May 14, 2008 by forbes.

New new new new new New new new new new New new new new new New new new new new New new new new new New new new new new York Haven May 9 and 10 in review review review

I went to New York city on Friday, May 9 for this. I played in New Haven, CT on Saturday, May 10 as part of this.

I was in a strange zone driving down to New York on Friday. I know that I didn’t fall asleep, but I went in and out of these strange no-mind states. It was almost worse than daydreaming. I’d find myself reflecting on a topic for 20 minutes which seemed really, like one long breath.

It rained on me and I don’t really use an umbrella. I got to the Community Church about a half hour before the concert was supposed to start and I nervously watched my car. I didn’t really understand what the parking regulations were, I just knew that I would be ok at 7pm.

Most of the time I’m cool as a cucumber in public settings but I felt nervous and awkward. I ran into an old friend of mine from high school and a fellow trumpet player Eli Asher. Check him out. Anyway so we did a lot of looking back and catching up and what happened to so and so.

Finally the panel began. My review of the panel is that it was ok. I’ve explained it to people like that. You know how you hear a piece of music or see a work of art and you go “I could do that”? That’s how I sort of felt about the questions. But, but, I point out to people..that one might claim that “I could do that” when in reality they can’t do it, wouldn’t do it, and didn’t think of it. So in an attempt to be magnamious I will say that in truth I don’t really know if I could have done a better job. Also, I had already read the entire book. Wadada Leo Smith dropped some serious science. Henry Threadgill did too although I don’t know if I agreed with all of it. George Lewis was the man. They should have made him the governor of New York after Spitzer got caught.

I think that everyone on the panel had something worthwhile to say, but the format and lack of time just precluded getting more in depths gems from everyone. Just my two cents.

The concert, by “The Trio” of George Lewis, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Wadada Leo Smith was off the hook! I don’t really feel like getting too in depth with it. It was worth the trip. It’s good to watch players who aren’t afraid to be themselves. But I guess that comes with dealing with life and working at your craft for years and years.

After getting some food at Red Bamboo (the place smelled like Raid, but hey that vegan cheesecake is worth almost anything) I went to Harlem to crash with Cooper-Moore. We talked a whole lot, he showed me some of his harps and other instruments, which I couldn’t really play that well.

The next day we talked a lot more, listened to records, etc etc. I told him that my favorite thing about living in the town that he grew up in was going to the pick your own fruit farms in the next town over.

Then I made my pilgrimage to 125th st, which I hadn’t been to in at least a year and a half if not longer. Hit up Dr. Jays and Uptown Juice Bar. Best food.

I dropped off some cd’s at Downtown Music Gallery and then I headed to New Haven.

I still haven’t gotten used to the nice parts of New Haven. But I’m glad the show was in a nice part. It was at this strange bookstore that doesn’t quite seem to still be open. Or it is, but in some life-support sort of way. Carl told me that it runs off of donations or something.

Well, I played ok, but nothing to write home about. I felt kind of dejected afterwards but I listened back to it and it was bearable. There are some good things in there. It’s a good foundation I think.

So finally “I Won’t Stop” is out! You can visit www.blalqlghtn.com for more info!

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May 4, 2008 by forbes.

Check out an interview with me here. Sorry if I wasn’t more interesting. I have a bunch of gigs coming up. Playing at Music Workshop tomorrow, then I’m in New Haven on Saturday, and more stuff after that. Hard to keep track of it all.

I forgot about Lily’s birthday at the end of June and then I scheduled a bunch of stuff and she rightfully called me out on it so I’m feeling a little shitty about it. I think it will all work out but I still feel dumb.

Anyway, come to Music Workshop.

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April 17, 2008 by forbes.

Blaq Lghtn

POW! So now you can order cd’s and vinyl. That’s the story!

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April 16, 2008 by forbes.

Kevin, Ryan, Andrew and I played a concert down in Attleboro last week. We were the uh, “cocktail” music for an art exhibit at the Attleboro Arts Museum. Lily shot some footage on her camera and I put it on YouTube:

Unfortunately, an elderly woman fainted and hit her head very very hard during the gallery talk. I called 911, was transferred twice, and finally got the right people who arrived very promptly. I went to the bathroom after that to chill out and when I emerged it was business as usual. The gallery talk continued. We were also asked to play at the end as scheduled. I didn’t want to, but hey I went along with it so who am I to whine about it afterwards. I hope she is ok. I definitely think she got a concussion. Apparently, it’s not the first that it’s happened. To her.

