Last week, I was very happy to play music with mostly new people. We improvised three sets, two in trios and then one all together. I’m not sure how many readers of this newsletter also enjoy listening to improvised music, but I like this format for distributing, in a casual way, the music that I’m making. It is a great sadness for me that I’ve not been in the studio more throughout the past decade; but at least I’m starting to remember to bring my little microphone to more gigs these days.
If you’d like to hear/see the full show, it’s up on YouTube. Here, I’m dropping the two sets that I played, with a little post-show mixing to help them sound better. In the first set, I love the beginning and the ending both, the former because of how patient we are, and the magical way that my cymbal mostly matches the pitch of a prominent tone being plumbed by Seth’s guitar. In the end, we return to the same dynamic, with Henry’s bass out front, easing us back down with soft repetition. In between, there’s all kinds of fun interplay, and I’m particularly happy with the sounds I was able to get out of bowing my cymbal, from around 7:20–8:00.
So much of this music is about texture and its unexpected delights, the surprise that can happen when your own exploration of what your instrument can do collides with someone else’s. That full spectrum of sound is on full display in the second set, perhaps less narratively structured, but with enough coherence to sustain my attention throughout. It’s a real challenge to play with five other people and not walk all over them, especially in music that often incentivizes blistering technicality. There’s some of that here for sure; but I like best the silences, the groove that takes hold around 12:00, the moments of sustained insistence.
Cry hard.