Chased by dogs...

When you grow up on the west coast you think that you know what raking the leaves means but you do not. There is a part of me that does not want to rake the leaves for a number of reasons, but one learns after one winter why they must be gathered up in the fall, the primary reason being that any obstruction of flowers and greenery in the spring is quite problematic after months of a colorless (relatively speaking) world. The fact is that one must pay for lush summers and so many trees. There is a whole system for this process here which is completely new to us west coast folks. Anyway, as you can see my yard is a sea, though growing less leafy by the day.

I've meant to write about my last gig as it was something of a clusterfuck. When asked about how I felt afterwards, I replied that it was somewhere in between being chased by dogs and falling down a very long steep hill. In short, the gentlemen I performed with and I have VERY different playing styles which led to a certain tension. This tension led to what would be best defined as 'barely controlled chaos' which might not be such a bad thing. If nothing else it was certainly an experience to learn from. Generally speaking, I find myself fascinated when I end up playing really differently from my 'normal musical self.' Anyway, I guess I'll leave it at that for now. In Derek Bailey's biography one of the things I found most fascinating about him, was his willingness to play with anyone and to try and learn from the experience. I'm afraid we all have the tendency to become so set in our ways, that those ways come to limit us as much as they define us.

So I have another gig this week, down in New York city on Sunday. I'll be performing with a small ensemble (six of us). The score is a piece written by a composer friend of mine named Doug Van Nort and he describes the piece as such: "the general idea is that players drone (their own pitch choices) and make slow timbral shifts mostly of their own devising. We all play into a max patch I just finished writing, which "morphs" the timbres of pairs of players (which pair and all that is part of the score...) over the course of the piece this will be 1 of 3 things: the envelope of your sound will shape/color white noise, the timbre will morph with another player (so playing together in time and quality will be instructed in the score and important in this section) or you will feed into a sustaining bed of sound. also some permutations on these..."

The show is at The Flea on Sunday at 3pm and is Free! Should be an interesting afternoon of sound if you NYC folks are interested. Me, I'm off to the leaves for now.

Posted by jeff pitcher at November 4, 2009 10:18 AM

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