Brasstet Reflections

 Stephen Haynes/Steve Swell Brasstet

University of the Streets

New York, NY

Last month, Steve Swell and I launched a new co-led brass quintet.  We gathered on a sweltering hot day in Manhattan for a rehearsal at Steve's Union Square loft, followed by a long, sweaty stroll through Greenwich Village to The University of the Streets.

The ensemble consists of Steve and myself, along with Herb Robertson, Mark Taylor and Ben Stapp.  Ben joined us to cover the charter tuba seat held by Joseph Daley.  Each strand of this quintet carries a story or two.  Steve and I share a deep love of orchestra playing.  We first met twenty-five years ago working with Makanda Ken McIntyre's orchestra.  While we have worked together in a range of orchestra projects over the years, this is the first time that we have collaborated on a project.  Herb is a long-time favorite on trumpet and cornet who I have rarely worked with but have always carried an abiding affection for.  It is great to work alongside a trumpeter who loves (and carries and uses joyfully) mutes as much as I do!  Mark and I have been dancing around the notion of building a project together for some time.  I love his dark sound and consistently focused conception.

Ben was the wild card for me.  We first met at the rehearsal, and it was easy to see why folks remark on his ability.  He has an easygoing manner and plays the tuba as if he was born to it.  Folks who have followed my work will understand that this was a treat for me, as I have an abiding affection for the tuba.

Bill Dixon was on my mind throughout the evening, as he had conducted orchestra rehearsals and concerts at The University of the Streets many years ago.  I believe he would have gotten a kick out of our gathering, and likely would have joined in, coaching us on what path best to follow in the music.

Adding to the delight of the experience was an audience stocked with some of my favorite listeners.  Jeff Schlanger, known to many as musicWitness, was with us. He created a lovely window into the work.  Click on the image below for a larger view. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention the presence of Will Connell.  Another lover of the large ensemble, Will worked with Steve and me in the orchestras of Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor.  Stalwart recordist Robert O'Haire was on hand capturing the goings on, and shared these photos of the ensemble in action.  We look forward to more time spent together in the very near future!

images of the Brasstet by Robert O'Haire

Looking Back I: Bill Dixon in Italy

Summer of 1980

Verona, Viareggio, Padua, Firenze, Milano

This is the first in a series of posts that will look back at a number of important periods/events in my development as an artist. 

Thirty-one years ago, I traveled to Italy with Bill Dixon for a series of concert performances culminating in a recording session for Soulnote Records.  The work we captured in the tiny studio in Milano - Bill Dixon in Italy, Volumes I & II - has recently been reissued by CamJazz.  The boxset edition includes all of the recordings that Bill did for Soulnote and has been remastered.

The ensemble that Bill put together consisted of Bill Dixon, Stephen Haynes, Arthur Brooks, Stephen Horenstein, Alan Silva and Freddie Waits.  Jimmy Lyons and Art Davis were also asked to join us.  Jimmy was scheduled to be at the Verona Jazz Festival as a member of Cecil Taylor's ensemble.  Bill urged Jimmy to take a plane ticket from him, in order to ensure his place in our group.  When Cecil decided not to perform, Jimmy was unable to join us.

We flew into Milano and drove up to Verona, where we met Alan and Freddie.  The full ensemble had it's first rehearsal onstage during an afternoon soundcheck.  I will never forget Bill's instructions to Freddie Waits.  "I want pulse, but I don't want to hear a one every four beats.  Play in a long meter, 11 or 15 if you like."  Bill then indicated a tempo from the piano to set up a rhythmic ground that he used with dramatic effect throughout the tour.

The music evolved every night that we played it.  Other than the soundcheck, there were no rehearsals.  The core of the ensemble, the four horns, rehearsed in Vermont and all of us had been there for years teaching and, in my case (though, to be fair, everyone learned from Bill!), studying with Bill Dixon. 

My favorite performance was in Firenze, where we played in an outdoor piazza, a junction of four cobblestone streets.  The audience was a sea of upturned faces and the music was on fire.  Freddie Waits stalked Bill on the snare drum, Alan Silva did what he does so well - never repeating himself - and Bill summoned the spirits with his trumpet.  My understanding is that there is a recording of this concert.  I'd love to hear it someday.

I first met Warren Smith in Verona, where he performed with Julius Hemphill, Olu Dara, and Abdul Wadud. Andrew Hill payed solo piano without a net, and I got to know him and his lovely wife Laverne over the course of the tour.  For me, one of the highlights of the tour was getting to spend time with Freddie Waits.  Freddie hipped me to travel techniques that I still use, and he helped me out when I moved to New York a few years later. 

