Category: Artists

Susan Chen, piano; Mark Kennedy, bass; Tom Hassett, drums

Biography:

Susan Chen, piano; Mark Kennedy, bass; Tom Hassett, drums

San Francisco based guitarist/composer

Biography:

Alex Candelaria is a guitar voice in jazz worth investigating. His playing is marked by a fluidity which is both driving and melodic. On “Yeahway” he displays the influence of modern guitar playing while staying in touch with essential aspects of the jazz tradition.

Alex lives in San Francisco and has recently played with Graham Connah’s Jettison Slinky, the acapella singing group the Florid Ians, saxophonist Hal Stein, and his own trio.

” energetic drive and lyrical originality”
Derk Richardson SF Bay Guardian

“dazzling electric guitar work”
Glenn Astarita- All About Jazz

Admiral Ted Brinkley (semi-ret.) directs the Verrugoso Vista Junior Junior College Grads of ’77

Link to home page : http://www.evandermusic.com/artists.asp

Biography:

College jazz bands have released albums ever since the first generation of pulchrimose gibberish-benedicts ascended ivy covered masonry under fool-moonlight and re-entered ancestral dormitoria from Long Beach to North Texas. Like quivering lichen clinging to windswept crags, collector fetishists emerged in short order, drooling into this murkpuddle of pseudo-documentation. Is this shlub-genre a barely-known Stubby Little Nub on the tree of jazz history? A much maligned loathe-child of misguided delusionaries who molder and malinger awhile in the musty and interminably flourescent halls of academe? Outsider-art generated by a hopeful-to-be-hip strobe-satori-seeking subculture unaware of itself as such? Mid-century surely saw the emergence of strategic parasitism as academies were populated by a tweed with-leather-patch-encrusted rabble of roadband-refugees and didact-aspirants who thought to stimulate, penetrate, and even dilate the pupils they encountered. DiaQuintaPrimagogues put down roots and spread like hydroponic gardens with mega-carbon-dioxide infusions. Who cares to remember to forget the annual doses of ecstasy afforded listeners by the nation’s best-known (vitamin) “A” bands? A rabble of felon-zealots armed with combustible pedigrees from the name-bands of festeryear marched into the dodeca-pedagogic wilderness of the suburbs and shrub-herbs seeking to bestow clinics, masterclasses and carpet-cavorting parties upon the warty-faced toothy-grinned instrument-toting lasses, asses, and callipygian masses. Defying belief and affording little relief, their documents received critical appraisal in spurious journals from Credence to Signal to Nose. (Laughably, we here at Collegiate Jazz And Halftime Daily are here to perpetuate that dismal tumescent blemish upon the pimple-bootied surface of “literacy”).

Admiral Ted Brinkley strode, rowed, and even flowed into the shadows of this abstruse chartreuse milieu. He was a shelf selected pretender-scion of a fratrilineage of cave-dwelling moss-boiling and corpses-into-peatbogs-chucking neo-cromagnae (bubbler ever at the ready). Upon misreading the title of a well-known album and concluding that “Jazz Goes To Collage”, he could no longer recall how jazz managed to get itself sent up the river. In any event how it came to this is a story better left to the bile-emanating ooze-congealing spittle-spraying goatee-scratching troglodyte myopia-cognoscenti fronting as scribe-like data-entry drones in the infernal realm of ³post-doctoral research² and/or neighborhood internet quasi-journalism.

Soon enough a flotilla of cruise (plus booze plus blaze equals craze) ships weighed desultory anchor after stuffing themselves to the gills, their holds bulging with the erratically-fed yet-to-be-laid arpeggio-slinging graduates of heresy-instigation programs thither and yon. Ted Brinkley obambled delirious onto the helm of one such musician-ship, with a bongwaterlogged sheaf of charts under his latest good arm. The admiral belatedly observed that such epitomes of venerated Chartist tradition might not be of much help in his effort to cross an ocean of ambivalence and shelf-loathing, round the Cape of Good Horn, and navigate some kind of mixed ensemble passage. Raiding the stashes of pre-grads from brixton to braxton, Brinkley injected frothing and roiling pan-dameronium and lurid-turbid arkestration, the crashing swells recalling the din-din of the dilettante landlubbing yak-milkers at (nocturnal-e)mission district aryan narcissus-mating centers. Moored for a spell near cliffs that might have been familiar sights to Aldhelm or denizens of Lindisfarne, Brinkley draped himself in a warm Dover patina often found through stock-arrangement mail-order firms at nominally exorbitant fees. In this thalassic netherworld characterized by hefty assaults of surf and rock the moist briny climes proved suitable for the petri-dish-like cultivation of myriad molds, causing admiral and crew to appear (not least to themselves) as wild-eyed messianic-mycologists bent on inculcation of guilt-free depravity and ephemeral thrills. Immersed in the tasks and flasks at hand they sought not to disavow such free association, and instead steered a course propagating and instigating perpetual thalassic rosanna-danna-baptismal ablution.