Last Sunday the Calliope Quartet performed on Share TV with AKA, Harlo Holmes, and Jimmie Rodgers. We also did a solo set. You can watch the whole episode below. Plus the episode features a performance by Brother Blue!!

Turns out that these folks are heavy into the whole circuit bending thing, which is something that I’ve wanted to dip into for a long time now. They hosted a circuit bending workshop last night in Somerville. Lily and I went and who was there but Bill T. Miller! He also took pictures:

You can see all of them here.

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April 9, 2008 by forbes.

Not on topic, but first off I’ve been listening to Krumbsnatcha like crazy lately. Visit his myspace, you can watch his DVD and check out a lot of his music. My personal favorite, which is not on his page right now, is “The King Is Here”. He tells you what’s really in his heart which is why I like him.

Anyway, I was thinking about if you could write lines based around certain types of distributions. For example, a bell curve:

So in any given line most notes will fall within a certain area. If a line has a range of an octave, most notes will say, be in the middle. The distribution could be modeled around the number of times certain notes appear, or it could model the contour of a line. Could this make for good music? My bet is yes, because it has a sense of unity about it.

It’s kind of like Xenakis for improvisers. I believe, but do not know, that he used the Poisson distribution often.

Anyway, I’m just saying I bet you could make up cool lines by trying to at least model them on different distributions.

Posted in Philosophy | 1 Comment »

March 27, 2008 by forbes.

When I took up writing music again (post-college), I had problems because I couldn’t hold the compositions together past the eighteenth measure or so. I would just throw stuff down on the page and then try to make sense of it, but I would run out of ideas really fast. I have a short attention span, and I am not good at being consistent (with anything really).

I needed to have an overarching concept that I could start using to organize my music, and I choose prime numbers. Why? Because I have loved them since I was a kid. And, most of them are odd, so you have instant odd times to work with. But, you can put them together to add up to other numbers.

Take a measure of 4/4. Dividing that into sixteenths, you get, well 16. Breaking that down into units of prime numbers gives you a lot of options to create rhythms.

13+3
11+5
11+3+2
7+7+2
7+5+2+2
7+3+2+2+2
etc etc. I usually don’t use 1, because it’s not as interesting.

It was also inspired somewhat by Olivier Messiaen’s use of non-retrogradeable rhythms.
Once I start getting into this whole prime thing I was able to use it to organize things, which helped me actually finish pieces.

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March 26, 2008 by forbes.

Look, I’m sure this is a cliche observation but..I’ve been thinking about how we assign meaning to art. Here’s a story to sum it up.

My girlfriend Lillian is a visual artist, who graduated from college in 2007. Her senior show had a piece called “Interrogation”. One of the reviewers asked her about the significance of chairs in her work. Lily’s reply was “I like chairs”. She might had said something about spy novels or something.

So when her review came back, the woman complained that Lily’s answer wasn’t more political. Honestly, I think that the woman is a cool person. I think being aware of politics is fine and good. But I also think that it’s ok for A CHAIR TO BE A CHAIR.

One could say, well we should be aware about politics. I agree with that, but you know the truth is any given person could always do more on any given topic/issue/thing. Most of the time when people say this stuff what they really want is for you to agree with them. Otherwise, they’d be glad for you to be completely ignorant.

The reason I’m posting this and relaying this anecdote is because I ask myself questions like, “Should I explore the quote unquote meanings behind the symbolism and organizing motifs of my work?”

Example. The prime numbers have figured in heavily in a number of my compositions. Should I sit around and ask myself why? Or write about it in an attempt to make people think that I am smarter than I actually am? Well, what is a prime number, it is a number that is only divisible by one and itself. I have loved the prime numbers ever since I was a little boy. Some of them happen to be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, etc etc.

What is the signifigance of a number that is only divisible by one and itself? It remains resolute, itself. It cannot be divided by another integer. Thusly, it can be seen to represent strength. It can be seen to represent a piece in a work that is whole in and of itself.

