A little while back my group the Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble in partnership with Karin Stevens Dance received a grant from 4Culture to create a concert series around a composer/choreographer collaboration. After planning and talking and planning and talking… the project is underway!

Composers Beth Fleenor, Catherine Grealish, Stephen Fandrich, and yours truly have been paired with UMAMI Performance, Animate Objects Physical Theater, Khambatta Dance Company, and Karin Stevens Dance respectively.  We are now all tasked to create a new collaborative work scored for a 9-piece band and between 2-5 different dancers per pairing.

How do 2 people go about creating a concert piece? That’s what I was asking myself as I was walking into Velocity Dance to my first meeting with choreographer Karin Stevens. That’s what we will all find out in this process.  We decided before the meeting that we would start from scratch.  No preconceived notions.  We talked about communication and concepts and started figuring out the common language a musician and a dancer can speak.  Then improvisation.  We performed a series of games or improvisatory exercises to see what we can cooperatively generate and how we relate on a artistically visceral level.

Here is one of the exercises we came up with. Long Tones:

A “long tone” means a definite thing to a musician. A sustained note.  What does that mean to a dancer? Is it a static pose? A slowly moving one? A mood? A certain energy level?

This process of working closely with another discipline is unlike anything I have done before.  In the fledgling stages of our collaboration I discovered that Karin and I have much the same kind of energy and drive when it comes to our work.  And even this early on, one of my longtime suspicions turns out to be true: composition is composition is composition regardless of discipline.  I feel that in that place this composer and choreographer can easily connect.  With that then comes more insight into the other discipline as the work unfolds.  I’m super stoked.

Check back soon. Karin and I are meeting weekly and you to can share in this process as it unfolds.  I’ll be posting video, audio and thoughts as we go. Performance will be in April 2012.

I am very happy to announce that 4Culture has funded my 2011 A Tune A Day project!  The scope of this project includes a free composition workshop and a free concert series featuring the best of these tunes.

The composition workshop will be held in partnership with Arts In Motion, a non-profit arts school that provides subsidized lessons in the arts for people that need them. I will facilitate a free, 4-session, non-genre specific, workshop that will give anyone the basic compositional tools needed to create or enhance a piece of music.  I am really stoked to get to work with a crop of budding composers! Hopefully I can get them started down a productive creative path.

The concert series will feature the best of the Tune A Day compositions arranged for a quartet.  I know Beth Fleenor will be playing clarinet and I will be playing piano.  Bass and drums are still being determined.  I want to assemble a band with a lot of personality and strong individual voices to play this music. We will perform at least 3 concerts.

I am so stoked.  Everything should get rolling in Nov. and I plan to chronicle the whole thing here on my blog.

In the meantime, here is tune #218 for this year. Another waltz. This originated as something I improvised while accompanying a ballet class.

Waltz in A minor (Aug. 11, 2011)

Tune #164 of my Tune A Day Project. Here is a tune I wrote for the Bushwick Book Club. The Book Club is a collective of singer-songwriters, composers, and musicians who write all write a piece on a selected book. This month’s Book was Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I wrote a solo piano piece to score the Batman’s seeming death and burial. It is written in the nocturne style. A nocturne features a strum-like 6/8 pattern in the bass and a singable melody in the treble.

Requiem for a Dark Knight (June 15, 2011)

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Here are 3 Meditations for Solo Clarinet performed by Beth Fleenor at the Chapel Performance space.  These are quasi-improvised pieces.  The performer is given pitches and relative note durations, but must decide how to phrase and how short or long to make the note values. I have posted Meditation 1 a while ago, here it is again as part of the whole set.

These were performed May 27, 2011 as part of Chamber Bomb, my first solo chamber music concert. Dates indicated below are composition dates.

Meditation 1 (Jan. 16, 2011)

Meditation 2 (Feb. 2, 2011)

Meditation 3 (Feb. 3, 2011)

I have just passed the 1/3 mark for my Tune A Day project. I have now completed 126 pieces of music in as many days.  Way overdue on posting. Will be on an audio posting frenzy for the next week or so.

Here is a piece that I wrote for 2 students that are sisters, Olivia and Claire.  Claire plays the flute as well, so I wrote them a piano and flute duet.  They are in 6th and 1st grade.  I am playing the piano here.  I will have a version with both sisters performing up in a couple of weeks after their recital.