Thus it has come to this and we entreat thee: listeners pry open those freaking auriculi (use hot salt water and ayahuasca if necessary) and behold the sound of hard-fought demi-god-wrought diplomas going up in smoke!!

— nach o¹hargman, editor, College Jazz and Halftime Daily

********************************************************************************

Here’s a press release for a prior gig by Admiral TEd Brinkley (semi-ret.):

Ted Brinkley’s Jazz Argosy…january 31st

Are the big bands really back? What a freakin’ pain in the ass …silence really is golden…like an 800-pound gorilla under a new moon–you sure can smell it, but you try to ignore it since you can’t see it…sooner or later it elbows its way into the periphery of your semblance -of consciousness, much like this unsolicited email.

Admiral Ted Brinkley (semi-ret.) is soon to be no longer on Terra Firma. His ashen pallor, leathery scab-encrusted odoriferous flesh, and biohazard-grade halitosis all testify to his utter disregard, or at least obliviousness to, the supposed advances of Civilization (at least as manifested by the so-called modernists and post modernists alike in the endeavor of sonic emanation).

Idealists and geeks expound and pontificate, high-concept art forms labor upward, often somewhat ponderously…meanwhile, like an amphetamine-infused mole burrowing out in the yard, no-concept-happy-stupid music asserts itself semi-intrusively off to the side–figuratively and literally flipping the bird at people, things, itself, concepts, and the void. like any self- respecting civilized being , please close your drapes and ignore if you wish. report back about your high concepts with your data and your findings–we will (pretend to) listen sincerely and take it all under advisement.

Ted Brinkley’s music is gleefully nostalgic, and happily, dare-i-say militantly, devoid of any pretense of conceptual profundity. As Ted himself was heard to remark, after disembarking from the HMS Prince Hairy at Heather-On-The Moor, “I am the musical equivalent of a guy who builds little dioramas out of popsicle sticks”. He is also suspected of saying: “In the chain restaurant that is culture, i am merely the sonic manifestation of a newly hired and soon-to-be-fired ever-pubescent busboy.”

Critics (would) have used terms like “pathetic…frivolous…mind-numbing display of a complete lack of originality…slice the frontal lobe…” (if they had been invited).

Eons spent literally and figuratively “at sea” gave Ted ample opportunity to manifest the personal consequences of self-inflicted gangrene, mildew, and overexposure (or the lack thereof) on the malleable salty psyche of a dude (un skilled at the breathtakingly obsolete technology called studio-band arranging.

Shortly before he returns to a crawl space near the boiler room of whatever maritime vessel he can wangle his way onto, and after a brief detour at vintage car shows and RV parks, with a few low-ball wagering pick-up rounds at local municipal golf courses…Ted lassos along his entourage of deluded non-visionaries, misguided mercenaries, savants and nonsaviors (and not a few crusty sorts who love to talk trash) for a one-set dusting-off of Ye Olde Parchment full of dots and lines.

At the point where the eyes glaze over and roll back into the head, the lines and dots appear as prison bars and tiny scampering cockroaches…the musicians themselves become in their own mind’s eyes like vermin cavorting on the drifting flotsam-remains of the truly s(t)inking ship that is the repressed, ashamed, needlessly ascetic twenty-four-hour-a day partay known as the Music Scene. No problems or puzzles get solved, no cosmic questions are asked or answered, the question “why bother?” is intoned, mantra-like… (however, in the end, a few beers are consumed). Like maggots squirming over the rotting carcass that is the so called “culture workers’ community” these sonic culturati are bloated and lethargic after gorging on the staples of their auditory diet…a large band is the perfect vehicle for the ultimate realization of their aspirations: they squat, they read, they blow spittle, occasionally rising to spray that spittle all over their colleagues and any zombie hominids who may have occidentally obambulated near the bandstand, while delivering solilloquies against the ticking clock. (needless to say, Ted Brinkley is the most bloated and lethargic of them all!!)

