Road Reports 2010
(click pics to enlarge)
Road Reports 2010
(click pics to enlarge)
For upcoming concert dates, go here
January
January 1 Poetry Project Benefit - St. Mark's Church - Manhattan
The annual fundraiser - an institution and a great chance to run into seldom seen friends and colleagues in the backstage hang. This year these include Edwin Torres, Lenny Kaye, Penny Arcade, Roy Nathanson, the trio of Peter Zummo/Bill Ruyle/Ernie Brooks, Marlon Cherry, Erica Hunt, Taylor Mead and more. The twins remember the scene from last year and head right to the refreshment tables where Lila befriends an older girl (10-years old) and is soon behind the tables helping out for the rest of the evening. Kai joins Janene out in the audience for my solo set and plays some mean air guitar while I perform "Hangin' 010" on a parts-Strat fitted with three Japanese pickups giving it a unique timbre - it's plugged into a silver-face 70's Fender Bronco amp - like a Champ: small, light, Class A and very toneful. The piece is a cross between twangy Delta blues and tapped melodic textures in a blue mode and worked well in the packed room. In the 9-10pm block, I join Tracie Morris for our version of The Temptations' "Ball of Confusion", a fantastic song that is somehow always appropriate, regardless of the decade. Tracie and I got together to rehearse and touched on some of her sound poetry, toyed with other covers, started working on a setting of an obscure poem from Edgar Allan Poe, and finally and enthusiastically took up this one.
January 3 Entertaining Science "- "Extremes" - Cornelia St. Cafe - Manhattan
For this evening, the final one curated solely by Roald Hoffman, Roald presented two short talks concerrning extremes: one on Archaea, bacteria that thrive under conditions impossible for any other living thing; the other on the effects of extreme pressure on such substances as gases like carbon dioxide. As always, Roald was erudite, fascinating, enlightening, and entertaining. Lukas Ligeti and I improvised together alternating sets with Roald. We tried to live up to our combined reputations as extremists but also attempted to stretch the definition. We played loud and dense but also quiet and delicate, arhythmic space but also heavily grooving. This was probably our 7th time playing together and it continues to grow. For this evening, Lukas augmented the house drums with assorted small percussion instruments and objects. I brought the solidbody 8-string and only a Digitech RP250 processor. After the show, we all had dinner together thanks to the gracious hospitality of our Cornelia St. host, Robin Hirsch (also an author and actor - check out his autobiographical "Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski.")
January 9 Terraplane - Winter Jazzfest - Bitter End - Manhattan
We're booked into this combination jazz festival and cattle-call that coincides with the APAP presenters' conference - a chance for agencies to try to drum up work for their artists (no complaints here.) The Bitter End is one of the infamous West Village clubs that were transformed into tourist attractions somewhere in the 60's. When I was briefly a Lounge Lizard in 1984, we did a long run at the club that was quite enjoyable. It's actually a decent room with good stage and PA. Because the event is a marathon of bands from 6pm until 2am, there is no soundcheck - just set up and play. We do have a good slot at 845pm - the band tonight includes Reut Regev on trombone, Alex Harding on bari sax, Dave Hofstra on bass, Don McKenzie on drums, and Eric Mingus singing. The jazz group preceding us goes over their set limit so we're squeezed to get up and running. The mic stand given to me for my steel guitar is quite unstable and the house Twin Reverb has the nasty tendency of unexpectedly and suddenly jumping in volume. No chance to do anything but blast through these little problems. And blast we do - there are some kids sitting right in front of my amp who have their fingers in their ears but smiles on their faces. Because of the time limit, we play very compact versions of the songs in our set but make up for the brevity with intensity. The pressure of the evening makes for a hot set and the packed house gives us great feedback.
January 17 InMixing Closing Event - White Box Gallery - Manhattan
For the completion of Hans Breder's "InMixing" show at White Box [ http://www.inliquid.com/gallery/whitebox/whitebox.php ] Hans invited Herman Rapaport [ http://users.wfu.edu/rapapoh/index.html ] to read texts he had written about the work while I process the sound of his voice. Hans provided me with a soundfile that he'd made of some processed voice and I included it in my Ableton patch. I made much use of the GRM Freeze plug-in grabbing sections of voice and isolating short sections which would be looped and layered, sometimes transforming part of one syllable into an individual pitched tone or cloud of sounds. Herman's reading in itself was quite was poetic and musical with shifting dynamics and rhythms - a pleasure to process. The post-concert hang at a little Turkish place in Chelsea was also a pleasure, with a trio of wonderful Turkish musicians, a belly dancer, plus food and wine.
January 22 Benefit for Tuli Kupferberg - St. Ann's Warehouse - Brooklyn, NY
Producer Hal Willner called me to invite me to participate in this benefit event for 86-year old Tuli Kuperferberg, founding member of The Fugs and important NYC poet/activist/weirdo. Tuli has had two strokes and is in great need of financial assistance for his medical treatments. More info here: http://www.thefugs.com/ I prepared "Carpe Diem" off of The Fugs' First Album as a country-blues number which I sing and play on my cheapo electric sitar, a copy of the old Coral and quite a good-sounding instrument. Over the river to Brooklyn for soundcheck where Hal suggested merging my arrangement with that of the the Fugs and so we did to good effect. Also taking part in the evening were John Kruth, John S. Hall, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Lenny Kaye, Dan Zane, David Amram, Peter Stampfel, and many more. A fantastic event that raised onver $20K for Tuli!
