« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »
In my new yard I've seen a variety of wildlife--two woodpeckers, some small and not so small lizards, a hummingbird, white-winged doves, etc.--but nothing quite so frightening as the beetle pictured above. He's like three inches long and seems very cocky. He intimidates me.
A warm welcome to le monde des blogs to my friend the composer Lou Bunk. Lou's started a blog, which promises to be a refreshing oasis, over at Sequenza21. Who else would tell you about Derek Hurst's parking foibles at Berkelee? Speaking of Derek, I just realized that I never put up a clip of his piece Bacchanalia Skiapodorum, which will be on the CD. So here it is. Think Milton Babbitt's funk band. Take that David Salvage!
After a long absence, I'm back online after the move to Tucson, where it is scorching at 111 degrees today (and for the rest of the week). Seems as though I picked the wrong time to move. So it goes. The drive was exhausting and I'm sill recovering, I think. A late start on Tuesday put us in Springfield, IL the first night. The second night after 11 hours of driving, we retired in Shamrock, TX. Interestingly, you'd think a place like Shamrock, which plays up it's Irish-tinged name with hotels like the Irish Inn and the Blarney Hotel, would have, say, some Irish beer. Not so. It turns out the Shamrock is a dry county, a fact I found out much to my dismay as a cold one would have been the perfect punctuation after the long drive. But actually Wednesday's drive wasn't quite as long as the epic 13-hour final push on Thursday. 900 miles.
There were some signs on the road along the way that were both confusing and mysterious. Among the confusing variety was this one seen in Oklahoma: "Do not drive into the smoke." Huh? I didn't see any smoke but if I did I surely wouldn't drive into it. A waiter at a local restaurant didn't know what it meant either. Any hints out there? Among the mysterious signs viewed were some that posited the existence of certain natural phenomenon: "Gusty winds may exist," or "Dust storms may exist." May exist? Sounds very existential. It gave me a lot to ponder through the barren land of New Mexico. I kept looking for clues of their existence. And after careful thought (and driving) I can dispel the mystery once and for all--yes, gusty winds and dust storms do exist.
So that was the journey. Now I'm sitting in an empty house with my saxophones, a bicycle, and a computer waiting for my things to arrive. If the pace of the movers who packed my things is any indication of when they might arrive, I expect to receive my furniture and other belongings in mid-July. It's funny that as the moving company was courting my business, they were very responsive to my phone calls. But now that they've already got my stuff in their clutches, they are not very helpful. I just hope everything arrives in one piece.
This was a very non-musical post, which kind of reflects my current state of mind. Besides Alex's new article, which I suppose isn't that new anymore, I haven't been keeping up with the goings on about town, as it were. But now I'm back online and feeling a bit more connected, although I've never felt so far from the east coast. Even reading the Times makes for a strange experience being so far away. Oh, and I realize how irresponsible I was to not put up a pretty picture with an allusion to the fact that I'd be away for awhile. Apologies for that. I hope you'll forgive me. Between the packing, and finishing up in the studio, and driving, and driving, and driving, and driving, and getting situated here in Tucson, frankly I'm tired. But I'm glad to be back. More to come.
Back in a flash . . .
There's a haiku I've been looking for but haven't been able to find. That is, until I started getting things ready for the movers. There it was in my Modern Japanese Literature binder from the fall of 1998. It's from Masaoka Shiki's (1867-1902) Thirty-Nine Haiku:
A stray cat
shits in my
winter garden
You'll notice that it doesn't have the typical 5-7-5 syllable count--that's because it's in translation. I like it because I like cats. But I also like it because it evokes a kind of serenity that I often feel when I look out at a fresh snow during wintertime. A cat is simply doing it's business in the quiet of a cold winter landscape. Everything seems hushed and peaceful, even though the cat is defecating.
A while ago I made a big deal about the scarcity of live classical music recordings and vowed that one day I would release a live album. American Voices is not a live album, however, I'm including one track from a live performance--Erik Spangler's pastlife laptops and attic instruments for alto saxophone, turntables, and electronics. We did it as part of the whatWALL? integrated multimedia show last October. Erik and I both thought the performance was special and brimming with energy. That's the kind of stuff I want on this disc. So here's a little sample of the track with me and DJ Dubble8 trading licks. Enjoy.
