My Favorite World #20 point 5

Ed Note: This is a bonus, unscheduled MFW. Be happy.

That beautiful couple in the photo is my treasured Stratocaster plugged into my latest Hero BoardTM.Micro POG→MXR Phase 90→Jetter Tritium overdrive→ Ernie Jr. volume pedal→ Big Muff Pi→ Nano Freeze→ Ibanez Tube Screamer→ TC Ditto. Enquiring minds &c. Today this combo aired out the studio for a couple of hours, their first day in the light in six months. Say hallelujah and amen.

Both the strings and the board layout are unchanged since the 4WAKO gig in September.Coffee is for closers. New strings are for in-shape hands. Soon. I’m getting back in trim for some rehearsals this weekend in Tallahasse, this ahead of a re-embrace of public humiliation in Atlanta in a gig or two later this month with my once and future compadre. As such:

[jwplayer mediaid=”721″]

Daylilies by RoboCromp, 2011 Also, too, these guys joined the fun. Everett F-85 and Fender Deluxe

Ain’t no more favorite world than This Favorite World.

My Favorite World #16 See that way cool cat up there? That’s composer/pianist/bandleader Horace Silver. He recorded a bunch of very deep swinging albums for Blue Note in the 60s. Turns out he died while I was in hospital last summer, passing without me noticing. Mea culpa. He’s not one of the Major figures in jazz, but he is significant. And swinging. Been listening to him a fair bit the past few days, thanks to the serendipity of Ipodius Randomonious.

Along the way, it occurred to me that Steely Dan might have copped the intro to Rikki Don’t Lost That Number from Song for my Father by Horace Silver.

Whaddya think?

Other than that, this week, I got nuthin. You might use it til you feel better.

Still my favorite world.

My Favorite World #9 I’ve been listening to a bunch of Jim Hall recordings lately. This one, a duet with Ron Carter from 1972, exemplifies so much of what I love about the music called jazz.

It’s all there…the playfulness, the attentive listening. More than anything, the sense of two people having a real conversation while never saying a word.

Jim Hall died at the end of 2013 at the age of 83. Along the way, he wrote a few of the definitive chapters on what’s possible with a guitar. He played smooth, he played cool, he played hot. He could play inside with great taste and economy, as in this Cole Porter classic with the Paul Desmond Quartet. (1959)

But Hall was also an adventurer, and he was one of few the cool guitar guys to embrace the heat and risk the expanded harmonic challenges necessary to keep up with someone like Sonny Rollins. Here’s some terrific footage from that era (1962).

Jim Hall was widely praised as a generous teacher, as well, and spent time with Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, and Julian Lage, helping these guys find their own voice and navigate the dark trench of the music industry. The following link is a full set of Hall’s trio with Lage at Newport, recorded just a few months before Hall died in 2013. It might be the best hour you spend this week.

Jim Hall Trio w Julian Lage, Live at Newport Jazz (via NPR) Nothing new in any of this…unless this is the first you’ve heard of Jim Hall. He kept playing well into his 83rd year, and every step of the way he was listening closely and responding with taste and honesty. His work, his legacy…a big part of My Favorite World.

Now You Know What I Did Last Summer

Prologue

Writing this on Thanksgiving morning in a random Starbucks, stealing a few quiet minutes of solitude before a packed weekend of familial familiarity. I’m thankful for much – and aggravated by much, too, but today’s not the day to enumerate – but I’m especially grateful for the great response to my first week of posts here at the i2b oasis. Thanks for reading and sharing and tweeting and commenting. Good to know I’m not simply howling at the moon. Please comment and share to wretched excess so that I become more popular than Paris Kardashian. For today, an answer to the burning question – why does Immune to Boredom exist?Beyond the obvious egoism and narcissistic delusion that anyone might care what I have to say.

The answer: I need it. After finally getting a handle on lifelong depression last spring, I nearly died over the summer. i2b is part of my attempt to make sense of things in the aftermath of a disruptive but decidedly non-epiphanal event.

Some Reassembly Required The Unreliable Narrator Gets His Groove Back

And after all that, I was just minding my own business at a train station in upstate New York when a tick bit me on the assThe geographic location, viral carrier, and body part of the offense remain unverified. But something happened, believe you me. and put me in the hospital for a month. Talk about your random and indifferent universe.

______

It’s not that your Unreliable Narrator sets out to lie, but you must admit that a little tweak makes any recounting more enjoyable. It’s not a violation of truth, just a gentle(ish) reassembly that allows the pieces to rest more comfortably side by side. Maybe a dollop of fabrication here and there, but only insofar as the narrator appears more noble, inspiring, and intelligent.Except where fabrication denigrates the narrator to paint a false sense of humility / vulnerability / fragility that might entice the unwary reader to proffer greater sym-/em-pathy than might otherwise emerge. Who can blame?

