Shelton titled "Tempo E Tempi," Joshua Cody's string quartet "Wind," and Fredric Rzewski's "Ninety-Six."

Jan. 31 "Amygdala" - Marco Cappelli - Extreme Guitar Project - Issue Project Room - NYC
From Naples, Marco Cappelli is a virtuoso guitarist well-versed in the classical repertoire, jazz, and improvisation, and one whose enthusiasm matches his technique. In 2002 he approached me with the idea of his Extreme Guitar Project which centered on a custom-modified classical guitar with extra strings, piezo transducers, and a MIDI pickup. Marco decided to commission a number of composers to write for him and the instrument. This group included Marc Ribot, Otomo Yoshihide, Annie Gosfield, Erik Friedlander, Nick Didkovsky, David Shea, Mark Stewart, Ikue Mori, and Anthony Coleman.
I was disappointed with the recording I had heard of Marco's premiere of "Amygdala" in Napoli and so we had time to get together and work on it before I left for tour. There were good reports of the previous night's perfromance, and indeed, Marco played it beautifully, digging into the final tapping sections with power and abandon.
These are my notes for the piece:
  "almond-shaped - nonverbal signs of anger, avoidance, defensiveness, and fear - a small mass of gray matter - the freeze reaction, sweaty palms, and the tense-mouth display - primeval arousal center originating in early fishes - limbic"
  "As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the job of the translator is much more than finding the equivalent words in a second language but to realize the original impulse of the source and output it through new eyes, mouth, hands. The gestures, syntax, and vocabulary of Amygdala are very much part of my everyday language on guitar. In this composition, my desire is to plant these strands of musical DNA in these most-capable hands of Marco Cappelli and let them manifest in the body of this new exciting instrument that he has created."
Some pictures of Marco and his guitar may be found here.

February

I had no performances during February though I was incredibly busy working on a number of projects: the score to the "Commune" film, the composition "No Time Like The Stranger" for Continuum (premiered in Baltimore on April 4), and "Tranz," a recording collaboration with Merzbow for a new label. The "Commune" score has been espcially enjoyable as the music is all referential to the 60's - lots of psychedelia. In addition to a 1970 Martin 12-string and a 1991 National Tricone, I use a number of different electrics. I've also been working on developing a contemporary music series for a web radio station operated by PS1 Contemporary Art Center. We'll call it WPS1 and the studios are being built in the Clocktower in Tribeca. Look to a launch on April 19 at http://www.wps1.org

March

March 13 Expedition at Issue, NYC
Steve Piccolo and Gak Sato are coming to NYC to do what they call an "Expedition" (also the name of their new CD) and I arrange for us to perform at Issue. I'm quite happy to gig again after so many days spent in front of the computer from early morning to late at night.
This evening starts with my solo acoustic for 25 minutes followed by a riveting set by their duo. They're performing a suite called "The Box Man" after the book by Kobo Abe accompanied by unsynchronized slides taken by Gak. It's simultaneously lyrical, poignant, arch, theatrical, and slyly humorous. After a short break, I join them along with Dougie Bowne on electronics and Eric Mingus on voice for a 30-minute improvisation that is sometimes jazzy, sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying.

March 23 Meridian Arts Ensemble at Lafayette College
This concert is part of the Sound Alternatives series at the Williams Center for the Arts at this small liberal-arts school in Easton, Pennsylvania, a two hour drive from NYC. The 500-seat hall has fine acoustics, very live but not too wet. For the first set, Meridian plays a selection of original music as well as tunes by Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, and King Crimson. They are five incredibly virtuosic brass players with an equally virtuosic drummer and in this set they pay tribute to rock of high creative intensity. I follow with a Velocity Of Hue set after which Meridian returns to perform "Beyond The Curve" with my live computer processing. Finally we perform together the King Crimson song "Vrooom," and Frank Zappa's " Pygmy Twilite" and "Echidna's Arp." It's a serious challenge for me to play these complex parts and arrangments! For an encore we play the lovely Zappa composition "Dupree's Paradise" which includes a long guitar/percussion improvisation. I've brought the white Strat and try to channel some Zappa-isms using an envelope filter and fuzz. The audience response to the entire evening is phenomenal.

March 24 Terraplane at Tonic NYC
We haven't played together since the November UK tour and even that one didn't have Dean so this is as close as we're going to get to a reunion. Sam Furnace is sorely missed in many ways and we dedicate the evening to him - Curtis is with us on trombone. We're playing to celebrate the release on Gaff Music of "Do The Don't." The music is identical to the zOaR release but there is a lush booklet with pics and liner notes by author Madison Smart Bell.
We start with "Life In The Crackerbox" and proceed through "Stop That Thing," "Oil Blues," "Twistin'," "L8R On," "Please Don't," "Lost Souls," and finish with the unrecorded "They Say We Is." For an encore we play Howlin' Wolf's "Meet Me In The Bottom" and "Wang Dang Doodle." The band is surprisingly tight considering our extended lack of musical contact and plays with great fire (there certainly are a few trainwrecks though!) The audience is wildly appreciative and speaking with a few people after, they seem to like the looseness as much as the tightness. In addition to the white Strat, I bring out a 1993 Gibson Nighthawk for the first time - it's light and has great tone, denser than the Fender but not as heavy (in every way) as a Les Paul.

April

April 3 Janene Higgins/E# at the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia
Another welcome opportunity to leave the city. The Slought is a small gallery associated with the University of Pennsylvania built into a former bank. The acoustics are very good, the old vault is in use for an installation, and the entire space has a feel both post-industrial and welcoming. Because of the architecture of the room, the audience is divided into two sections radiating out from the performance area. We do two pieces: the 40-minute "Suspension" followed by the 12-minute "Ombra." I use the Godin/Powerbook in the former and bass clarinet with Whammy pedal and Boomerang in the latter. Seamless interactions throughout and we both feel that transcendant moments were reached during "Ombra."

April 15 Janene Higgins/E# Chelsea Art Museum - NYC
For an opening event for our installation "Suspension," Janene & I perform the piece for a packed and enthusiastic audience at this recently opened museum in the new "art district" on the far west side. The space is reverberant but the sound equipment is fine. We have to wait until sundown to really see how the setup looks but it's fully dark by the time we commence.

April 21 "Blue Jay Way" at Bowery Poetry Club - NYC
This is a benefit organized by John Kruth to raise money to name a street or park Blue Jay Way in honor of George Harrison. John invites Eric Mingus and I to perform "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". We stick pretty close to the original arrangement although I ask drummer Todd Isler to channel Elvin Jones and Mitch Mitchell more than Ringo Starr and we take it out in the outro. I use the white Strat. Before we perform, our local council representative talks somewhat incoherently about this park idea and other things. Mingus and I get to discussing why there should be a park for George Harrison and not John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Dolphy, his own father Charles, and so many many more. Eric in preaching mode runs with this as an intro while I'm setting up - he both terrifies and energizes the audience and they respond strongly. Up to our piece, things have been pretty mellow so we up the level and seem to shock.


May

May 2-3 Northwestern University New Music Marathon
This is the fifth installment of an annual event organized by the dedicated and inexhaustible composer and pianist Amy Williams, a faculty member here. Amy's father Jan is an incredible percussionist and interpreter of such composers as Cage and Feldman and was a very positive force when I was a student in Buffalo in the 70's.
After an encouraging rehearsal of Coriolis Effect with the Contemporary Music Ensemble under the baton of Robert Hasty I'm off to a panel discussion with various composers and computer artists on the topic of collaboration. Great to hear Gregory Whitehead. I speak to the lack of immediacy in much digital art and describe SyndaKit as an example of a "non-coercive" mode of composing. At 3:30 I run over to the radio station WNUR (longtime supporters of my work!) and perform an intense 30-minute Velocity Of Hue set on the Godin. The rest of this day is free to check out a virtual realityt event by artist Paul Hertz and catch up with some old friends.
May 3 begins early in the morning with a SyndaKit rehearsal followed by a rehearsal with an impromptu sax quartet assembled to perform "Approaching The Arches Of Corti." After a lunch break, I listen to a set by the Ensemble Integrales followed by my own Velocity Of Hue set with guitar and computer. These take place in the auditorium of the Block Art Museum. Excellent acoustics in this room used mostly for film screening but the PA is underpowered. I overload and distort the mixing board trying to get enough gain to achieve comfortable volume. Still, some new places for me and the audience response is very strong.
At 6pm, we assemble in the lobby of the music building for my next event. This begins with the sax quartet performing my piece scored for straight soprano saxes to make extensive use of the leg mute along with other extended techniques. The piece was composed for the French quartet Xasax and this event is the US premiere. They play it absolutely beautifully and powerfully! We next set up to perform SyndaKit as a sextet with drummer Virgil Moorefield (ex-New Yorker who has played with the Swans and Glenn Branca), flute virtuoso Robert Dick (an old friend going back to Buffalo days), bassist Mark Cartwright, violist Matt Albert, and finally, another ex-New Yorker and old friend/associate, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. We dig into a 40-minute version of the piece with many exciting textures although fewer big unisons than I might have desired. Still, everyone played wonderfully to create a stirring set that was enjoyed by both the listeners and the players. While packing up, we noticed a large raccoon rooting around just outside the lobby. For my last event here, the Contemporary Music Ensemble performs Coriolis Effect in the concert hall. Hasty is a precise and energetic conductor but even his best efforts cannot stir the ambivalent string and horn players to give it up. They play accurately and follow the score well creating many of the intended effects but they're missing the spirit. This lackadasical approach is very common in American orchestras especially with contemporary music. Frustrating. Still, the percussionists, bass clarinetist, oboist, and pianist were great and the overall impression of the composition was properly manifested. I would very much like to get a SOLID performance and recording of this piece someday - so far, the Tilt version wins out!

