Of Frictions and Sax-sonic Poetry

Joshua Jefferson/Samuel Burt/Paul Neidhardt @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
August 2, 2008

Joshua Jefferson: alto saxophone
solo, and in a trio with -
Samuel Burt: balloons, bass clarinet
Paul Neidhardt: frictions, percussion

Like shards of explosive sonic grains the opening salvo from Joshua Jefferson's solo alto saxophone set unleashed short bursts of loud, timbrally mutilated gestures that threatened to puncture the eardrums and settle deep within the skull.  With these seeds planted within the cranium of the attentive (and rudely awakened) listeners he then followed up with short improvisations exploring the opposite extreme of volume.  The brevity of his compact, self-contained solos was poetic to a fault - leaving one longing for a mix of longer expositions and developed ideas.  The shards of poetry, and creative use of mutes, gave a sense of ideas capable of taking root where these seeds had been planted.

The second half of the first set then transitioned into a study of frictions as Samuel Burt and Paul Neidhardt applied flesh to balloons and drum heads.  The expansive, sustained volumes of bowed sheets of metal and aggressively twisted rubber settling into a long-form meditation punctuated by the abrupt pop that ended the set.

The second set brought these three creative forces into a single fold as each contributed to an attentive and organic sonic form.  Duos formed and coalesced instinctively as each player left spaces within the collective sound and mined the timbral extremes of their instruments.

Three Times After Now

After Now: Nothing you've heard before @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
Saturday, March 8, 2008

Medium - Mark A. Lackey
Mark A. Lackey: voice

embodied - Mark A. Lackey
Duo Mare + boom box
Jee Young Rachel Choe: flute
Akiko Sumi: guitar

Sacred Words In Dead Languages - Mark A. Lackey
Catherine Wong: clarinet
Devin Adams: alto saxophone
Daniel Miller: trumpet
David DeDionisio: guitar
Iain Roush: guitar
Mark A. Lackey: electric guitar
Doug Perry: vibraphone

Accretion - Samuel Burt
Jamie Schneider: oboe
Sally Sarles: viola
Cameron Raecke: viola
Nathan Bontrager: cello

[im] possibilities - C. R. Kasprzyk
Shodekeh: human beatboxer
Jeremiah Baker: soprano saxophone
C.R. Kasprzyk: laptop

Staring At The Sun - Andrew Cole
pre-rendered 4-channel fixed media

Nearo - Andrew Cole
Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart: flute
Jamie Schneider: oboe
Marc Edwards: guitar
Sally Sarles: viola
Domenica Romagni: cello

Housed within Normal's Books and Records, the pre-concert atmosphere outside the Red Room was colored by live chamber ensembles working in some last-minute rehearsal in the odd spaces between book shelves and magazine racks. I was just thinking that the Normal's sound system was sounding much better than I'd remembered it before rounding the corner of the fiction stacks to find my pathway blocked by violists and guitarists. The heady, languid harmonies being a perfect compliment in a jungle of ideas one could easily imagine a Henry Brant spatial composition filling every corner of a bookstore with such music.

The third presentation of the After Now collective turned toward a more introspective set of works in sharp contrast to the more dramatic-oriented experience of their second outing. This was particularly true of the quiet spaces plumbed by Mark Lackey's Sacred Words In Dead Languages and Samuel Burt's Accretion. Lackey's use of muting of the guitars, the plunger mute on the trumpet and the manual operation of the revolving discs within the vibraphone's resonant tubes provided an acute unity to Sacred Words while Burt explored a consistent set of intervals and dynamic timbral shifts with sustained tones for Accretion.

In Medium, Mark Lackey delivered a text on the use of lab mice to test the possible link between cell phone frequencies and cancer as he performed against a delay of his own voice channeled through a low-fidelity chain of cell phones. The appropriation of carrier networks as performance instrument managed to avoid a sense of gimmick through a combination of brevity and well-rehearsed, almost casual delivery.

Mark Lackey's embodied and C.R. Kasprzyk's [im]possibilities each explored the insertion point of crafted beats of contemporary commercial musics within classical traditions with mixed results. In embodied the bursts of groove and accompaniment emanating from the boom box managed to graft an unusual thread into the compositional logic of the piece. With [im]possibilities the beat boxer, soprano saxophone and laptop coexisted within a temporal space with few nods toward cohesive design or perceptible interplay between parts.

If there is a singular aesthetic quality to the wide-ranging After Now collective of composers it is a creative drive to shuffle the deck of tradition to place technology, chamber music and present-day vernacular musics in the age of portable, downloadable genre-mashing sensibilities into a sonic space that has yet to be discovered. I look forward to hearing what hand is dealt in their fourth concert.

Killick & 3/5ths of Benito Cereno @ the Red Room

Killick (H'arpeggione), Neil Feather (guitaint, nojo), Samuel Burt (guitaint, clarinet, voice)
Dustin Hurt (trumpet), Ian Fraser (electronics), Tim Albro (electronics)
@ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD - August 18, 2007

The first set of improvised micro-tonal music on other-worldly invented string instruments was sheer bliss. It was refreshing to hear a trio plunge head-long into such an unfamiliar harmonic territory with little more than ears and guile to guide them. The added unfamiliarity of these invented instruments completed the aural image of vast, under-explored musical territory unfolding. The sound that these three arrived at so intuitively was deeply encouraging to my micro-tonal heart.

Killick's long-necked, fretted cello-like instrument was especially interesting. At times it seemed like even the smallest movement, a slight pluck or slow strum, would expose unexpected and striking variations on the sound pallet.

The second set of the evening featured three members of the Philadelphia-based quintet Benito Cereno. Dustin Hurt was flanked on either side by card tables overloaded with electronic gear (of varying vintage) as Ian Fraser and Tim Albro covered the stereo field with their sometimes dense, but mostly quiet, electronic sound. I seemed to be sitting in the "sweet spot" of the room with the bell of the trumpet squarely in the center. The focus of the improvisational textures switched away from the harmonic territory of the first set in favor of a noise-oriented approach. Dustin Hurt's extended technique on the trumpet made for a good match with the prevailing white-noise and processed radio signal oriented sonic environment as he focused on breath and some gritty sounds running through the plumbing of his horn. Late in the set he began to introduce more familiar trumpet-like tones into the mix and they were a welcome and fleeting addition to the tense soundscape.

Artscape/Exotic Hypnotic: Global Tranquility (Sam Burt & Ensemble)

Global Tranquility @ Artscape/Exotic Hypnotic, Langsdale Auditorium, July 22, 2007, Baltimore, MD

The Sam Burt portion of this marathon concert featured music for sine tones. The first piece was an electronic work featuring restless sine tones in various frequency ranges relative to one another - creating difference tones that were particularly audible if one was close to the center of the stereo field. The "pure" frequencies of sine tones handled this way creates an interesting contour of precise smoothness and roughness that was definitely the focus of this work.

The second piece was for string quartet and sine tones and it was the string quartet that put some horse hair on these sine timbres. With long sustained tones pitted against computer generated "pure" tones this piece was an austere study of the harmonic potential of lock-step consonance combined with the beating and combinatorial tones rising from deliberate de-tunings of such consonance.