Madrona Tree (May 25th, 2011)

Claire Canady – Flute

Michael Owcharuk – Piano

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Last Wednesday, April 13, was the culmination of one of the coolest experiences of my musical career.  The Lakeside Middle-school String Orchestra performed my composition Lakeside Rhapsody. A few months prior the orchestra director and my friend Erica Johansen commissioned me to write a piece for and work with the kids of the orchestra.  It was a great experience.  First we all met and the kids asked me questions about my influences and what I do.  Then, they brainstormed different ideas for me to use in the composition.  We got: write a 5 voice fugue (I got in a grand exposition!), distribute main melodic materials between the different instruments (violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, piano), use an odd meter, and include some indie rock/pop elements and sounds.  Well, that was quite an inspirational happening.  I immediately set to writing on the piece and finished the bulk of the work in about 2 weeks, managing to put all those elements in there.

The orchestra had a couple of months to work on it.  I sat-in on a couple of rehearsals and we got to work on and talk about the piece. A valuable and rare opportunity for both composer and musician.  It was wonderful.

The performance was great.  The kids really dug in and played the music with purpose.  Afterwards they presented me with this card they made and signed:

Here is Lakeside Rhapsody performed by the Lakeside Middleschool Orchestra:

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I am very grateful for and honored by this experience.  Many thanks to Erica, all the young musicians, and the Lakeside School.

Okay, okay last one of the melancholy ones.  I am wrapping up the winter series of Tune A Day and will be posting more upbeat stuff with the season change. Funny how that works.  This piece is simply watching the thick clouds pass by on the greyest of February days. The movement is almost imperceptible unless you stop to consider it.

February Grey (Feb. 25, 2011)

Beth Fleenor-clarinet and Michael Owcharuk-accordion

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Being an artist is a lot of work more than anything else.  It seems that you’re either is working on stuff or planning stuff to working on later.  You never get to punch out.  Art monk, masochist, workaholic…  The work is finding a way to communicate/create in order to ease the pain of living (to paraphrase and add a little to Ginsberg).

It’s Like That (Jan. 6 2011)

Recorded live at Egan’s Ballard Jam House 3/29/11.  My good friend Cody Rahn was in town and we decided to do a gig together. We are joined by Nate Omdal-bass and Beth Fleenor-clarinet.  These guys did an amazing job sight-reading this tune and making sound good on the fly.  Artists always working…

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It’s Like That (PDF)

Been a little while since I posted last.  Due to a combination of preparing for big concerts (March 25th SJCE plays original arrangements of Classic Video Game Music:  www.seattlejazzcomposersensemble.com) and not really having anything I felt worth posting.  So today I would like to give you a piece entitled Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Nuclear Meltdown (piece number 70 btw).  This is dedicated to the people of Japan in the the aftermath of the multiple catastrophes they have been and still are experiencing in the past few weeks.  I enlisted the help of trumpeter  Samantha Boshnack and my frequent collaborator and all around awesome lady Beth Fleenor.  I am off camera playing the piano.  There is a some extraneous noise, but it adds to the character.

This piece is not a literal representation of the disasters.  It is a meditation on the tragedy and a commentary on the calm nature and collective effort put forth by Japan’s people.

Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Nuclear Meltdown (March 14, 2011)

Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Nuclear Meltdown (pdf)

Hey Folks!  Took a little time between posts, but grant season was upon us and there were many things going on… Anyhow, the other day I had the great pleasure of playing a duo gig with Evan Flory-Barnes, bass player extraordinaire, composer of elegant music, and a genuine pillar of the Seattle  music and art community.  Let me say, I have been trying to figure out a way to play with this cat for a while and  he just happens to call for the gig!  Serendipity baby!  So, we played at the newly re-incarnated Vito’s on First Hill.  Good piano, great staff, awesome food, and a very formidable bourbon selection.  I took this as an opportunity to have Evan play on A Tune A Day piece.  I selected a piece called Interim.  I wrote this piece while I was killing time between 2 appointments.  It pretty much represents what I think anybody does when they are killing time:  have a little idea and improvise.  Maybe you know you will get a coffee, but  who will you meet, what will you see, what thoughts will come and go?  This piece is like that.  An idea or 2 to get you going then let whatever happen happen.  It’s a passing observation of thought, an ongoing conversation, the Interim.  Evan is great to play with.  Besides just being a great player, he has a way of making it easier for you to play and of making you sound better.

Interim (Feb. 26, 2011)

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Interim (PDF)