May 8 Panarchy - Hanover NH
As part of my residency at Dartmouth College at the invitation of composer Eric Lyon, I perform Velocity Of Hue at Panarchy, a "fraternity house" that is really a cooperative living situation with a mission of presenting music which so far has included the White Stripes, free jazz, and electroacoustic music. It's still winter up in New Hampshire but a space heater combined with a living breathing audience brings the temperature up. I play 2 sets mixing the Godin with the computer. Eric played the CD of the Sun Ra Kohoutek concert for me the previous day and I was inspired (as always!) by Sun Ra's keyboard sounds and approach and found myself channeling it a little. During my time there I also taught 2 classes and met with both the brilliant grad students and wonderful faculty members Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, and Larry Polansky. Driving my rent-a-car back to NYC I found that Route 91 was blocked near the Vermont border with much flashing lights and a posse of National Guardsmen sporting machine guns and camo. Approached by one stalwart defender of freedom, gun drawn, I was asked to give proof of my Amrkn citizenship. Haven't experienced this since trips over the Iron Curtain or traveling in banana republics! New World Odor!

May 15 Michiyo Yagi/E# at Issue Project Room NYC
I always welcome an opportunity to perform together with kotoist Michiyo Yagi. Our last time was in Tokyo in 2001. She's an amazingly virtuosic improviser who is equally at home in ancient traditions or futuristic noise. She has both her regular koto and her 20-string bass koto - a monstrous sound. We do two wide-ranging sets to a full-house and wild response. At times our instruments seem to function as extensions of each others'.

May 19 Loft - Koln, Germany
Many good reports about the Loft over the years and I'm glad to finally have a chance to perform here as the commencement of this brief solo Velocity Of Hue tour. Indeed, the proprietor, Hans-Martin Muller is a flutist and committed for decades to providing a good outlet for creative music. The welcoming space, in a factory building, also functions as a recording studio and a high-quality documentation is a positive by-product of a performance here. It's the beginning of a long holiday weekend but there is still a good audience whose concentrated listening provides inspiration to cut through the jet lag. After a 70 minute set, I play one short encore of "Manhattan-delta" slide then after much applause return to play another longish piece depending heavily on the GRM resonator and using my SoundBug to introduce material into the body of the Godin to be processed in my Max patch.

May 20 Westwerk - Hamburg
This former factory converted into a gallery/performance space/living house was a standard stop on many Euro tours of the past although it had been 8 years since I last performed there. Going by taxi from the station, I almost didn't recognize the neighborhood - lots of construction including a new hotel and many new shops plus renovations on the surrounding buildings, street, and canals. Inside, the essence of Westwerk is retained and I'm happy to meet old friends again and perform for a full and excited house with a powerful sound system with a subwoofer. The enhanced lows allow an authoritative "chunk" to issue from the Godin and reveal interesting low-frequency manifestations in the use of the GRM tools.

May 21 Uebereck - Berlin - Velocity Of Hue acoustic
This venue is a long narrow cafe presided over by Antoine with great hospitality, food, and espresso. They present music of various kinds though not on a regular basis and the sound equipment is not state-of-the-art but certainly adequate. The Jazz Kellar organization organizes my concerts and they are excellent hosts bringing in a large and dedicated audience from their mailing list. I would not call what I do "jazz" but this term is much more inclusive in Europe than in the US. The first of my three nights in Berlin is to be completely "acoustic" i.e. without use of the computer, and the Godin sounds full and crisp.
First set is about 40 minutes and second nearly an hour followed by 2 encores. I stay in D- tuning throughout except for the final encore of Manhattan-delta in Vastopol.

May 22. Uebereck - Electroacoustic guitar & computer
Tonight I add the computer and tune to DADGAD for most of the evening. I come upon some new realms that will be developed into compositions. Soundbug works well. Using a Soundcraft Folio mini-desk which unfortunately does not allow pre-fader sends into the computer. I sometimes like to have only the computer-processing in the mix without the guitar source and this is impossible with this equipment. Sustained response leads to three encores. For the last I retune to D- and reprise some of the Velocity Of Hue pieces.

May 23 Uebereck - Berlin Meeting w/ Reinhold Friedl, Tony Buck, Thomas Borgmann, Martin Koller
Reinhold and I have collaborated many times previously and I know all of the other musicians for some years but we've never played together. The evening begins with a 25-minute solo where I reprise aspects of the previous 2 nights after which I take an intermission so that technical problems with the sound system can be solved. For the second set we create a rough order for combinations beginning with Friedl joining me for a 5-minute duo followed by the others entering. The plan soon becomes mangled but we still work through a variety of situations to good effect. Tony Buck has a very wide range of approaches and abilities and listens/plays wonderfully. Thomas Borgmann and Martin Koller are both quite accomplished on their instruments and operate from a more genre-based vocabulary, respectively free-jazz and fusion. Everyone plays attentively and contributes to the narrative tapestry. We're called back for multiple encores by the packed house. We hang for hours after greeting old friends and fellow musicians in the heimlich (albeit heavily smoke-filled) atmosphere then retire for an hour of sleep before the flights back to NYC.

June

June - on tour at home - NYC
Returning from the May tour in Germany, I jumped directly and intensely into the RadioHyperYahoo recording project for GaffMusic. This is the third installment of a series that began in 1986 with In The Land Of the Yahoos on SST and continued with 1991's Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Yahoos (both long out-of-print.) Strangely considered by some to be "comedy records", these were collections of mostly collaborative pieces operating in a darkly critical and satiric vein about American cultural and political life. My partners-in-crime on these two volumes included Christian Marclay, Sussan Deihim, Alva Rogers, Elizabeth Fischer, Christoph Anders of Cassiber, Eugene Chadbourne, Lee Ann Brown, Shelley Hirsch, David Fulton, Victor Poison-Tete, Binky Phillips, and Samm Bennett. This latest edition includes Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, Eric Bogosian, Eszter Balint, Steve Buscemi, Eric Mingus, Maggie Estep, Jack Womack, and Lisa Lowell. The deadline was my departure at the end of the month for Japan.
Other concurrent projects included a score for the film "Un Chien Andalou" for Ensemble Sospeso for a July performance, a piano score for Jenny Lin, and some sound-design and composing for the new video channel "Tube" so it was a furiously busy and focussed time. The few gigs were most-welcome diversions from the hotseat in front of the computer!

June 10 - Benefit for Issue Project Room
This event took place at the beautifully decayed Angel Orensanz Foundation, a partially restored ex-synagogue on Norfolk St. The acoustics are quite challenging for louder ensembles but fine for smaller groups and fantastic for solo. The audience of friends and supporters was wildly enthusiastic (partially fueled by the free vodka drinks.)
First up was Rebecca Moore's Prevention Of Blindness after which I performed a 15-minute compaction of material from Velocity Of Hue. Finally, Marc Ribot's Cubanos Postizos performed. Between the musical events, there were films and a short performance by the ever-brilliant Edwin Torres.

June 18 - Raw Meet at Downtown Music Gallery 20th Anniversary Party
This evening commenced with Tisiji Munoz' Coltrane/Santana-inflected virtuosic guitar jazz after which John Zorn performed some Masada pieces with various musicians. This was Raw Meet's first NYC gig and we were quite excited as was the audience. The house bass amp didn't do justice to Melvin Gibb's articulate and massive bass sound but it came through anyway thanks to the soundwork of engineer Michelle Casillas. With Lance Carter grooving hard, we ran through a medley of most of the pieces on our eponymous record on Intakt reaching greater intensity than on our debut performance in Leipzig last year - the very direct stage sound helped in this regard. In Leipzig we faced the diffusion of a large opera-house stage. I used the triple-P90 hollow Tele and appreciated greatly it's punch and resonance. For our final tune, the Sharrock tribute "Sonny's Way," I switched to the Nighthawk for its sonic density. A great response from the crowd.

June 23 - "Quarks Swim Free" and "SyndaKit" at Tonic
After the Venice Biennale debut of Quarks, I had been wanting to perform it again with additional personnel. This date finally gave me the opportunity and the ensemble was a virtuosic crew and completely acoustic (except for the Boomerang which I used with my electroacoustic Godin for looping.) Players were Jenny Lin-piano; Kinan Azmeh-clarinet, James Fei-bass clarinet, alto sax; Curtis Fowlkes-trombone, Brad Jones-bass, Jim Pugliese-percussion. I also brought my bass clarinet which allowed some triple-woodwind interplay. I was extremely pleased with this rendition though I believe we've barely scratched the surface of what is possible with this piece, the most difficult of my algorithmic works in the potential complexity and layering of the diverse melodic and rhythmic cores. I hope to add viola, cello, and trumpet for the next manifestation.
SyndaKit this evening was a repeat of the all-guitar version performed in 2001. Personnel included Al Kaatz, Ron Anderson, Deb deSalvo, Alan Licht, Angela Babin, Kato Hideki, Tyondai Braxton, Dave Hofstra, Luke Dubois, Roger Kleier, and Khabu. Some absolutely wonderful moments of massive unities but my real reservation was the perhaps inherent inability of electric guitarists to lay back and let "nothing" happen or at least to let builds develop more gradually. There is a tendency to force instantaneous crescendi and hyper-fibrillated grooving. While this is an important part of the piece, it's not everything. I often tell the players that there is no such thing as an "incorrect version" of SyndaKit, at the same time, I would enjoy hearing more of the potential of the score realized. An all-acoustic guitar version could be next!

June 26 Tribute to Neil Young - Prospect Park Bandshell, Brooklyn, NYC
Organized by producer Hal Willner, this event brought many diverse musicians together to pay tribute to the iconic guitarist and composer. My favorite interactions included working with Bonfire Madigan on the theme for the film "Dead Man" and playing "rock guitar guy" with vocalist Stan Ridgeway on "Ohio."