All of this in an ultimately inconsequential underutilization of what some refer to as “potential”.

with: Lou Frankenhauer, a Choir including sonya hunter,ches smith…. , erik pearson, nancy clarke, john finkbeiner, alex candelaria, dan seamans, elaine difalco, miranda, jewlia eisenberg and beth custer….musicians, sleep cravers, bon-mot droppers and chronically distracted nightmare self-inflicters like sheldon brown, ches smith…. , marty wehner, mark bolin, jarrett rossini, ches smith…. , aarons bennett and novik, tom griesser, devin hoff, cornelius boots, darren johnston, john ingle, ben goldberg, ches smith….

Big Band Leader

Biography:

Are the big bands really back? What a freakin’ pain in the ass …silence really is golden…like an 800-pound gorilla under a new moon–you sure can smell it, but you try to ignore it since you can’t see it…sooner or later it elbows its way into the periphery of your semblance -of-consciousness, much like this unsolicited email.

Admiral Ted Brinkley (semi-ret.) is soon to be no longer on Terra Firma. His ashen pallor, leathery scab-encrusted odoriferous flesh, and biohazard-grade halitosis all testify to his utter disregard, or at least obliviousness to, the supposed advances of Civilization (at least as manifested by the so-called modernists and post modernists alike in the endeavor of sonic emanation).

Idealists and geeks expound and pontificate, high-concept art forms labor upward, often somewhat ponderously…meanwhile, like an amphetamine-infused mole burrowing out in the yard, no-concept-happy-stupid music asserts itself semi-intrusively off to the side– figuratively and literally flipping the bird at people, things, itself, concepts, and the void. like any self- respecting civilized being , please close your drapes and ignore if you wish. report back about your high concepts with your data and your findings–we will (pretend to) listen sincerely and take it all under advisement.

Ted Brinkley’s music is gleefully nostalgic, and happily, dare-i-say militantly, devoid of any pretense of conceptual profundity. As Ted himself was heard to remark, after disembarking from the HMS Prince Hairy at Heather-On-The-Moor, “I am the musical equivalent of a guy who builds little dioramas out of popsicle sticks”. He is also suspected of saying: “In the chain restaurant that is culture, i am merely the sonic manifestation of a newly-hired and soon-to-be-fired ever-pubescent busboy.”

Cory Wright, reeds; Noah Phillips, guitar; Aaron Kohen, bass; Harris Eisenstadt, drums

Biography:

Boxes of Water is Harris Eisenstadt- drum set, Aaron Kohen- double bass, Noah Phillips- guitar, and Cory Wright- woodwinds

The original compositions that this quartet performs are inspired by the legacy of the Los Angeles New Music community. Boxes of Water continues the tradition of adventurous composition and free improvisation that has become the earmark of new music in Los Angeles. The quartet blends the influences of free jazz, 20th century acoustic and electronic music. Every member of the group contributes compositions which are then arranged by the ensemble, creating a group dynamic both cohesive and playful.

Press:

“…a curious series of sections with inventive and playful antics… There is a sense of adventure which permeates every piece: a great deal of thought was put into each tune, yet nothing is loud or angry. Splendid.”
-Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter (NY)

“While various live performances prove them to be some of the most fearless free players around, their self-titled first release shows the quartet also adept at creating and working within tightly arranged complex structures.”
-All About Jazz (Los Angeles)

Bi-coastal duo of California trumpeter Kris Tiner and New York guitarist Mike Baggetta deals with a music that is spare, ethereal, and highly exploratory, “clearly cut from cloth that hasn’t been designed yet…” (–Improvijazzation Nation).

Link to home page : http://www.kristiner.com/tinbag.html

Biography:

“Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty…”
–Greg Burk, LA WEEKLY

“Tiner in particular is a really compelling voice, blending the timbral resourcefulness of
Smoker or Wadada with the focused linear constructions of, say, Booker Little.”
–Jason Bivins, CADENCE MAGAZINE

“Tiner plays through a spectrum of tones and approaches…”
–Rex Butters, ALL ABOUT JAZZ LOS ANGELES

“Tiner’s trumpet and flugelhorn work is both conversational and eliptical,
much like Bill Dixon’s in its unhurried examination of space.”
–Larry Nai, CADENCE MAGAZINE

“Extraordinarily inventive… suggesting still-untapped potentials in Miles Davis’s legacy –
it’s as if Tiner has plumbed the most daring, piercing moments in Davis’s music to propose
a boldface musical language utterly different from the usual stylized fragility of Miles disciples.”
–Nate Dorward, SIGNAL TO NOISE