Besides, I don’t even attach my name to this chronicle;I’m not hiding my identity. Any reasonably astute reader could out me with a few keystrokes on the googly box. Go ahead. You will be minimally whelmed with what you find. how much trust should you put in someone who won’t even identify herself. Himself. And so on. Just don’t look at it as lying; that’s such an ugly word, so judgmental. Let’s call it editing, instead. Everybody loves an editor. So if you think something I wrote seems edited (nudgewink), don’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s me.

______

Depression had been an intermittent companion for decades. Not the engulfing, collapse into a quivering heap kind. Not always, anyway. It’s more like a wastrel ex-roommate who shows up from time to time to crash on your couch and eat all your food and smoke up your stash and upend whatever sense of progress and structure you had managed to reclaim since the last visit. A familiar and unpleasantly comfortable friend who knows you well enough to encourage your worst impulses and make you believe there is some deeper meaning to the wave of dissolution rising on the horizon who then takes all your money and fades into mist without so much as a by your leave to the reassembly required. But it’s nothing to worry about, really, I’m doing fine, leave me alone, we can’t be out of gin already,FWIW, I detest gin. &c.

______

Here’s some essential advice: if you find yourself in a hospital flirting with death, be sure to have some high- quality music with you. Run it 24/7. The docs had me on mega- IV doses of Doxycycline (known henceforth as Doxy because Sonny Rollins), the reigning WMD of the antibiotic world. But it was the music that kept me alive.“This I believe,” the Narrator intoned with an outsized sense of self-important righteousness that brooks no dissent.

______Proof the nth of the random and indifferent nature of the universe: how did this native of the Deep South arrive at a train platform in the Hudson Valley at just the moment when a virally virulent tickIn the name of accuracy…a tick is not an insect; it is an arachnid. The Narrator’s devotion to factual accuracy is often wholehearted. crawled up my skirt for a nice feast on my ass?Again, important to note that delivery agent, body target, and locale remain subject to dispute.

What random accumulation of butterfly wing beats placed the Narrator on the precipice of that hoariest of plot twists that signals imminent redemption or rebirth or or the tragic demise of one gone too soon? If one arbitrary decision had gone another way, would this chronicle even exist? Would the narrator’s reliability be less tenuous? Would the unexamined life remain unexamined? Might there be fewer question marks?

______

Several years ago, the Narrator made a hard-nosed decision to grow up. At last. A real job with cubicles and everything. And the Narrator killed it, solid results for almost three years, on and off airplanes in such garden spots as Trenton and Reno and Jackson, adding twenty pounds and discarding whatever sense of joy and optimism might have been. Two days before Thanksgiving, 12 hours after crawling off a redeye and finalizing the papers that would bring the company a few million more dollars, I was sacked. Not personal, they said. It’s business. I remarked that the “it’s not personal, it’s business” gambit originated in The Godfather and was generally something said just before somebody took a bullet behind the ear. These Galtian heroes shuffled their feet and offered their weasel condolences and I walked out vowing to never be a cubicle monkey again.

Growing up is a suckers game. ______

Soon after, the wastrel ex-roommate showed up with shadow companions and settled in for an extended residency. Like the roommate, these shades and I were well acquainted, sharing deep secrets I had long tried to forget. The invasions and upending and subsequent bouts of dissolution and disillusion came more frequently. Irritants gained the power to cast me into the darkest humor. Serious challenges rendered panic and paralysis, while the best of life generated flat stoicism, if that. Because why bother enjoying the milkshake when a shit sandwich is just around the corner.

Last spring, I had just completed a short tour with the best band in AmericaThis is 100% true. that you’ve probably never heard. I promise to tell you all about them sometime. Ten people blowing the roof off of packed houses, an astonishing gumbo of klezmer, funk, afro-beat, Zappoid melodies, Saturnalian cacophony, and the hottest drum- sousaphone pulse engine anywhere on the planet. And throughout the tour, as audiences were sweating and dancing and generally losing their minds,Again, 100% true. About this, I would not lie. your NarratorWho is in fact a guitarist of some international familiarity. Another clue! (?) was watching as if from a distance, with one persistent thought: “You really should be enjoying this more.”

So I talked to my doctorCue the twin bathtubs advert. and we tried a few chemical enhancements.

______

The loving embrace of viral bio-horror brought fevers, enveloping pain, and a head-to-toe (including the inside of my mouth) petechial rash.Characterized by blood seeping from little capillaries just under your skin. All joints swelled and frozen in place, the knees resembling well-boiled hams, the digits barely recognizable as toes or fingers. The rash moved into my lungs and liver. My fever rose, my behavior increasingly alarming. And on my 55th birthday, I celebrated by enjoying a nice lumbar puncture.Cake and ice cream are for triflers.

I visited the fever swamp of meningitis and encephalitis. Just add morphine and oxycodone; your Narrator was tripping balls. Conversations with people not present, including one lovely cigar party with Gandhi and Jerry Garcia.Of course, I knew this was hallucination. I detest cigar smoke. Lots of serious conversations with the kids, essential life lessons that they need to know, conversations that I continued even when I realized they were a couple hundred miles away, chats that I had to continue in my solitude because the despair over not sharing this crucial information was too much to bear. Awaking to find myself cleaning the kitchen, hands moving back and forth to polish the imaginary surfaces. I was getting my affairs in order.