July

July 3 - E# + Altered States - Shinjuku Pit Inn - Tokyo
I was extremely happy to leave the confines of my studio and computer to sit on a jet for 14 hours to Japan. Ten days of gigging would be the perfect antidote to an excess of composing work. Relieved and pleased to have completed the RadioHyperYahoo project (except for mastering), I very much look forward to its September release. We took off from JFK into an advancing front of severe thunderstorms and spent the first hour weaving between them affording magnificent views of the towering and seething stratonimbus clouds. The rest of the trip yielded excellent void-time and I arrived on July 2 in Tokyo refreshed and ready for the first evening free to walk through the Shinjuku crowds to meet friends for an koppo dinner. This marks my 15th trip to Japan and seventh time at the Pit Inn - neither the acoustics nor sound equipment are great and the room has somewhat the air of a classroom but still, the vibe is very good as everyone truly is there to listen. I've collaborated with guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi and his band Altered States a number of times previously and we jumped directly into furious rock improvising with many brake-screeching time and textural changes. I opened the second set with 15-minutes of Velocity Of Hue after which the set continued as a quartet. In the full house were many old friends including drummer Samm Bennett, now living in Tokyo. For the electric material, I used a cherry Les Paul Standard provided by organizer Yasuhiru Usui. It has a fat sustaining sound and good attack but typical of its breed, weighs far too much! I've also brought my curved soprano sax which I play acoustically.

July 4 - E#, Yasuhiro Usui, Yoshikazu Isaki, Keizo Nobori - Bridge, Osaka
This venue exists in a huge entertainment complex with a roller-coaster running in its central-courtyard, occasionally shaking and rumbling the proceedings! Music of all sorts as well as film, theatre, and dance are presented here. The neighborhood is unusual for Japan, filled with homeless people who, after the bubble burst, have fallen through the cracks of the substantial social services network.
First set was an energetic and unpredictable duo with Usui, also an accomplished and unique guitarist. I performed Velocity of Hue material augmented with computer processing for the first half of the second set and next, a trio with drummer Isaki and tenor saxophonist Nobori, both flexible and virtuosic players. We first delved into jazzy territory then went deeper and wider with sustained Ayler-like passages with the saturated sounds morphing fluidly between tenor and fuzz guitar. Usui joined us for a final jagged quartet - on this, I played only soprano sax processed with the computer.

July 5 E#, Carl Stone, Yasuhiro Usui, Koji Asano - Tokuzo, Nagoya
Tokuzo is a large (by Japanese standards) live-house with a very eclectic schedule. There are posters on the wall for Gatemouth Brown and Mavis Staples and the owner tells me that Hubert Sumlin has played there as well. It's a wooden room with great sound-equipment and the feel is excellent (as is the cuisine served there.)
The evening begins with Koji Asano performing a loud electroacoustic work from the laptop with varied textures after which I perform Velocity Of Hue to excellent response. After the break, Usui and I perform duo with good interaction though without the sublime moments of our Osaka set - I'm on the Les Paul for this. Carl Stone and I next perform a duo, our first time in this format - I stick to the horn/computer combo and we generate many situations where it's impossible to tell who is producing which sound, lots of fun. Finally, Usui joins us for a nicely thorny trio after which it's time for photos, autographs, greeting old friends including Kawabata from Acid Mothers Temple and Leah and Bob from my old Northhampton, Mass. days, and ultimately, dinner and biiru!

July 6 Lecture at Tama College of Art, Hachioji
This is organized by my old friend Keisuke Oki (in 1985 we did a collaborative performance at a department store in Hamamatsu with Oki using an early video synthesizer developed by Misubishi - angry shoppers rushed their children out with eyes and ears covered!) and is part of the digital music class of Prof. Akihira Kubota at Tama, an hour west of Tokyo. My lecture is titled "Music in the Post-Digital Age" and is in two parts. The first is an overview of my work dealing with history, theories, and strategies for composition, performance, and installation. The second deals mostly with a favorite topic of mine: smell - specifically how digital artists may enhance the neurotransmitter communication that is so important in the manifestation of art and music and how it is so often missing from modern digital presentation. Many good questions from the 100 or so in the audience, both students and faculty. After class we take the train back to Shinjuku for my rehearsal with Fusanosuke Kondo for the next-day's gig.
Fusa is very affable and an excellent guitarist who has obviously done serious homework into the styles of Otis Rush and other second-generation Chicago blues guitarists and often backs Rush up during his visits to Japan. We run through a number of classic tunes and riffs and realize we'll have no problems blasting through our show. I've heard great things about Fusa's singing from Ned Rothenberg but he doesn't sing in rehearsal. When finished, we're off to Mama's Kitchen, a tiny hole-in-the-wall nearby with incredible Korean food.

July 7 Motion Blue, Yokohama - Blues session with Fusanosuke Kondo
The venue is huge and very spiff - like a Hollywood movie set for a jazz club - and operates inside a warehouse along the waterfront converted into a massive shopping mall filled with unspeakable myriad chatchkes . There are dramatic views of strangely discontinuous architecture and a ferris wheel seen throught the windows which I'm unable to show as my camera has decided to stop functioning (all following pics are by Usui, Satoku, or Oki).
We perform two sets this evening, each beginning with a 20-minute Velocity Of Hue solo in which I stress the blues connections in the material to an extremely receptive audience. Fusa then joins me. For the first set with both of us on electrics, we start with a brooding vamp in E, play a slashing version of Albert King's "Pretty Woman," switch to acoustics for Otis' "Double Trouble" in which Fusa reveals a powerful voice cured in whiskey and smoke, and finish with a boogie in A which we take to some extremes. We're brought back for an encore and play a Delta abstraction in D on acoustics. Second set starts similarly but we substitute Muddy Waters' "Can't Be Satisfied" on acoustics for the King tune and finish with a John Lee Hooker groove that seriously stretches. An acoustic encore again for the cheering audience. I start solo and Fusa joins me outlining "Rollin' & Tumblin" which we bend and stretch.

July 8 E# - Michiyo Yagi - Super Deluxe
This funky basement venue with very good acoustics is the successor to Deluxe, a now-defunct brewery/performance space where I performed in 2001. The fashionable Rappongi neighborhood has been heavily transformed since my last visit with a huge shopping complex replacing a strip of shops and sidewalk that was the site of the old Wave, a record store that carried EVERYTHING and often featured performances on a small stage on the sidewalk. In 1985, John Zorn and I performed duo there during our simultaneous first visits to Japan.
For my solo set, I begin acoustically in the D- tuning and add the computer after about 30-minutes, relying heavily on the resonators and E-Bow. The Velocity of Hue material is very compacted in this version allowing me to touch on more of the motifs presented on the CD but not in as much depth. The room-acoustics respond very well to the "khoomei guitar" sounds so I explore them to a great degree before taking intermission. The duo begins with Yagi generating tsunamis of sound while I add processed soprano sax obligati after which she sings a Vietnamese song accompanying herself with more pure tones and I switch to guitar with low twanging and a matrix of delays. The second piece begins with Michiyo playing her 19-string bass koto (truly an amazing sound!) while I use the brass rod on the guitar with E-Bow. Eventually we morph to arpeggiated and hammered low grooves. Our third piece is not so easily defined stylistically but also ranges from bright delicacies to massive soundwaves. We play a meditative encore to finish after which the entourage heads to a nearby Chinese restaurant for Peking duck and other delicacies. The centerpiece sculpture in the restaurant is 6-ft long golden phallus which functions as the ringer for a giant bell. Lifesize plaster female buttocks, breasts, and genitalia and giant lips like the old Rolling Stones logo adorn the walls.

July 9 Fourth Floor- Velocity solo and much more -
Kichijoji Kichijoji is a vibrant Tokyo suburb with lots of interesting restaurants and bars and a large artist and student population in close proximity to the many universities. The performance space is not overly large and a huge soundsystem dominates one end of the room. The house is packed with an international crew of people who jam in and out all night. Air-conditioning is minimal and the atmosphere is an almost solid mix of cigarette smoke and humidity but the air seems to crackle with anticipation as the entire weekend is devoted to a marathon festival of art from faculty and students of Keisuke Oki and Akihire Kubota (teaching respectively at Tokyo and Tama art colleges.)
This opening night featured my solo set as a "guest" - I mixed the 50-minute set between acoustic Velocity Of Hue material and the computer processing and was met by powerful audience response. Other performances included Kubota's "Laptop Jazz Quartet," interesting video artist from Singapore, Kai Syng Tan, who collaborated with French electronic composer Christophe Charles, and finally Oki and a friend performing on a large string instrument made by Jeff Fetterman of LEMUR that produced beautiful sounds and modulated textures. Before catching the last train to Shinjuku we stop at a highly regarded, small, bright, loud and truly excellent sushi bar.