After Italy, we followed Bill to Paris, though there was no work for the band.  Bill played with Steve Lacy's rhythm section, and those concerts deserve a separate post.  We spent a memorable evening listening to Chet Baker together.  Chet and Bill both played Conn Constellation trumpets, and Bill dedicated his set later that night to Chet, playing extensions and abstractions of My Funny Valentine.

When I got back home, I hitchhiked to northern Wisconsin with artist (now author) Eric Green.  We rode the freight trains out to Portland, Oregon subsisting on a diet of peanut butter sandwiches, sardines, and Bushmill's Irish whiskey.  After a long, slow leg traveling through a northwest desert I never knew existed, we rolled into Portland covered with ash from the recent Mount Saint Helen's volcanic eruption.

black and white images from 1980 Verona Jazz Festival by Elena Carminati

album photos by Renzo Chesa and Luigi Zanon

In Search of a Sound: Remembering Bill Dixon

In Search of a Sound: Remembering Bill Dixon

Follow the Sound Festival

Antwerp, Belgium

Ingrid Karl Recalls Bill Dixon

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in a musical remembrance of Bill Dixon.  Rob Luerentop, Artistic Director of the Follow the Sound Festival, had the notion to invite four artists, all of who had, at some point in their career, an association with Dixon. Franz Koglmann, Jacques Coursil and Barry Guy answered the call to collaboration, as did I.  It would be fair to say that this particular combination of musicians would never have come together but for the invitation of the festival.  The diversity of our approaches to the music guaranteed, at the very least, an unusual confluence.

We had several days to get to know each other through rehearsal, conversation and, my favorite, shared gourmet meals.  My deepest connection was with Franz Koglmann and his wife Ingrid Karl.  Franz and Ingrid were longtime friends of Bill Dixon, and presented his work in Vienna at the essential Weiner Musik Galerie many times. Bill was fond of the city and his time there.  There are plans afoot to honor Bill's memory in Vienna in the near future.

The music we created is best described as work in progress.  Over an aesthetically adhesive bed of sound provided by Barry Guy, each of us improvised alone, in pairs and, at times, as a trio of trumpets.  There were moments of great beauty.   Check out one of the concert reviews, by Guy Peters for goddeau.com.

 images by Ingrid Karl, Stephen Haynes & Geert Vandepoele

Cultural Locavorism in Connecticut

Connecticut Improvising Composers Project

Firehouse 12

New Haven, CT

Work in progress: a day of recording at Firehouse 12.  Music developed, shared and documented close to home by four Connecticut resident improvising composers.  Think of this as cultural locavorism.

The CICP ensemble:

     David Darling/cello
     Peter McEachern/trombone
     Mario Pavone/bass
     Stephen Haynes/trumpet, cornet & flugelhorn
     Satoshi Takeishi/drums & percussion
     Harris Eisenstadt/drums & percussion

Mario, David, Peter and myself developed the work in partnership with Music for People with catalytic funding from the Special Initiative Grant program of the CT Commission on Culture and Tourism.  After over a year of workshopping the material and another year or more spent touring the state, we brought the new music into the studio at Firehouse 12 to record.

The music was/is strong, and the convergence of the two drummers (first time together) a steady delight to the heart and mind.  Stay tuned for details...

images of CICP by Stephen Haynes

Following the Sound of Bill Dixon

  Searching For a Sound: Remembering Bill Dixon

Follow the Sound Festival

Antwerp, Belgium

Next week, eight days after Bill Dixon's eighty-fifth birthday, I will fly to Antwerp and join Franz Koglmann, Jacques Coursil and Barry Guy to create new music in Bill's memory.  Each musician in this grouping worked with Dixon at some point over the past forty five years.  Rob Leurentop, Artistic Director of the Follow the Sound Festival, was inspired to knit the four of us together.  I am happy that he had the notion.

image of Stephen Haynes by Maurice Robertson

image of Franz Koglmann by Elfie Semotan

image of Jacques Coursil by Juliette Robert

Dancing With the Young Lions

 Taylor Ho Bynum's Acoustic Bike Tour

Real Art Ways

Hartford, CT

I recently had the sublime pleasure of meeting and playing with a wonderful young artist, Tyshawn Sorey.  We worked together in an ad hoc improvisational trio put together by my old friend and trickster confrere, Taylor Ho Bynum.

We set up camp in front of Elaine Gan's Considering Rice photographic installation in the Loading Dock Gallery at Real Art Ways.  Something about the deceptively horizontal and deeply rhythmic quality of this work helped set the table for an intimate afternoon of music full of space and simple beauty.

And beauty is what we brought, received and shared: in the music and through/with the audience of friends and neighbors.  Repeat after me: "there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

 images of the trio at RAW by Brigid Kennedy