“Tiner’s timbre is brassy and full, capable of tranquility, but prone to pugnacious elation…”
–Troy Collins, CADENCE MAGAZINE

bio:
KRIS TINER (b. 1977) is active on the West Coast jazz and creative music scene as a trumpet player, composer, and improviser. His music has been described as “extraordinarily inventive” by Signal to Noise magazine; Cadence magazine calls him “a really compelling voice,” and LA Weekly jazz critic Greg Burk claims, “Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty.” Kris has toured and performed his own music at concert venues and festivals throughout North America and in West Africa, with highlights including The Kennedy Center (Washington D.C.), Line Space Line Festival of Improvised Music (Los Angeles), CalArts Creative Music Festival, Mateel Summer Arts & Music Festival, Ventura New Music Festival, Bakersfield Jazz Festival, Trummerflora Spring Reverb Festival (San Diego), Mat Bevel Institute (Tucson), LA County Museum of Art, The Jazz Bakery (Los Angeles), CBGB (New York), The Knitting Factory (Hollywood), The Jazzschool (Berkeley), 1067 Granville (Vancouver B.C.), Zeitgeist Gallery (Boston), Bowery Poetry Club (New York), High Mayhem (Santa Fe), Polestar Gallery (Seattle), The Goethe Institut (Los Angeles), REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, sound. at the Schindler House, The Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival (Albuquerque), so.cal.sonic (Long Beach), and Earjam.

Kris has performed on over 30 recordings and his own works have been released on the pfMENTUM, Nine Winds, and Evander Music labels. He has written and recorded music for radio, television, and motion picture scores, and his trumpet playing has been heard on MTV and Comedy Central. His recordings are regularly featured on jazz radio stations throughout the world. Kris has been the recipient of awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE), and the Kennedy Center’s Jazz Ahead program. His music has received praise in Cadence Magazine, Signal to Noise, All About Jazz, One Final Note, The Wire (UK), The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Tucson Weekly, Time Out New York, The Santa Fe Reporter, The Stranger (Seattle), Jazz Hot (France), Improjazz Magazine (France), Paris Transatlantic, Bad Alchemy (Germany), Tarkus Magazine (Norway), Kathodik (Italy), and Gonzo Circus (Belgium), among others.

His primary musical project is the Empty Cage Quartet (formerly MTKJ Quartet), a collaborative new jazz ensemble that has been hailed in the jazz press as being “one of the most powerful and appealing jazz units currently active” (–All About Jazz). Formed in 2002, the quartet features Tiner on trumpet and flugelhorn along with saxophonist Jason Mears, bassist Ivan Johnson and percussionist Paul Kikuchi. Over the course of five albums and a number of lengthy tours the group has explored new ways to integrate original modular compositions with controlled improvisation as well as groove functions from all over the globe. Critic Rex Butters of the Jazz Journalists Association selected Day of the Race, their second CD on Nine Winds Records, as one of the top 10 jazz albums of 2005.

Tiner’s other major project is TIN/BAG, a duo collaboration with New York guitarist Mike Baggetta which deals with a music that is spare, ethereal, and highly exploratory, “clearly cut from cloth that hasn’t been designed yet…” (–Improvijazzation Nation). In 2005 their debut CD There, Just As You Look For It (pfMENTUM CD025) was met with enthusiastic reviews as it opened the way for several national tours. Their recent album And Begin Again (Evander Music Em 044) is a more compositionally oriented release that features several new duos alongside two extended compositions for quartet which feature virtuoso clarinetist Brian Walsh and rising jazz percussionist Harris Eisenstadt.

Kris is also a member of the electro-acoustic improvisation trio The Unmentionables, with guitarist Noah Phillips and percussionist Nathan Hubbard. He is a founding member of the Los Angeles Trumpet Quartet and he performs regularly with the Industrial Jazz Group, Vinny Golia’s Jazz for Models and the Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, the Jeff Kaiser Ockodektet, and Steuart Liebig’s Meninas Quartet. In addition to these ongoing projects he has performed and/or recorded with a broad range of creative musicians including Wadada Leo Smith, Gerry Hemingway, G.E. Stinson, Kraig Grady, Lukas Ligeti, Ken Filiano, Phillip Greenlief, Mary Oliver, Michael Vlatkovich, Nels Cline, Bill Horvitz, Toshi Makihara, Pete Christlieb, Brad Dutz, Kim Richmond, Mike Lee, Harris Eisenstadt’s Ahimsa Orchestra, the Joe LaBarbera Quintet, Create (!), Mento Buru, The Sons of the San Joaquin, the Tri-Axium West Large Ensemble (performing the music of Anthony Braxton), Nathan Hubbard’s Skeleton Key Orchestra, the Kreative Orchestra of Los Angeles (KOLA), and the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra. Kris has premiered new works by composers Becky Allen, hans w. koch, Leroy Jenkins, Wayne Peet, Doug Davis, Travis Just, Devin Maxwell, and Andrew Durkin. His interest in interdisciplinary connections has led to collaborations with filmmakers Allen Glass and Maryam Kashani, choreographers Miyuki Kobayashi and Wan-Chen Chang, and visual artists Art Sherwyn and Kio Griffith, as well as projects involving animation, poetry and spoken word.