July 11 Candy - Combinations with Satoku Fujii, Natsuki Tamura and Usui - Chiba
An hour's journey by local train brings us to the low industrial sprawl of Chiba, prominently featured in the opening chapters of William Gibson's "Neuromancer." The center features a cluster of futuristic office towers visible from the hotel but most of what I see is shopping mall complexes and cookie-cutter apartment blocks reminiscent of Moscow though in much better shape. The office towers are mostly vacant as are the sidewalks, further evidence of an overly optimistic building boom during the bubble. At the same time, in the neighborhood near the train-station where Candy has operated for 30 years, Chiba has much the feel of a little village. Candy is a tiny live-house which surprisingly has a grand piano. It's packed with 20 people and from past experience with these types of venues, I know that the audience will listen intensely.
The evening begins with my 15-minute acoustic solo after which Usui and I perform a 30-minute duet with many radical shifts and quite focussed throughout. A 20-minute break leads to a trio with Satoku on piano and Natsuki on trumpet - I concentrate on soprano sax for the first half of this 40-minute piece then switch to guitar. The mode is quite sonic though pitched material does appear fleetingly. Again, lots of fibrillation and hi-density. We pause and Usui joins us for the final torrid quartet, lasting about 20 minutes and finishing to great applause. After greetings, it's off to a neighborhood ezakaya for one last dinner in Japan before preparing for my return trip to NYC. I'm looking forward to the 12+ hours of flight to rest up for the grueling days ahead and the flight is quite tranquil except for a 5-minutes of poundingly intense clear-air turbulence 45 minutes outside of Narita. I land at JFK on the 12th, 30 minutes before my departure in Japan.

July 14 Terraplane + Henry Kaiser & Glenn Phillips - Tribute to Willie Dixon - Tonic NYC
The day after arrival is spent preparing for this live concert/recording session featuring the guitarists, vocalists Eric Mingus and Queen Esther, Melvin Gibbs on bass, and Lance Carter on drums. Henry and I have done most of the planning by email and we've come up with a list of songs that are mostly not so well-known plus a couple of classics that will benefit from our treatment. The obscurities include "Dead Presidents" (a title that brings a cheer), "It Don't Make Sense - You Can't Make Peace," "Eternity" (composed together with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead,) "Gravedigger," and "Egg or Hen." Glenn, from Atlanta, is a virtuosic guitarist and veteran of the Hampton Grease Band - we were SST labelmates in the '80's but this is our first meeting. We convene on the 13th at Studio zOaR and go over grooves, arrangements, and the division of vocal assignations. We've arranged for a 24-bit digital recording by engineer Jody McAllister and meet at Tonic in the afternoon on the 14th to set up and rehearse. Everyone's schedule is complicated and things are massively delayed - I feel we don't really go over as much as we should. Sometimes this has the effect of sharpening perceptions and this is borne out. Despite a few train wrecks (no fatalities!) we stomp through two sets getting excellent versions of many of the songs with long guitar solos from everyone and nicely contrasting vocals from the singers.

July 15 Roy Smeck Tribute - Barbez - Brooklyn
About 20 years ago, filmmaker Alan Edelstein made "Wizard Of The Strings," a wonderful documentary about the multi-string player Roy Smeck, a hugely popular and influential player who appeared in some of the first sound films, helped create modern Hawaiian guitar music, and performed utilizing many tricks that we would today call "extended techniques" to produce all sorts of noises and sound effects on ukulele, steel guitar, banjo, and guitar. I had called Smeck "the Eddie Van Halen of the 20's" in an interview in 1985 and Edelstein and I met shortly thereafter. With writer Bill Milkowski, we conducted an interview with Roy, never published. Cut to the present, and Alan has arranged a screening at this funky little Brooklyn boite and has asked me to perform.
After the film, I plug the Godin into the house PA and begin in Vastopol tuning with some ragtime bottleneck blues, "Sitting On Top Of The World" (during this song, I have to battle a front-row gent loudly tapping his foot with not the best sense of rhythm,) and "I'll Stand There Cheering...". I tune down to D- and finish with a long Velocity Of Hue set - the resonance of the small room allows fantastic overtone ringing which leads me to new territory in the tapping sequences. The packed room is enthusiastic so I return to standard tuning and play a version of Monk's "Bemsha Swing". I enjoy doing this so much that I'm now considering recording an entire CD of Monk on acoustic guitar.

July 22 Four Dogs - Ensemble Sospeso - Walter Reade Theater - NYC
As part of Lincoln Center's Summer Festival, Sospeso was commissioned to perform live scores to the avant classic "Un Chien Andalou" by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Besides scores newly written by Sospeso's Kirk Noreen and Josh Cody, there is an old score by Wolfgang Rihm and my own "Akadak," freshly composed for this event and titled as a reference to Cadaques, the Spanish village where the film was written. For my piece, the group includes flutist Cecile Daroux, clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt, pianist Stephen Gosling, accordionist William Schimmel, violinist Vesselin Gellev, cellist Michael Finckel, and myself on the Godin guitar - there is also an electroacoustic backing track on CD which I composed during my time in Japan in ProTools on the Powerbook and exactly synchronized to a Quicktime of the film that I was given by Sospeso. Because of my dense schedule, I had only 2 1/2 days to compose the score for the musicians but had watched the film so many times in the previous few weeks while composing the electroacoustic component, that I felt that I had absorbed the structure and many levels of unspoken meaning. The composing felt more like transcription of my inner voices and it went smoothly and quickly with the measures of the score synchronized to the film's SMPTE timecode. Not so the printing - strange bugs always seem to appear at the last minute, bugs that ate four hours of time, much toner, and many pages of paper. Still and all, by early Monday morning the 19th, it was printed, copied, and bound, and our first rehearsal later that day went off easily - the virtuosic players greatly helped as did the sensitive conducting of Rand Steiger, in from San Diego for the event. We rehearsed twice more while viewing the Quicktime and I was lulled into a relaxed anticipation of the concert.
Arriving at the hall for dress rehearsal on the day of the show, I was told that the actual film to be screened was 36.5 seconds longer than the Quicktime we had been given. No one knew how this came to be! The written parts were not a major problem: by slowing the tempo down about 5% and fudging a few entrances, my synchronization could be maintained. Not so with the backing soundfiles. I attempted to timestretch them in Rand's computer (not having my own with me) but the artifacts produced were unacceptable. It boiled down to performing the piece completely acoustically, improvising a guitar part to replace the prepared sounds, or somehow using a backup mp3 on my iPod and manipulating it to make it fit. This seemed to be the best solution and we were able to rehearse it - I found that if I stopped it twice in silent sections and held it for 15 seconds or so, it would cover the length of the piece and maintain sync well enough that only I would notice any anomalies. I can't say that I relished this approach as I find the iPod buttons do not have the feel of reliability and in the dark, I would not be able to clearly see the little screen.
The evening began with the Noreen, very whimsical, and continued with the Rihm, stark and conceptual with long silences. After intermission, the witty and engaging piece by Cody was performed, and then "Akadak" to finish the event. The first minute or so went smoothly and I realized that it might actually work - I started breathing again and was able to enjoy the precise and spirited playing of the ensemble and to concentrate on my own playing as well. I didn't mess up the iPod pauses and we ended together to great response. Watching the film so many times, I was truly amazed at how much more is revealed with each viewing, visually and also conceptually, metaphorically. Hopefully, this project will continue with more performances.

July 24 - Benefit for Sim Cain - Tonic NYC
Drummer extraordinaire Sim Cain has worked with Hubert Sumlin, Henry Rollins, the J. Geils Band, Ween, David Poe, Eric Mingus, Marc Ribot, John Zorn, my own Terraplane and Orchestra Carbon, plus many other musicians. In April he fell down some stairs - the pain was diagnosed as a sprained ankle so he did little to treat it. A few unbearable months later, another doctor has correctly analyzed the problem as a broken ankle. It's necessary to re-break and set it again with the help of bone grafts. We rally to his financial help and arrange this event. Rousing performances from various singer/songwriters that work with Sim including Chris Hartford and Poe; Zorn's Masada; Ribot's Mystery Trio; an impromptu trio from Vernon Reid, Melvin Gibbs, and Lance Carter; Mingus; and finally, Terraplane with Hubert Sumlin and Mingus. At the end we're joined by Vernon Reid, Melvin, and Sim for some blues classics. The house was packed and cheering throughout!

(photo by ivan jerchich)
July 28 - Benefit for Markus - Tonic NYC
Another Tonic night, another benefit for another injured member of our little community. Many great sets including White Out. I had just come to listen and give support but Zorn asked if I had a guitar. I borrowed a funky Danelectro reissue from sound-engineer Michelle Casillas and we played an intensely jagged improv trio with John on alto and Ikue Mori on laptop.

August

August 12 Meridian Arts Ensemble - "Beyond The Curve" at Tanglewood Festival
Tanglewood in the 1950's was a festival that presented much innovative music with premieres by Pierre Boulez and Ornette Coleman. The 10-year old Ozawa hall is modern in feel but with a strong nod to both New England and Japanese traditional architecture - excellent acoustics, especially when the rear wall is opened to admit the audience and weather.
We do a long tech rehearsal the day before the concert and I encounter feedback problems with the resonator patch though other processors are very effective. Also, the system is mono which eliminates the usage of some of my more spatial effects. We first try feeds from the overhead recording mics (all omnidirectionals) plus a 414 cardioid near the drums but end up using the 414 alone placed in front of the ensemble to cut down on undesired pickup. The ensemble itself is completely unamplified in the hall and can only hear the processing in the ambience of the hall. I'm using one side of a headphone to monitor the computer directly from my mixing desk. It doesn't tell me anything at all about the overall mix but I can at least hear the output of the Max patch. In the end, I decide to err on the side of subtlety and not to push the processing in the mix, instead using it to add low-level chatter and commentary as well as shifting the harmonic spectrum in sustained passages. This may have been a strategic error as a few people tell me after that the computer was too low in the mix.
The 1100 seat hall is nearly full and the ensemble begins with a perfect version of Elliott Carter's "Brass Quintet" from 1974. Carter joins them onstage at the end to a huge ovation. This is followed by Stephen Barber's "Semahane," an intermission, then "Beyond The Curve," David Sanford's "Corpus", and finally three pieces by Zappa. The Ensemble is wildly received and play an imaginative arrangement of "Purple Haze" for an encore. BTC is played with precision and fire and I'm very pleased that feedback is absent and the computer functions as desired!

