SUMMER STORM “live” recording
I will be recording my new piece Summer Storm live on the Judson Memorial Church Facebook and Instragram sites (@judsonchurchnyc) on Friday, August 28th at 8pm EST.
Summer Storm an hour-ish long structured improvisation of longing for a national/global change of heart and mind to follow the tumult of this summer. It interweaves two themes, Amazing Grace and Sibelius' Finlandia Hymn, both of which are deep in my DNA, both of which were written by white men who perpetuated / benefited from inhuman systems in the lifetimes (slavery and naziism), alongside cloud textures drawn from a summer spent improvising with the sky out my quarantine window. It will be free, but donations will go to organizations* fighting racism and supporting immigrants, so please come prepared to give if you're able.
*Proceeds up to $1000 will be split between the B.R.E.A.T.H.E. Collective and the New Sanctuary Coalition. Proceeds over $1000 will be split between those two organizations and Judson Memorial Church.
warm up
my new communal singing piece!
The music is a rising series of 7 improvised, wordless melodies. Here's a video of the fourth warm up from a recent performance:
tent of meeting
an experiment in loving action for solo piano
The music is inspired by the story in Exodus of the Israelite God inhabiting the rooms of the tabernacle in the form of a cloud and, as such, features a succession of room-like musical structures that are filled with freely improvised clouds of sound. In preparation to play this piece, I spent a year carefully observing clouds and portraying their textures and rates of change in real time at the piano. Some of the clouds are dense and immersive, others are spare with stretches of silence. I drew from the extreme textures of musicians like Morton Feldman and Rhys Chatham, as well as my own experience playing gospel music for worship services every Sunday. The intent of the piece is to create abstract fields of sound in which love can be palpably felt both in the dense vibrations, and in the silences.