Originally from Wasco, California, Kris holds an MFA in African-American Improvisational Music from California Institute of the Arts where he studied composition with AACM masters Wadada Leo Smith and Leroy Jenkins, improvisation with Vinny Golia and Charlie Haden, and trumpet with Edward Carroll. He also holds a BA in Music from CSU Bakersfield, where his teachers included composer Doug Davis and the legendary trumpeter Charles Brady. Kris has studied and performed in a wide variety of classical, jazz, and popular styles as well as traditional music from Latin America, West Africa, Indonesia, and North India. He has made extensive research into world improvisational music systems from which he has formulated a unique methodology for teaching creative melodic improvisation. Kris has lectured on both music and visual art, and currently directs the jazz program at Bakersfield College. He has taught at CSU Bakersfield, College of the Canyons, Taft College, and the Academy of Creative Education in Los Angeles, and has been a guest lecturer/clinician at California Institute of the Arts and The Oakwood School as well as at numerous high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools throughout Southern California. Also active as a concert organizer, Kris co-founded and curated the Okiro Creative and Experimental Arts Series in Hollywood from 2002-03 and currently curates a jazz and new music concert series at Metro Galleries in Bakersfield. He lives in Bakersfield with his wife, baby daughter, and dog, and publishes a blog entitled Stop the Play and Watch the Audience.

bio:
MIKE BAGGETTA: Guitarist, composer and educator Mike Baggetta is originally from the town of Agawam in Western Massachusetts. Inspired by his father, he began playing the guitar while in high school after previously studying the violin and trombone. At that time, Mike studied with guitarist Tom Dempsey via audio tape lessons through the mail, continuously performed with the All-State Jazz Ensemble, and received many awards from the International Association of Jazz Educators and the Berklee College of Music. Mike went on to study music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he received his Bachelor of Music degree with high academic honors, and Master of Music degree in Jazz Studies. His talents have also been recognized through a scholarship from the New Jersey Jazz Society, an invitation to participate in Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency program at the Kennedy Center and as a finalist in the Fish Middleton Jazz Scholarship competition.

Mike is in demand as a sideman, composer and instructor, as well as leading the Mike Baggetta Quartet and co-leading the duo TIN/BAG with Los Angeles trumpeter Kris Tiner, which has recorded two highly acclaimed CDs and toured throughout the United States. In addition, he has had the pleasure of performing and/or recording with Tom Harrell, Bucky Pizzarelli, Ruth Brown, Conrad Herwig, Tony Reedus, Ralph Bowen, and violinist Christian Howes. Mike has also been a featured performer with Randy James’ Danceworks in the premiere of Looking East, and has composed a suite for solo prepared guitar based on poems by Laurie Sheck, which had its premiere at the New Gallery Concert Series in Boston, MA.

Mike Baggetta’s musical growth has been insightfully guided by the teachers whom he has sought out. Among them have been Ted Dunbar, Vic Juris, Ralph Bowen, Stanley Cowell, and Conrad Herwig. He also cites masterclasses with guitarist and NEA Jazz Master Jim Hall as being particularly insightful. Mike is an endorser for Evans Custom Amplifiers and currently lives in New York City.

Ashley Adams, bass; Phillip Greenlief, woodwinds, marimba; Michel Dumonceau, drums

Biography:

The Ashley Adams Trio was formed in 1996 after Ashley had met and played with Phillip Greenlief in Marco Enieidi’s American Jungle Orchestra. After gigging for nearly a year in an open free-jazz vein, the group latched onto Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and used the book as a springboard in their musicial realization, Flowers for Mrs. Dalloway.

