Bands

Bands I am in that have shows upcoming:

• Surrealestate: improvisation collective. Playing twice in October under the direction of Cristian Amigo, once in the World Festival of Sacred Music and once at CSUDH.
• Bruce Friedman Edgy Quintet: with Rich West, Motoko Honda, and Eric KM Clark. Playing ResBox August 18, Bruce and Motoko have a CD called Edge Study with liner notes by Christian Wolff. We may be playing Wolff's "Edges" on this gig.
• Charles Sharp Group: with Anthony Shadduck, Andrew Lessman, and special guests. Playing mostly Charles' originals, which often have me and Anthony playing in different keys and meters. A really interesting two-bass free jazz band. Playing the Open Gate series in Eagle Rock Sept. 3 and somewhere in San Francisco Sept. 11, both sharing the bill with Rent Romus' Lords of Outland + Vinny Golia.
• Ben Rosenbloom trio: with Alan Cook. Playing at the Battery Books & Music June 26. A piano trio which covers a lot of stylistic ground, from Iyer-ish odd meter vamps to Paul Bley free ballads.

Bands without pending shows:

• MESTO
• Scrappers
• Rich West's Homunculus/Confabulators
• Zebra Logic
• Four on a Hill
• Scott Heustis Group
• L.A. Collective
• The Decisive Instant
• The Changing Same
• Melic Sub Rosa
• Dot Dot Dot
• Alexander Vogel Quartet

More about these when I have something to promote or semi-publicly contemplate.

A Year Later

I am returning to this blog with the goal of writing more frequently and casually, discussing projects in more detail than is really possible on Facebook. Anyway, here's what's up:

Writing:

New Black Music: LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Music, 1959-1965. Still plugging away on the rewrite. I had resolved that 2010 would be the year to hit it or quit it, and I didn't get it done, but I got close enough to want to keep going. We shall see...

The Cost of Free Jazz: Charles Sharp put together a panel with himself, Jeff Kaiser, and me, all talking about the business side of the music, for the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in February. Vinny Golia was our respondent. I am supposed to be looking for a journal that would publish our papers together.

American Music: These cats have asked me to write a couple of CD reviews for them. It's fun and I hope they will continue to do so. I can't really see pumping out short pieces for say, All About Jazz, but American Music gives me enough space to feel like I've really engaged with an album.

musical bio pt. 1

If you're reading this, you probably already know me, but anyway...

I grew up playing guitar in garage bands and school and community big bands. I had occasional run-ins with the bass guitar, then fell in love with the string bass, buying myself one as a 20th birthday present. Having successfully taught myself guitar, I assumed I could do the same on bass, and that worked well enough that I could play in undergrad jazz ensembles and hippie bluegrass bands. I took about 10 years off from the string bass while I was in grad school. After settling in L.A. in 2000, I returned to it, playing free improvisation, mainly with Surrealestate, a band of UCLA music and ethnomusicology students gone wrong. Drummer David Martinelli invited me to play with MESTO, a Middle Eastern orchestra he was in, and it did not take long on that gig before I realized I needed to upgrade my chops to hang in a string section. I started studying with David Young, from the LA Opera & Colburn School (not this guy) and continue to do so.
So, I am not conservatory trained and have not been woodshedding diligently since I was 16. They didn't even have orchestra at my high school - I played French horn in the marching band. I'm probably still working on my 10,000 hours. However, I have gravitated towards types of music where technical requirements are more elastic (i.e. Earle Brown rather than Beethoven) and where my time spent reading philosophy or art history may make me a better candidate than someone who spent that time running scales and excerpts.
I also have a professional day job (which I'll try not to talk about here) which means I do not need to make decisions about music for financial reasons. I know several bassists who would love to play more avant-garde stuff but can't afford to skip a paying gig for a non-paying one.

Welcome

Hello readers!
I'm going to use this as a space to think in public about music. My main instrument is the string bass, so there will be some bass geekery, but I'm more interested in issues, both practical and theoretical, around the weird edges of rock, jazz, and classical music.
My title comes from Tom Johnson's "Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass." Besides offering some preliminary humility/self-deprecation, this piece incorporates improvisation and unconventional notation, two of my central interests.
"Failing" is also an example of impossible music, which may be the topic of my second book. In "Failing," the player is required to speak and play at the same time. The text is about the impossibility of an accurate performance. It would be inappropriate to conspicuously struggle with the piece, blowing notes and speaking uncomfortably, but an overly slick performance would also miss the point. I'm intrigued by music which incorporates the impossibility of a definitive performance: graphic scores, text pieces like Stockhausen's "From the Seven Days," Oliveros' "Software for People," Ono's "Grapefruit," and works from the Scratch Orchestra and Fluxus, but also pieces that incorporate improvisation, whether "Giant Steps" or "In C," and arguably also pieces whose notation is so demanding as to be unrealizable, i.e. Ferneyhough. This last one is a moving target though. I know folks used to think Paganini's Caprices were impossible and now folks play them all over the place. Feldman's second quartet and Cage's "Freeman Etudes" aren't far behind. Scodanibbio even plays some "Freeman Etudes" on the bass now.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Not only should I develop my impossible music thesis in its own post, I shouldn't be thinking about it at all until I've finished the revision of what I am hoping will be my first book, based on my dissertation: "New Black Music: Amiri Baraka and Jazz, 1959-1965." I'm chipping away at that. I've resolved that 2010 will be the year that this project moves off my desk, either to a publisher or into a bottom drawer. It has been hanging around much too long. I am hoping that blogging will help me maintain momentum as a writer. I had a personal blog while writing the dissertation and it definitely made writing feel like a much more natural activity.
So, that's a start.