August 28 Raw Meet at Willisau Jazz Festival
Greatly looking forward to this chance for the trio to perform again. Lance and I take a very bumpy flight to Munich and make our connection to a brief Zurich flight then a 75-minute drive to Willisau. Our hotel is situated on the Sursee and I have a stunning view from my room - perfect antidote to this last two weeks of work in NYC.
The night of our arrival, go the festival and meet up with Matt Shipp, Josh Roseman, Guillermo Brown, William Parker, Pierre Audetat, and many others and to renew acquaintance with Adrian Sherwood who is there to mix his Tackhead project with fantastic musicians Doug Wimbish, Keith LeBLanc, and Skip McDonald. Adrian and I last met in London in a wired and smoky haze over 20 years previously so its great to catch up and also to do the backstage hang with everyone.
Our soundcheck is at a very civilized hour the next day and Melvin meets us onstage, arriving directly from his Saalfelden gig with Arto Lindsay the previous night. The sound in the hall is a bit diffuse but the crew and equipment are great so soundcheck is efficient. We break for coffee and soon return to the stage to open the day's activities with a 2:30 PM set. Fortunately, the hall's shades block the light quite well so it's dark enough that we can imagine that we're playing late at night - a much better time for this music.
We leave a lot of space in the playing density but don't hold back on intensity and feel the full attention of the 2000 or so listeners. We play continuously, seguing between our pieces before pausing to announce our final tune, "Sonny's Way." Appropriately enough, Sonny Sharrock's birthday was the previous day. For an encore, we do an impromptu "Goodbye George" dedicated to the Evil Beast in DC. Much great feedback from audience members who come up and share very detailed responses about where the music brought them. Our set is followed by Marc Ribot's Albert Ayler Project with Henry Grimes and Roy Campbell. After a fantastic dinner of local venison, we spend the evening in and out of the festival catching music and catching up with friends. Back to the hotel at 2:30 AM and a 4:30 departure brings us back to Zurich Flughafen, Frankfurt, and NYC.
I'd been dreading the return trip figuring the presence of the Republicans would turn our already occupied-territory into a paranoid fortress. But Frankfurt was surprisingly tranquil for a Sunday, especially one at the end of August, and security was quick. After a beautiful flight back and speedy customs clearance, we found empty roads and the drive back into the city took only 20 minutes, an absolute record. Still, I couldn't rid myself of the anger I felt at the invading armada. I've written about this before, but I'll delve in again. For many decades, NYC was a special island, not really America. It was a place where the arts could thrive and new ideas could be played out, both for our colleagues and for interested visitors and local denizens. This changed greatly during the 1980's with real estate prices steadily rising, fueled by Disney's development of the Times Square area into a "NYC theme park." Soon it became impossible to walk anywhere, the sidewalks clogged with plodding fat-butt melto's from the provinces, gawking at everyone and walking four-abreast. The demographic of those able to afford the new rents changed as well - this inevitably affected the cultural outlets with more marginal places forced to close or bend their programming to cater to the new public. I often said during those days that NYC had been "invaded by the Americans." People in New York state outside of NYC had always hated and feared our metropolis and this emotion was magnified exponentially in the country at large. With a tamed and normalized NYC, it could be appreciated as an exotic tourist attraction with only the merest whiff of danger or deviance to add a frisson of excitement. This all took a new and more sinister tone after 9/11 with the city literally under a military occupation and the incessant fear-mongering of the government damaging or even paralyzing the entire creative flux while the Amrkns patronized and condescended to us. Of course, with this political convention, the Republicans crassly sought to exploit the images and memories of 9/11 for their own nefarious propoganda ends and to even rub our liberal noses in the stench of their presence, here in the symbolic heart of all they were not and could never be.
 

September

September 19 E# - Janene Higgins Hi-Teca Festival - Porto, Portugal
A great pleasure to return to Portugal, this time in duo with Janene to a city which I'd only visited by passing through the airport. The few days in NYC prior to departure are spent recording five Thelonious Monk pieces on solo acoustic guitar using the Dell Arte Grande Bouche. It's a project I've thought about for years and now seemed the time to do it! Using a Royer 121 ribbon microphone into a Focusrite ISA220 preamp and a stereo pair of AKG 460B's into Sytek preamp/Summit SCL200 compressor into ProTools, I recorded three versions each of Bemsha Swing, Misterioso, Well You Needn't, Epistrophy, and Round Midnight. Trying to keep editing to a minimum to preserve the live feel and work mostly on the sound of the songs almost to the time we leave for the airport. Will mix on return.
Fine flights to Frankfurt and on to Porto and after some rest on arrival, meet most of the other performers for a dinner: Carlos Zingaro, Ben Rubin, Christian Fennesz, Burnt Rosenman, Philip Jeck, and more. Performances on the 18th are Jeck and Fennesz, solos and duo. Janene and I are the next night after Zingaro's group performs. The theatre is only one-year old and seats about 300 - excellent equipment, lighting, acoustics, screens. Soundcheck is slow getting started but so are we - it's Sunday morning and the previous night went quite late. Janene and I perform a flowing version of Suspension this night to good response.
The next days are spent exploring Porto and environ, enjoying the architecture, food, wine, beach, and hospitality of organizer Pedro Santos. Especially enjoy the sounds of the local seagulls, strangely nocturnal and producing an incredible array of synthesizer-like calls, glisses, echoes, and cackles.

Sept. 29 New England Conservatory, Boston, Mass. & TT The Bears, Cambridge.
Arranged to do a colloquium in Lee Hyla's class at NEC moderated by Michael Gandolfi. Divide my time between theoretical/historical overview of my work as composer and performer and how they interweave. This leads to discussion and viewing of pics of the installation work and the instruments. Great questions from a full class of smart and engaged musical thinkers - inspiring!
Off to soundcheck at TT''s in Cambridge. Cul de Sac has hosted this evening and it begins with their guitarist, Glenn Jones, performing a Fahey/Basho inspired acoustic set after which I perform Velocity of Hue to good response. The evening finishes with Cul de Sac, a band I've known for many years and heard in a variety of incarnations especially this latest with Jonathan LaMaster. We stay on the Atlantic at Jonathan's house with crashing waves and seagulls replacing NYC's car alarms and pigeons.
Bill T. Miller took some great pics at this event, they can be found here.

Sept. 30 Velocity of Hue - Bezanzon Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
A funded concert that has made this New England trip possible and is sponsored by the university station, WMUA. The 200-seat hall has been recently renovated and is physically quite beautiful though there is a vicious 600ms slapback from the rear wall and serious bass-loading on the stage. I can't really tell from onstage how the sound is projecting but I trust the ears of the crew. The presence of the audience tames the sound a bit but not much. This is the night of the first presidential debate so we decide that I should play two sets to allow the audience to comfortably depart if they wish to view it. I'm fired up for the first set (sans computer) and find a number of new territories to explore plus allow myself to dig in and extend certain processes. I use the computer for the second set and feel disconnected from it, searching for nearly10 minutes before I feel the sounds are working. This may be illusion, though - I've often noticed that there's little correlation between how a concert feels when performing and how it sounds listening after to a recording. Fantastic response from the audience - I'm surprised and moved by a standing ovation.
After, it's a treat to see a number of old friends from past phases of existence and then dine on Barbara's excellent home-cooking with hosts Glenn Siegel from WMUA, composer Michael Dessen, and their friends. Janene and I return to the hotel in the fog and decide to delve into the debate wrap-ups and highlights. While Kerry is not very inspiring, there's no doubt that he's the lesser of two evils and certainly the only one of these candidates who can make a coherent argument! If it wasn't so appalling that this dolt Bush is president, it would be incredibly amusing. It's just unfortunate for the rest of the world that so much power resides with these criminals. Hopefully, the debates will allow some clarity to intrude!

October

The week previous to departure is crammed with work on my piece "Ripples and Heats" for the Kitchen House Blend Orchestra concert November 19 & 20 and the opera "A Modicum Of Passion" with a text by Lauri Bortz. I thought her finely wrought and wickedly funny text would benefit from a spare instrumental approach and composed the piece for string quartet plus voices. Cellist Garo Yellin assembled a fine group of players and we recorded very quickly at Studio zOaR using a pair of AKG460B's into the Sytek/Summit combination. I used Neumann TLM103 and AT4033 mics for the vocals. Ben Miller sang the tenor part of Tobias and Eric Mingus the baritone part of Jakob. Joan Wasser sang the Breeder and Devorah Day the Housegirl. I had to mix, edit, and master before leaving so that Abaton could put the CD into production to be ready for the December 12 premiere at Bowery Poetry Club. Everything complete, it was a great relief to get to the airport and relax into an easy flight to Paris and some hours of sleep at the hotel then a chance to walk around, drink espresso and eat butter real croissants, have various meetings, and finally attend the performance of the Brian Ferneyhough/Charles Bernstein opera "Shadowtime", an overly-long and dry piece with flashes of great brilliance and beauty in the writing but marred by amateurish staging and video.

October 27 Velocity of Hue solo - Cave 12 - Geneva
First concert on this tour is the Cave 12, always an enjoyable place to perform, especially to a packed house with open ears. I'm plagued with tuning problems this night as the guitar sat upstairs in the cold house during dinner and the venue was uncharacteristically warm. The tuning never stabilized, a fact which bothered me but not the audience, especially during those sections where I fretted and chorded more traditionally. Decided not to use the computer at all - it was a pleasure to have neither it's potentials nor distractions and to just concentrate on the possibilities at hand in the Godin itself. This yielded some good surprises notably while tapping harmonics over the 16th-18th frets in the latter part of the performance to create a bluesy gamelan effect. Internal clock a bit off - thought I played 45-50 minutes and it turned out to be 75.