From the liner notes of, “Flowers for Mrs. Dalloway”:

Beneath a simple veneer, one often discovers a complex reality. As Clarissa Dalloway spends the day in post WW I England preparing for her party, Virginia Woolf unveils the unspoken resonance of self-denial, regret, and the sense of lonliness that comes from living contained lives.

Woolf’s lyrical stream of consciousness style lends itself well as a model for musical improvisation. Her flow of words mirrors life in its seamless development. Our trio used this characteristic as a reference in our own creative process as we sought to find a common thread to weave our music with Mrs. Woolf’s writing style.

Whereas the novel has no chapters or breaks, we divided our interpretation into three sections to aid in organizing the material into a structure that served the music. Morning, afternoon, and evening illustrate the feelings and moods each section conveys. The first movement is full of the energy of a June morning. Most of the characters are outside running errands amidst the hustle and bustle of the London streets. Anticipation and excitement fill the air. In the second movement, people begin to slow down and unwind. As they rest, they drift into introspection, self-doubt and self-reflection. The third movement brings the darkness of a suicide and the arrival of Mrs. Dalloway’s party. The house fills with guests and gossip. The music goes in and out of each character as they re-unite and reflect upon both the day and their own lives.

Each reader derives from a novel their own interpretation. What each instrumentalist brings to the trio’s collaborative composition makes the music personal as well as representative of the spirit of our ensemble. Nevertheless, the result is not three different musical approaches, but one integrated tone poem which deepens and changes with each performance (attesting to the creative process) in search of Virginia Woolf’s original vision. Whether you have read Mrs. Dalloway or not, we hope to leave you with the spirit of this wonderful story.

Ashley Adams
San Francisco, 1997

Further Reflection on “Flowers for Mrs. Dalloway”

Ashley and I had met in Marco Eneidi’s band and got on well and wanted to put together a trio right around the time I had met Michel, and it was easy to form up and make some music. We mostly just got together and jammed at Michel’s house for some time, and one day during a rehearsal break I noticed a copy of “Mrs. Dalloway” on a bookshelf. I pulled it out and thumbed through it while we talked about the themes and structure of the book for some time.

I had read the book many years before when I was quite young, and then again only a few years prior to that rehearsal while I was deeply entrenched in the writings of James Joyce. I vowed to read Mrs. Dalloway again, because I felt I had freed myself from the Joycean straightjacket I had created for myself, and enjoyed the book more than ever on that 3rd reading. So many academicians try to force Joyce and Woolf into separate camps and resist one in favor of the other (and I was highly influenced by the folly of these critics). And yet I felt this project with Ashley and Michel really helped me to see the profound depth of both books, although realized in radically different means, and I’m deeply thankful for that step in my critical evolution.

Meanwhile, Michel and Ashley picked up copies of the book as I was talking about it all the time, and we decided we would do some sort of musical response to the novel. I drafted a “text score” for the trio – basically taking the book and breaking it into three parts (as Ashley discussed above) and jotting down the principal action. I created a series of episodes with central events we would try to evoke and we all discussed the themes of various internal monologues. I used a similar approach to “characterization” in my adaptations of Kafka’s “The Trial”, and Joyce’s “Ulysses”, so that we all shared as many roles as we could divide easily (I “played” many of the central characters with a variety of wind instruments), but it was really the collaborative effort that we put into this project that struck me so deeply. Ashley and Michel really dug into the book, reading it several times (not once) and found no end of thematic joints and links to celebrate musically. Everyone did a great job of hiding a bevy of leitmotives, and thematic statements into the mix that some critics (rightfully, I think) noted an almost symphonic quality that this small group (trio) was able to produce.

I am most thankful to Ashley and Michel for all the time we shared on the project. We worked really hard on it, and for me the record still has the ability to illuminate many of the themes that Virginia Woolf brought to Mrs. Dalloway (although my readings of the book and the creation of the music are so intrinsically entwined, that perhaps it’s not surprising, and that is another fascinating aspect of this project – the inquiry into how the musical mind processes narrative and how music has the ability to communicate something that is beyond language). It’s funny now, especially since Michael Cunningham has won a Pulitzer Prize doing his “setting” of Mrs Dalloway (The Hours) and a filmmaker has taken his novel and brought it to the screen – I find our version somehow extremely satisfying because it exists in a world outside the realm of literary voice (my main criticism with “The Hours” – the book – was that it read too much like a study in how to write like Virginia Woolf) and yet dwells in a realm where a literary interpretation could exist, but someone could just as easily sit back and enjoy the sounds on a purely musical level.

Phillip Greenlief
Oakland, 2005