Sorry to be missing in action for such an extended period of time. I haven't had much time for blogging lately--and apologies to those whose blogs I haven't been able to frequent quite as much recently. So what's been going on? A few things, actually. First, I'm planning for this 2000+ mile move to Tucson. The movers will be here this Sunday and I'll be taking off on Tuesday with my father as co-pilot. Nice Father's Day present--an exhausting three-day cross-country drive! Purging my closets and boxes is quite time consuming. Then there's this other thing that I've been doing. I save my change. In fact, I've been saving my change for the past five years. I need to count it before I leave. Don't want the movers handling that! And I don't want my car to be leaning to one side all the way to Tucson. (Any guesses on how much I've got?) Plus my bike will be taking up most of the space anyway. (That's right, I've got the Look. Take it away, Roxette!) Let's see, what else. Well, there's this album I've been mentioning a lot recently. Know what? It's finished! All that needs to be done is the mastering. I'm very excited about it. And it feels great to have it all in the can . You'll definitely know when it "drops," as they say in the pop world. One last thing, thanks to composer Everette Minchew over at Sequenza21 for keeping the faith.
CD Review. AngloSax, Kyle Horch, saxophone. The Saxophone Symposium, Vol. 29 (2004).
Steely Dan, Two Against Nature
There's a reason this album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001.
I'm back online after a great show at the Berkeley Edge Festival and a successful house-hunting trip to Tucson. There were two concerts last sunday as part of the Edge Fest--one featuring the music of John Zorn (Masada Book Two - The Book of Angels for violin and piano and Necronomicon for string quartet) and another featuring music by Berkeley and Berkeley-affiliated composers. Zorn's music is intense, visceral, satirical, and extremely communicative but over the course of an entire concert, not to mention an entire weekend, becomes very predictable, losing much of its shock value and humor once you've heard a cartoon or standard classical music quote more than twenty times. That being said, the players (Mark Feldman, violin and Sylvie Courvoisier, piano, along with the Crowley Quartet) were absolutely viscious, which made the concert more than bearable even after you knew what was coming.
I played on the Berkeley composers concert, which featured the music of Jorge Liderman, Fernando Benadon, Reynold Tharp, Adriana Verdie Vas-Romero, and Keeril Makan. We had a wonderful and responsive crowd for the event. However, Keeril and I didn't get the rave review we were hoping for. Here's what Jonathan Russell of the San Francisco Classical Voice wrote about us:
Keeril Makan’s Voice within Voice for solo baritone saxophone, performed by Brian Sacawa, is not really a composition but a catalog of the cool sounds you can get from using your voice in a baritone saxophone in different ways. And yes, some of these sounds are awfully cool. But I hope that Makan will now go back and actually do something with these sounds. Perhaps in the ‘50s and ‘60s it was enough simply to experiment and find out all the sounds you can get out of an instrument; but that’s all been done now. What’s really interesting now is what a composer can do with these discoveries. I also found myself irritated by the seriousness with which this whole enterprise seemed to be taken. Some of these sounds are just really silly sounding and I wanted to laugh, but the vibe of the performer and the audience was clearly not to laugh but to take this all very seriously. Quite a contrast to the vibe at the John Zorn concert earlier that day.(Read the entire article here.)
There are a lot of cool sounds in the piece and I think Mr. Russell simply wasn't able to get past this aspect of the work when forming his opinion of the piece. Much of the work sounds nothing like a saxophone. And I'm sure much of the audience experienced a bit of a shock when I walked out--they expected to hear one thing but instead heard something very different. We received several comments from audience members that the piece sounded less like an acoustic instrument and more like an electronic composition. Keeril creates a complex sound with the instrument that is a combination (in various permutations throughout the piece) of teeth on the reed, breath, sung tones (inhaling and exhaling), and actual played pitches. Sometimes all four of these aspects sound simutaneously, making a very intricate composite sound. Because Mr. Russell appeared to not be able to get past Keeril's unique sound universe, he missed his masterful command of development and pacing and control of a very personal "catalog of sounds." But that's just my biased opinion (and I consider this piece to be an example of one that requires more than one hearing to grasp firmly) and the piece will be on the American Voices CD so you can decide for yourself if you believe me or if I'm full of it!