October 29 Expedition + E# - Cox 18 - Milano
This squat/cultural center is usually referred to as Conchetta because of its address and has been a fixture in the Milano scene for years and includes an extensive bookstore as part of its operations. I join Steve Piccolo, Gak Sato, and Luca Gemma for this set featuring their original songs, improvisations, and a cover of "A Day In The Life" and do a 15-minute solo guitar cameo mid-set. The house is packed and very responsive. Luca is suffering from a cold and this cuts his vocal range but I still very much like the timbral quality of his singing.

October 30 Expedition + E# - Mercati Generale - Catania
We're all looking forward to this brief trip to Sicily to escape Milano's cold rainy weather, to enjoy the Sicilian coffee, wine, and cuisine, and to play at this welcoming venue about 20km outside of town. The promoter has bought us tickets on Windjet which seems promising until we experience it. The flight keeps getting delayed with no info forthcoming from the Wind people and when we finally board the plane almost 90 minutes late, we find it to be a VERY tired old Airbus with internal signage in Arabic and the most-densepack seating I've experienced. The cushioning is long gone and my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me. Despite the bad weather the flight is not too bumpy and 90 minutes later we're disembarking in balmy Sicily. After a doppio ristretto at the hotel's rooftop bar, it's off to soundcheck.
The club is a former winery that has been beautifully renovated with palm and cactus gardens and good sound equipment though the concrete-faced room is quite loud with a hollow stage to turn any low frequencies into mud. As an added treat, we're right in the airport landing-path and find ourselves competing sonically with the jets. We eventually finish soundcheck and enjoy the food and then hit. Conchetta served as a great rehearsal and we sail through the set. Luca is still suffering from his cold but he and Steve find new ways to blend and interchange their vocal parts. The improvisations are vibrant this night. The hotel return is at 3:30 in the morning and we're all-too-soon back at the airport for our flight back to wet Milano.

Oct 31 Night of Belphagor - Music for Silent Films - Cinema del Comune di Milano
Organized by cellist Walter Prati and lasting from midnight until 7 in the morning, this marathon Halloween event brings together silent films with various groupings of local musicians including Gak and Piccolo plus myself as a guest. The evening begins with the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera with a score by Claudio Chianura. We later have very enjoyable interactions with a Betty Boop film and Mickey Mouse film with themes relevant to the holiday. The highlight of the event, as it were, is four hours of Belphagor, a serialized suspense/mystery film from the golden dawn of cinema. Divided into four sections and beginning at 3 AM, we're on for parts 2 and 4. I don't find the film all that compelling though there are some beautiful images. We just concentrate on the playing with good results and some excellent accidental synchronisations. This type of event creates a hypnotic mind-state with the last hour especially intense. Unfortunately for the event, the skies opened up with pouring rain at 11:30 PM keeping down the number of audience members though I'm quite surprised by how many do show up with a big surge around 5 AM.

November

It's great to have Nov. 1 free for sleeping, reading, and dining and then a recording session with Gak Sato on Nov. 2. Wake up the morning of the 3rd hoping to hear that Bush is finished but am only treated to the news of the Ohio votecount. Not optimistic as I remember all too well the head of Diebold Corporation, maker of electronic voting machines, addressing a Republican fundraiser and announcing how proud he would be to deliver Ohio to Bush. This raised a stink, of course, and he quickly said that he "didn't mean to say that" Right. Off to Switzerland in the afternoon with a fine trainride through the Alps to take my mind off the USSA.

Nov. 3/4 E# meets Stade - Dampfzentrale - Bern
Drop things at the hotel and off to soundcheck with Stade, the duo of Pierre Audetat and Christophe Calpini who I'd collaborated with previously this year in Lausanne. We're performing in the Musikkellar of the Dampfzentrale, a cultural center built in an old power station by the river. With Semantics, I performed at one of the first concerts there in 1987. Now the place is very slick with multiple theaters and performance spaces and somewhat of a laissez-faire attitude about promotion. Still, our host Christophe is very magnanimous and a pleasure to work with. At dinner, we get the word that Bush is declared the victor and it casts a serious pall. I force myself to avoid ranting as the dinner is too good to be ruined by the bile of politics. It's incredible how Americans consistently vote against their own self-interest (not to mention the interests of everyone else in the globe!)
We head to the venue and find that attendance is very light (the second night as well.) The lack of promotion is multiplied by an act of omission on the local newspaper - very unfortunate as this is the main source of info to the community about events. I perform Velocity Of Hue sans computer to start each evening and then we collaborate. Pierre is having trouble with his sampler both nights but it works well during our set. Stade does a beautiful speeding up/slowing down thing that I really like. Their grooves are rooted in hip-hop but they mutate them extensively.

Nov. 5-8 London Musicians' Collective Festival - Museum of Gardening - London
Up at 6 to get the train to catch my flight to London from Zurich - the check-in attendant is extremely snide and tries to extort an excess-baggage fee because I have 25 kilos of baggage and she claims one is only allowed 22. I know this is not true but there is no supervisor to be found. 3 kilos over a dubious limit and she's making a capital case! i believe its best not to get angry though I'm astounded at the situation. I pull out 2 packages of Italian espresso and two books and she allows the bags to go through without charge. Arriving in London, I find that the bag with all of my clothing, my mini-disk recorder, my camera interface, and various other things (including more espresso) has not arrived. British Air cannot find it anywhere in their system (and this continues for days.) I suspect sabotage by the attendant. I'm not happy at all and have to make do with the clothes on my back for three days, washing them in my hotel-room sink and drying by iron - a drag!
The Festival is a brighter situation though and very much a pleasure. The venue is an old church converted into the Museum of Gardening (an activity taken very seriously in Britain) in whose yard lies buried the body of Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty. There are various exhibitions filling the room with the center open for seating, providing a dramatic setting for the Festival which features fifteen guitarists (many unknown to me) and curated by Londoner Alfredo Genovese who also performs. I meet many old friends over the three days as well as making new ones and get to hear some musicians in performance whose work I know only from record or on the web. The concerts are broadcast on Resonance FM, an incredible radio station that also has a streaming web presence. I also go the Resonance studio to record a Clear Spot program on my work hosted by Phil England and KJ Grant (who sang on the Carbon CD "Truthtable", on "Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Yahoos", and on the first Tectonics CD.)
My set is on the 6th and I perform Velocity Of Hue material standing instead of sitting, giving it some extra physicality. The sound equipment and acoustics are excellent, and the sound on stage is resonant and springy giving the guitar strings a suppleness that is exhilarating. Over the 3 days, the rest of the lineup includes Keith Rowe, Billy Jenkins, Annette Krebs, Paulo Angeli, Paul Mumford, Dave Tucker, John Bisset, Tom Besley, Susan Alcorn, Peter Cusack, Simon King, Janet Feder, and Alan Licht.
Spend Sunday afternoon visiting with author Russell Hoban and recording him reading his lament for the death of Thelonious Monk and three excerpts from his classic novel "Riddley Walker" - a MUST READ! I'll make musical settings for these readings to be broadcast on WPS1. An easy flight and I'm back in NYC. My missing bag turns up finally two days later with the kilo of espresso missing - at least my clothing and electronics have made it back! By examining the routing tags, I see that my bag spent time in Pristina, Yugoslavia - let's hear it for British Air incompetence! I hope to never fly them again.

Nov. 19-20 "Ripples And Heats" performed by The Kitchen's House Blend Orchestra
Last summer, The Kitchen's Associate Music Director, Chris McIntire, commissioned me to compose a piece for this ensemble to be premiered at their seasonal concert and to honor Sam Furnace. Also on the program are premieres by loft-jazz pioneer Joe McPhee and Geraldine Celerier from Mexico City. The group is an incredible collection of top players: Russell Johnson-trumpet, Curtis Hasselbring-trombone, Jim Pugliese-percussion and vibraphone, Tony Lewis-drums, Rudresh Mahantappa-alto sax, JD Parran-various saxophones & clarinets, Kevin Ray-bass, Nioka Workman-cello, Marlene Rice-violin, and Kathy Supove-piano.
I wanted to pay tribute to Sam's memory, musicianship, and friendship but I didn't want it to be programmatic or simplistically a portrait. I used some typical compositional processes for me: layering, chaining, and hocketed parts that transform and expand. There were also some explicitly lyrical and jazzy melodies and counterpoint. The title refers to both the internal processes of the piece and to Sam's burning playing (and his email tag "moreheat.")
This music ended up being quite tricky for the players and sorely testing my limited chops as a conductor. Over the course of the three rehearsals, I did some re-writing to clarify things and also verbally explained to the players how their written parts were just a point of departure for processes that could be explained but not necessarily notated. To expand vertically on the written material, I cue soloists in and out during the four final sections of the piece. The total duration is approximately 20 minutes.
Our first concert was at noon on the 19th with an audience mostly of high school students from the International School in Brooklyn - all recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, Africa - some of the women wearing burkas. "Ripples And Heats" goes down quite well - a very accurate performance - perhaps a bit less energetic than I would have hoped for but really quite good considering the hour and that we had another performance that evening. A question & answer session followed the performance with most of the questions coming not from the students but their teacher and from other guests. Still, the students seemed quite enthusiastic to both the music and the discussion which touched not only on musical issues but also on the history of extended techniques for piano, the process of mixing composition and improvisation, and the nature of conducting. Friday evening performance is a little wilder and the best was saved for Saturday night with all of the players more confident in their knowledge of the materials of all three composers. Each performance of the piece had different strengths and weaknesses. It was all recorded to multitrack so at some point I'll be able to listen and analyze.

