Heavy Lifting

Dave Jordano: Detroit Nocturne (2016)

As it turns out, ringing in 2021 hasn’t made composing any easier. I’m currently trudging through two big 20+ minute pieces (the longest piece(s) I’ve ever written for those of you counting). Creating a broad, large-scale formal structure that is clear and compressible takes a fair amount of elbow grease and is proving difficult. One of the pieces, a song cycle, is based around a series if texts by Mark Doty and James Wright which looks at what I think of as a kind of quintessential American melancholia. The type of American setting that lives at 2am in the Midwest and is musically occupied by Springsteen and Tom Waits. Late last year, I took the suddenly empty performance / commission calendar that came with the pandemic to focus on a piece that no one asked me to write. Commissioned myself, if you will. I wanted to write a large song cycle that investigated the sort of day to day American life that exists in rural America. Zooming in on a personal life which speaks for larger issues like a post 2008 finical crisis ‘Our Town.’ The final song in the set, Wright’s ‘Beautiful Ohio’, lends some much needed light to what might be a 15 minutes depression fest which precedes it. More to come…

But after a drought of live performances, there are some upcoming premieres and concerts in the news & events page! Students from the Northwestern Saxophone Studio release a filmed performance of my quartet Ain’t Gonna Study War No More on April 24th. Shortly thereafter, saxophonist Derek Granger and percussionist Dan Ingman premiere Deep State, a virtuoso diatribe they commissioned last year.