But so what? I mean, that was fun writing that out, and I think that in the future I really will talk more about why I like magic squares, fibonacci numbers, quadrilaterals, planes, lines and line segments, etc. But so what?

Well, maybe you’ll learn something or see a way to organize your own art.

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March 21, 2008 by forbes.

I’ve also been working on learning Pure Data, and my hope is to somehow “reverse engineer” my learning of Max/MSP to a greater understanding of PD.

I don’t have much else to talk about right now. It’s cool to finally start figuring this stuff out, and get some help doing it. I’m not far enough along where I can practically use it in performance, but I hope to get there in the next couple of months.

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February 5, 2008 by forbes.

Sunday I did a little cleaning around the house. I can’t really do things like clean without music because it helps me relax and smooth out my thoughts. I put on “Feel The Sunshine” by Hugh Ragin and cleaned out..the foyer. Well, you have to start somewhere.

The awesomest part was when me and my girlfriend started dancing around to the music.

Then we went for a walk and saw some depressing shit that I won’t get into. Before we left to go to her grandfather’s house to watch the Super Bowl, I put on a Bill Dixon record and we started dancing again. If I remember right the record is “7-ette”

Anyway, the Patriots lost but life must go on here in New England. Last night Lily and I had a couple’s evening over at Andrew Eisenberg’s before going to the Music Workshop. Cricket made a great vegan paella and salad and we chilled. Andrew and I were bouncing different ideas off of each other.

Andy couldn’t make it and Brendan got sick, so I filled in for Brendan on laptop (my trumpet is at Rayburn’s). Sometimes you don’t really know what will happen in a new playing situation, but I had an excellent musical evening. Thanks to Nikolas, Jules, and Mark. I thought the electro-acoustic balance was awesome, we had a nice balance of many different playing styles, everybody got to have a solo, and we played seriously without taking ourselves too seriously (I’m thinking of Mark’s “Just kidding” comment* and Jules’ use of the rubber glove). I liked it so much that I would even want to do it again with the exact same people.

* At Cross-Pollinization II Mark stood stock still for 11 minutes straight after playing for a couple of minutes, then proceeded to do some serious violin shredding. At the time I went through the whole range of emotional and intellectual responses. But hey, it was fun. So last night he paused for about 5 seconds and then said “Just kidding” and started shredding. It was fantastic.

Posted in Performances, Philosophy, Music | 1 Comment »

January 24, 2008 by forbes.

Through my job I’m able to access a lot of information. Sometimes at work I listen to music through these digital subscription services, anything from Cannonball Adderley to Lucia Dlugoszewski. Yesterday I finally checked out some materials from the music library. I checked out Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon, Forces in Motion - The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton, and the parts for Dmitri Schostakovitch’s String Quartet no. 8, which is dedicated to the victims of war and fascism.

I played the 1st violin part of the 1st section of the Schostakovitch last night and completely butchered it. First off, my tone was horrific. It is true what they say that playing slow is hard. Secondly, I was sight-transposing, which is a skill I have gotten a lot better at (I’ve been practicing from the Sasche book), but am still not particularly great it.

There are two awesome things I’d like to ruminate on concerning the 1st violin part. One is the range of the violin. I’ve never really written for violin, and I never paid deep deep attention to violin parts in scores. I can play the first section of this string quartet but I know that I cannot play the 2nd or 3rd parts. The other parts stay pretty low, almost at the lowest end of the trumpet. That’s a part that I want to develop further.

I have been having some degree of trouble with my endurance lately, and have realized that I need to be much more thoughtful about my warm up. I would like to get my upper range a lot better but it is going to have to wait until I get a better warm up and overall endurance regimen going. I think that playing these slower, lyrical passages from the 8th string quartet could be a part of that warm up process.

Perusing through the books on Braxton and Dixon has helped to reflect on the challenges they faced, and the solutions they developed to problems (musical and otherwise). I am not totally certain on this, but I often think that I need to be more systematic. I think it would help me take advantage of the most excellent grains in the musical sand.

On a closing note, I’m simply trying to be more literate, on every level that I am personally interested in.

Posted in Philosophy, Music | 1 Comment »