Nov. 23 E#-Bobby Previte Duo - Lantaren - Rotterdam, Holland
Smooth flights to Frankfurt and Schiphol/Amsterdam where I meet Bobby just off a 747 from LA where he's completed a tour with Charlie Hunter. The venue is dedicated to film presentation with a wide-ranging program plus a music series in the theatre, a black box with superb acoustics for quiet presentations but a bit more difficult for loud drums and electronics. It's a high-density set with good interactions and the mid-sized audience is enthusiastic in a Dutch way. I've brought the 8-string and the curved soprano sax instead of the bass clarinet. Also for this tour, picked up an AKG dynamic D409 clip-on mic for the horn which allows pretty high-gain amplification without feedback - very useful when running through effects and amplifiers and into the Max patch. It's great to play the 8-string again after a long hiatus using mostly the Godin acoustic - it's compactness and solidity feel like a physical extension, not so much a held instrument. Likewise, the curved soprano - it's not as deep and rich sounding as my Martin straight horn but it has a more "sax-like" quality rather than oboe-like (a function of the straight conical bore) and it's very compact in size.

Nov. 24 Paradox - Tilburg
The promoter has reserved a combi-taxi to pick us up at 11:30 for the brief trip to the Central Station. We've built in plenty of time to make our 12;15 train. 11:40 and no taxi. The hotel telephones the company and we're told "the car is on the way - 10 minutes." 11:55 and no taxi. We ask the hotel to telephone again and she is visibly annoyed. Again we're told, "the car will come." We're fuming. Time to call Frank, promoter, He calls the taxi company and then calls us back to tell us somehow the taxi was on the way but disappeared but it will be here immediately. 12:10 and Frank calls to check in just as the taxi finally arrives - the driver is amused at our irritation. We're resigned to missing the train but it's not a great worry as it's not a long trip and trains are every 30 minutes. We arrive at the station to find our train is delayed so we go to the platform just as it arrives and we get on.
In Tilburg, we taxi directly to the hotel where we're told there are no reservations for us and the hotel is fully booked. It does seem to be one of those days that always materializes on a tour - better we get it at the beginning. We retire to the bar for lunch and the concierge comes in 30 minutes to tell us that they found our reservation at the hotel across the street. We schlep things over and settle into our rooms until soundcheck.
Soundcheck is smooth and made smoother by my decision to forego use of the computer. Ambient ground hum problems in the room confirm that this was probably the correct decision. The club is smallish with a capacity of 175 and the acoustics are such that we don't need much from the PA. We play one long set to a very warm response. New regions explored on this night, very psychedelic, and excellent dynamic range from very quiet to outright roaring.

Nov. 25 Jazzkeller - Hofheim, Germany
An easy trip to Frankfurt then 40 minutes wasted in shuffling from line to line in the Reisezentrum in the Frankfurt station until we finally get a clerk who knows what they're doing and is able to make the simple changes we need in our tickets for the following days (though we find out on Saturday that he's messed things up more causing extra charges.) Off to Hofheim by putt-putt and a brief pitstop at the hotel, a quick setup and soundcheck with a fine crew, and finally a wonderful dinner cooked by our host Esther Arvay from the Club der Jazzfreunde.
The club itself is a dark cellar in the old train station - it has a funky vibe in the best sense of the word and the full house crackles with expectation. It's great to see many old friends from the Akut festival in nearby Mainz. We play a short first set of 35 minutes but of great intensity - I thought it was longer but my internal clock was off - perhaps missing an installment of my minimum daily caffeine requirement. The set made up for its brevity with an elegant arc and the feeling that every saturated furious sound was inevitable. A longish break to refuel on coffee and a taste of the local apple cider - light in alcohol content and slightly sour in a bracing and refreshing way.
We jump into the second set with the same fire and play for over 75 minutes then are called back for three encores - we make each one shorter and more-filled with angular absurdity. These gestures are greatly appreciated by the audience and the concert is finished. After, we meet and speak with many people. A few tell me that they regularly read this tour diary. I'm always truly happy to hear this kind of feedback and my greetings to them!

Nov. 26 Solo Tectonics - Galerie - Stuttgart
Thanks to Peter Daners for setting this up on short notice on what would have been a free day. The gallery has blocky columns and raised levels that gives the impression of hidden places and the owners dedicate it to new multimedia and video art. There's an intriguing-looking German guitar-amp of mid-60's vintage hiding in the back but it doesn't look as if it will do justice to the frequency range of the 8-string so I choose to use only the house PA: two monitors on pedestals and a powered sub-woofer with a Peavey desk driving it. It all sounds quite good and gives me clean headroom and ample power to fill the space.
Opening is the duo of Goh Lee Kwang, a Malaysian composer using only a "prepared" DJ mixer and Tim Blechmann on laptop performing a very reductionist set. The gallery is packed when I commence with fast tapped fluttering gestures on the 8-string that resolve into bass polyrhythms. The tempo and density of this gesture is referred to throughout the hour-long set. One notable part involved the soprano sax into the GRM Tools Shuffle creating a three-dimentional cloud of hocketed guttural squeals that morph into a tsunami wall of granulated droplets. In three instances in the set, I used AIFF files of drum tracks that I had created for the Tectonics CD's and had used in performance previously. They felt a bit flat on this night in comparison to the material created on the fly - I may forego the use of them completely in future Tectonics sets. I was deeply moved and pleased by the strong audience response and performed an encore of 7 minutes duration with a tangy E7 chord flavor infusing it's fractured surface. The evening was recorded to DAT.

Nov. 27 Bunker Ulmenwall - Bielefeld
Meet Bobby on the platform in Frankfurt for a relaxed ride to Bielefeld and a return to this always-enjoyable venue in northern Germany. Heavy ground hum from the computer power supply that cannot be eliminated so must run it from the battery. Not quite enough time between dinner and the first set and we agree afterwards that we didn't get to the musical core but still, some intense passages. Second set again powerful but not transcendent though our final ten minutes are on it. After, a bluesy encore that builds gradually to flames then gently winds down.

Nov. 28 Teatro Polivalente Occupato - Bologna, Italy
We must travel three hours by train to Koln to catch our flight to Bologna and decide to take an earlier train to allow for anomalies. We don't have to wait long as we find our first right at the station in Bielefeld - there is a problem on the line and all the trains are delayed. This might very well have been a huge disaster in terms of missing our flight so we feel lucky. We catch a regional train to Dortmund and prepare to wait. There, a train to Munich pulls up and we're instructed to board it which gets us to Koln and an S-Bahn to the airport. After a kilometer walk through the airport shlepping our gear in search of the German Wings counter and check in, we finally find it only to be charged for excess baggage, the inevitable price of a "cheap" airline and their strict baggage limits. With the train costs added in, it would have been less expensive and much more civilized to have taken Lufthansa from nearby Hanover. The boarding is an open cattle-call but the seats are okay and the flight is smooth with some grand views of the Dolomiti shrouded in fog as we begin our descent.
We go from the airport directly to the venue, a huge old factory with a few performance rooms scaled large and small, various bars, spaces for storage and offices, some for strange little installations. There's a long tradition of these squatted spaces in Bologna and the organization of this one once operated out of an old school where Zeena Parkins and I performed in duo in 1994 and at a different one with Carbon in 1996. Organizers are very hospitable, sound crew is great, and my amplifiers are fine but Bobby's drums are completely inadequate and the organizers either did not receive or didn't read the details of the technical rider as there is no provision for his electronics. Since it's impossible to set up or soundcheck, we head to the hotel and dinner.
Arriving just before the concert, we find that the crew has cobbled together or borrowed the necessary materials and we quickly build up and adjust the sound. I forego the computer again. Two wild sets to an attentive audience and great response. We do a very quiet soprano/electronics piece for the encore and a final encore of thirty seconds of total noise. A number of old friends in the house makes for enjoyable reunions after the show. This includes guitarist Paolo Angeli who I last saw just in London.

Nov. 29 La Palma - Roma
The usual mild chaos at the Bologna stazione but we manage to get our places in the Eurostar and set off for Rome. The Italian Eurostar and French TGV trains vie for the title of "worst-designed" - it's not that they're not stylish - the visual impression is very good but the seats are not made for human adults and the storage areas for luggage are insufficient and inaccessible. At least they do deliver us from one city to another at high speed - certainly much more than the sad joke that is Amtrak travel in the USA. And one can get a very good ristretto on the train here, always a pleasure. The hotel is a converted church near the center, huge in size and labyrinthine. It's raining steadily in Roma, not just drizzle but sustained downpour, and more poor design results in run-off rainwater splashing down continuously over the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the lift to the rooms. Perhaps the former owners of the church have insisted on a baptism of all guests.
La Palma is on the edge of town and is a spacious club that has been renovated since my previous appearance there five years before (also on a day of heavy rain.) A quick soundcheck allows us to get to that most vital and important musical activity: a Roman meal in the club's restaurant. Excellent sound engineer and equipment and the room itself is resonant enough to feel live without being boomy making it pleasure to play in - we do one long set to a serious-listening audience of smaller than normal size, the foul weather having kept many concertgoers at home.
We get word that there will be a general strike of public transportation the next morning so my flight is changed to an earlier one and it's an open question as to how this will affect traffic to the airport. Ultimately, the traffic is no worse than a typical Roman morning, that is to say, very bad, but we make it to Fiumicino in decent time. My flight departs on time, one hour before the strike. Arriving in Frankfurt, I get reports of cancellations to and from Roma so I'm relieved to have made it out. A few hours layover and then crammed into a 747 for my flight to NYC.