February
February 3 E# Plays Monk - KGB Radio Hour - KGB Bar - Manhattan
Saw Mark Jacobson for the first time in years at the Tuli Benefit (and met his KGB partner-in-crime Larry Ratso Sloman) who invited me to take part in their monthly live podcast at the homey KGB Bar on 4th Street in the East Village - a mixture of talk and music. I'd attended many sci-fi readings there and looked forward to taking part. The duo of Christine Ullman/GE Smith opened the proceedings with a great old Eddie Hinton song "Cover Me" after which I did a compact version of Monk interpretations on my acoustic tricone. Started with Bemsha Swing finishing it up in Delta slide style and then touched on "Round Midnight", "Epistrophy", and "Well You Needn't" after which conspiracy-expert and KGB bartender Danny Christian did an informed and righteously paranoid rant on the Federal Reserve system and world economics. Next Shilpa Ray sang a passionate "Venus Pearl" accompanying herself on harmonium after which Sal, proprietor of Rosario's Pizza came up to speak about his philosophy and personal 48-year history of pizza in the Lower East Side (accompanying himself with a couple of boxes of fresh hot pie!) I had to leave for a meeting so did not get to hear more but the podcast is of very good sound quality.
http://www.kgbbar.com/radio_hour/
February 8 Seminar "Strategies For Composition In The Post-Digital Age" - The Stone - Manhattan
For my part in this seminar series, I spoke about how my approach to composition and improvisation is in a feedback relationship with my electroacoustic and computer work with concepts from each informing the other. The talk also ended up being rather autobiographical as that was the best way to tie the developments in my work to both cultural and technological factors. Besides playing soundfiles of various orchestral and string quartet pieces (as well as parts of Cryptid Fragments), I also projected scores and spoke about filtering and processing of the actual scores in Photoshop to create graphic scores that evoke the sounds that might have been created through digital processing of the musicians' performance. I take a very non-linear approach to these types of talks and welcomed questions and discussion. Bert Shapiro and his cinematographer Loic de Lame filmed the proceedings for the next version of "Doing the Don't". (photo by Bert Shapiro)
February 25 - "The Italian Connection" - Marco Cappelli, Andrea Centazzo, E# -White Box - Manhattan
A rare visit to NYC from Andrea Centazzo, a pioneer of free-jazz drumming whose work in the 1970's saw him recording with guitarists Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, and Henry Kaiser and saxophonists Steve Lacy and Evan Parker among many others. visit: http://www.andreacentazzo.com
Heavy winter storm forecasts and it turned out to be the kind of day that gets the global-warming deniers all fired up and joyful. NYC is slush central when Marco Cappelli and I arrive at this small Chinatown art space. Andrea has arrived earlier and his complex setup is complete (comprising a Drum Kat mallet controller, a laptop, sundry frame drums, noisemakers, and metallophones.) I plan to go direct into the stereo PA and Marco will play two pieces completely acoustically as well plugging in his resonant-string "extreme guitar" direct. Soundcheck is quick once we sort out our patching into the PA and gives Andrea and I a chance to slog thorugh the slush to nearby Little Italy for espresso. By start time we have a surprisingly good audience. New Yorkers used to take snowy weather as a challenge and insisted on going out - snowy gigs would be better attended than fair weather hits. Now there's internet and Netflix and whatever else and so at the first sign of inclement weather they hunker down in their shells. But White Box has a dedicated crowd and we all have our friends and fans so what could have been a disaster turns out to be a crackling vibe. Marco opens the evening with completely acoustic versions of two virtuosic classical pieces "Drei Tentos" by Hans Werner Henze and "Sonata op. 47" by Alberto Ginastera. He then plugs in his "extreme guitar" for "Marked by a Hat" by Annie Gosfield and my "Amygdala", both part of his Extreme Guitar Project CD that I produced for Mode Records: http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/157cappelli.html. A version of the "Amygdala" score for standard classical guitar has also recently been published by Edition Peters: http://www.edition-peters.com/article.php?inno=IN00114§ion
After a break mostly spent dealing with various hums caused by fluorescent lights and intermittent ground connections on the mixer, Centazzo and I take the stage for our duo. Even though we've never played together before, our personal gestures and vocabulary mesh quickly. The music is often textural but sometimes these textures consist of micro-rhythms that grow into full-fledged grooves. Andrea switches fluidly between sampled sounds and acoustic percussion. I make use of various extended techniques on the 8-string solidbody as well as electronic processing to render chords and melodies "other" . Our 35-minute duo is compact and energetic consisting of one longer and one shorter piece. The ending is obvious to us both. We then bring Marco up for a trio. His amplified nylon-string "extreme guitar" thickens the mix and nicely changes the geometry of our interactions (the trio being one of my favorite setups for it' s balance and trilateral symmetry.)
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