December

Dec. 1 Oligosono "world premiere" performed by Jenny Lin - Italian Academy - NYC
A pre-concert talk is scheduled at 7pm so I have most of this first day back free to take care of loose ends and to get re-acquainted with my Pavoni espresso machine. The 3 kg of espresso I purchased in Roma made it through this time and are being put to good use!
Rick Whitaker of the Academy introduces Jenny and I to the small pre-concert audience and the discussion ranges freely around the syntax and vocabulary of my compositions, Jenny's involvement with new music, and background material including my tortured relationship with the piano as a child. It turns out that the first public performances on piano for both Jenny and myself were at Carnegie Recital Hall - mine in 1958 as part of a group recital of the students of Ms. Joan Mayer where I played Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. In discussing Oligosono, of necessity, I refer to the operations in such compositions as Tessalation Row, SyndaKit, and Quarks Swim Free - all make use of small modules that are looped and recombined in a bio-morphological approach. "Oligo" is from the Greek meaning "few" or "small" and "sono" is, of course, having to do with sound. Jenny is a phenomenal pianist in every way - her sheer technique and endurance are jaw-dropping but overall is her incredible musicality and probing intellect. The hall is quite opulent and ornate with dry acoustics that reveal detail. I would have appreciated the benefits of a bit more room reverb for Oligosono but still, the space did justice to the piece. I also enjoyed the slight irony of playing in a very low-tech squat in Bologna on Sunday, a slick jazzclub in Roma on Monday, and the luxurious Italian Academy at home in NYC on Wednesday.
By the opening of the concert, the room had filled up and the audience was very receptive to this incredibly varied program of Italian and American composers covering a huge range of pianistic possibilities. Oligosono makes use of simple techniques including polyrhythmic tremeloes that exploit the idea of the piano as a resonator with strings to create sounds not normally associated with the instrument including sweeping overtones and what sounds like sequenced filters.

Dec. 3-5 E#'s WPS1 Sonorama at Miami/Basel Art Fair
Up at 4 to do some things then catch a car to LaGuardia for my flight to Florida, that dreaded place responsible for the coup d'etat that ushered in the era of Bush 2. The plane is second in line for take-off when we suddenly turn and head back to the gate. When we arrive there, two men enter the plane and escort off an unruly passenger. He was seated in the rear and I in the front so I didn't catch what exactly happened but I do know that the pilot wanted him off and the passengers in the rear applauded at his removal. Back in line and 25 minutes later we're in the air.
As part of this giant shmoozefest called Art Basel Miami Beach, WPS1 has set up a quick-and-dirty remote unit in a cabana poolside at the "fabulous" Delano Hotel designed by Phillip Starck . There are also alternative festivals and exhibitions (Scope, Position, N.A.D.A) for the many galleries and artists operating outside of the main - apparently the Miami art scene is booming with many young and enthusiastic practitioners and supportive collectors with $$. There's a certain absurdity to this scene but I can also appreciate some great artwork and being able to sit outside in the balmy Miami air when 24 hours before I was freezing in rainy NYC - one of the many contradictions of operating in an artworld that must pledge allegiance to both market forces and corporate largesse in order to function. Hanging out poolside, one can understand that in addition to the usual fauna found in NYC, Miami hosts a large number of silicone-based lifeforms.
For this gig, I'll do a "live" version of my Sonorama show mixing favorite tracks with my microphone piece "Living Room" plus some brief electric guitar/computer improvisations that I'm titling as installments of "Serf Music For The New Feudal Era." In the pool itself, there is an audio system for which I've programmed an installation titled Soundpool consisting of a selection of tracks all having titles associated with water.
Soundpool playlist: Frog Song - Genggong Batur Sari, Blue Nile - Alice Coltrane, Atlantis - Morton Feldman, Three Little Fishes - John Barry, Das Rheingold - Richard Wagner, Water Babies - Wayne Shorter, Like Water - Bun-Ching Lam, Water MusicPt3 - Tod Dockstadter, Inspired By The Two Rivers - Salim Al' Nur, Beneath 12-Mile Reef3 - Bernard Herrmann, Surfboard - Esquivel, Spring & Neap - Elliott Sharp, Tidal Wave - Dick Dale, Atlantis2 - Sun Ra, Water MusicPt6 - Tod Dockstadter, The Waterfront - John Lee Hooker, Mists - Iannis Xenakis, Dadastream - Tectonics, Beneath 12-Mile Reef1 - Bernard Herrmann, Moon Turn The Tides - Jimi Hendrix, Sea Slurpent Sloop - Blectum From Blechdom, Glob Waterfall - Joe Meek , The Mill Pond - John Fahey, River Limba - Jeff Greinke, Atlantis1 - Sun Ra, On The Other Ocean - David Behrman
Sonorama Playlists: Dec. 3: Gordon Mumma - Epifont, Robert Pete Williams-Death Blues, Public Enemy - Son Of A Bush, James Tenney - Collage #1 Blue Suede Shoes, Skip James - Hard Times Killing Floor Blues, Michiyo Yagi - Talking Durian, Albert Ayler - New Ghosts, Simon Shaheen - Turath, Hugo Chavez - El Oraculo del Guerrero Remix. Interspersed are three versions of "Living Room" and two of "Serf Music." Dec. 4: Willie Dixon - Pie In The Sky, Banda Polyphony - Linda Music 1, Othar Turner - Running Through The Jungle, Karlheinz Stockhausen - Studie Electroniksche, Bernard Herrmann - Klaatu, Trong Quang Hai - Guimbardes Du Monde 9, Sun Ra - Journey Through Outer Darkness, Balinese Jawharp Orchestra - Katak Ngongkek, Michiyo Yagi - Seawall 1, Edgard Varese - Octandre. Interspersed are three versions of "Living Room" (one of which is interrupted by a bizarre sounding computer-crash) and three of "Serf Music." Dec. 5: Bus Ratch - Con, Robert Pete Williams - A Thousand Miles From Nowhere, Neil Young - Dead Man Theme, Gyorgi Ligeti - Chamber Concerto 3rd Movement, Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451-Fire Engine, Willie Dixon - Dead Presidents, John Fahey - Desperate Man Blues, Miles Davis - Black Satin, John Lee Hooker - Misbelieving Baby, Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451-Flamethrower, Turgun Alimatov - Music From Ouzbekistan, Willie Dixon- It don't Make Sense If You Can't Make Peace, Olivier Messiaen - La Grive Des Bois. Interspersed are three versions of " Living Room" and three of "Serf Music."

Dec. 10 E# Plays Thelonious Monk - Issue Project Room - NYC
Quite busy at the studio so waited until the last minute to go over to Issue for soundcheck and just before heading out, received a telephone call telling me that Issue's mixing desk (a small Mackie) had been stolen, most likely at a party there in the previous days. The sound engineer had gone to retrieve a simple Samson desk from his home and I arrived during the last stages of setup. Big problems with one channel in the PA, finally solved but in public - pouring rain outside so the audience was already in the space as we tweaked things. I ran the internal pickup on my Dell Arte into a Boss SE70 patched to work as EQ/compression/reverb and one SM57 was used to mic the acoustic sound of the guitar. No monitors so the feel was very much like playing an acoustic guitar in a room - quite a concept! Soundcheck complete, I ran back to my nearby studio for a last minute ristretto.
All of the seats were taken when I returned and as I began to play, even the standing room filled. I opened with Bemsha Swing and after a pause continued with Epistrophy, densifying the melody with polyphonic tapping and fragmenting the bridge with low twang. Next into Round Midnight with overtone chords and clusters as a prelude then stating the melody with false harmonics, The improvisation in Round Midnight was perhaps my most straightforward one using lots of pitched scalar material (in a bluesy vein) and the chord structure of the song. It grew more abstract as it iterated, morphing into tapped overtone soundfields and finally an EBow improvisation. More overtones and a segue into Misterioso, the chord melody manifested clearly and directly. My transcription of Monk's voicings on piano sound like country blues when played on guitar. The improvisation eventually brought me to Well You Needn't, the head revealed with a metal slide and the improvisation treading a fine line between gritty blues lines and noise squalls. The final piece was a short version of Nutty, fragmented and clustered, drawing directly on Monk's terseness and economy of movement. The audience response warranted an encore and I retuned to perform Euwrecka from The Velocity Of Hue, the Dell Arte guitar forcing me to remake the techniques used in this composition for new potentials and limitations.
Monk's music has meant so much to me over the years that I feared not doing it justice. His compositions and improvisations are filled with beautiful oppositions and simulataneities: terse and witty yet romantic and expansive, darkly cynical and quietly sentiental, acerbic and sweet.

Dec. 12 "A Modicum Of Passion" opera - Bowery Poetry Club - NYC - world premiere/record release party
I'd long been a fan of Lauri Bortz' writing (I've been friends with her husband Mark Dagley for many years and collaborated with him on many projects going back to the band Hi Sheriffs Of Blue in 1982 through work with Marianne Nowottny and other Abaton artists) and so was pleased when she commissioned me to set her play "A Modicum Of Passion" to music. More about the work and the new CD may be found here. I chose to score it for string quartet plus the four voices of Jason (Eric Mingus), Tobias (Ben Miller), The Breeder (Joan Wasser), and The Housegirl (Devorah Day). The Yellin Quartet were on hand for the recording but not for this concert. Becca Schack subbed for Joan this night as well.
The score is not overly complicated but there are a few twists. I tried to filter my love for the music of Bernard Herrmann and Olivier Messiaen through my own calipers and it blends simple, almost Shaker-like chord changes with touches of chaos and sonic extremity. The singing ranges from lyrical and poignant to horrifying - all part of the overall focus of the score. I liken the approach of this work to that of filmmaker John Waters - a mix of comedy, horror, and deeply felt emotions. As to the performance, it went surprisingly well despite a lack of rehearsal time - NYC life makes coordinating the schedule of 8 musicians almost impossible. We used a minimum of amplification to simplify at least one aspect of the evening. There were a few small trainwrecks and some time problems with the strings but overall, the singers were wonderful and the story came through quite effectively to good response.

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