But despite the best efforts of that nasty mosquito,Perhaps not a tick. It’s healthy to keep an open mind. Death could not get the better of me.So far.

______

Nobody really talks anymore. What is there to talk about, anyway? Other than the depressions and fears and anxieties, the uncertainties of an economy stacked against you, and just when did my kids grow up and my parents get old all of a sudden anyway what the hell? Oh yeah, and I almost died for my summer vacation this year. Who wants to hear that litany of sad sack shit, anyway?

If dancing on the grave’s edge provided any kind of epiphany, it’s this. Lots of people want to hear this litany because they want to share their own story, or at least to know their own story does not mark them as aberrations. People want me to know: they had a heart attack or kidney failure or lymphoma or cancer. They were in the hospital for x months because of [fill in malady here]. They got screwed at work or their children grew up or their parents got old all of a sudden what the hell. Your Narrator’s brush with the Reaper seemed to be a new open space for talking about these things.Your Narrator apparently believes that the sun shines out of his ass. Not to solve problems or find answers. Just to be able to say, “This shitty thing happened to me. Now, what’s up with you?” Nobody, anywhere, world without end, was talking about this stuff before that earwigIt could have happened. But I still blame that fucking tick. crawled down your Narrator’s auditory canal.Sun shining out of ass.

Or maybe I had forgotten how to listen.What good is a musician who forgot how to listen?

______

My 5th grade teacher assigned a short story exercise. I wrote a tale about an astronaut exploring the moonNeil Armstrong had recently taken his giant leap. Clever application of calendars and arithmetic reveals yet another clue! and discovering a vicious moon monster. Most of the story was about the desperate attempt to retrieve a laser death ray gun that would dispatch the beast. After an adjective-heavy chase across the moonscape:

“He aimed carefully and fired the death ray gun at the monster. It did not work.

“The End”

I thought this exceedingly clever. I’d never heard a story that did not resolve. What a fun trick! My teacher was very displeased and gave me a C. Friends who read it were annoyed because I did not tie it up and put a bow on it. I explained that this way they could fill it in the way they wanted it to happen. Geebus, do a little work yourself, people! My arguments fell on deaf ears.

To this day, I love the unresolved ending.An opinion not universally shared, it seems. Consider yourself fairly warned. Or encouraged.

______

Always be sure to share the music.

“Is that Coltrane?” asked the neurologist sliding a needle into my spine.

Yep.

“Cool. I’ve never had Trane as a soundtrack for a lumbar puncture. It’s usually Jerry Springer or a game show.”

I never felt a thing.

My Favorite World #4

The news of the world lately has been pretty dispiriting, making it difficult to remember that this really is My Favorite World. Two tried and true things you can do in the face of apparent hopelessness…cooking and listening to great new music. Field Tested Fool Proof Granola

Looking for an activity that’ll cure what ails you? Cook something.

Alas, my kitchen chops are just enough to keep me from starving, and to get myself in trouble once in a while, but there are a few go-to recipes that keep me from being a cliched, Leave It To Beaver era patriarchal putz.There are plenty of other areas where I qualify, but I’m nearly redeemable on this score. If you are generally kitchen savvy, this post is likely beneath your notice, save as an opportunity to point and laugh as I wobble on toddler legs through the world of food.

This one is an amalgam of lots of different granola recipes I’ve made/bungled/burned over the years. I’ve finally learned the guiding principles, though, and now I can whip this out at a moment’s notice, as long as I have all the ingredients: Oatmeal – 4 cups

Sunflower seeds – 1 cup

Flax seeds – ½ cup

Coconut flakes – 1 cup

Tupelo Honey – ¾ cup (any other sweetener will do, but this is my fave?

Vegetable Oil – ½ cup

Salt – A couple two three pinches

Vanilla extract – A scoche

Then, if you’re like me, you’ll realize you forgot something, so off to the market to get: Pecans – 1 cup chopped

Dried fruit – A fistful (cranberries today). DO NOT put the dried fruit in the oven or they will turn to stone. Mix all the dry ingredients (except the dried fruit!!) in a big pan. You can substitute or add any kinds of seeds or nuts, but if you add much more than I use, you might want to add another cup of oats to keep the granola from becoming too seedy. Add the salt, oil, honey, and vanilla. Then stir like crazy. I use a pan with high side walls because I’m clumsy and spill a lot otherwise.

Put the mix in a 300* oven for 30 minutes. Make another pot of coffee after SOMEONE drank the rest of the first pot.I’m not naming names.

At the 30 minute mark, pull the pan out and stir well. Put it back in for another 15 minutes or so. Keep your eyes and nose peeled for any hint of burning.

After 15 minutes, or around the time your kitchen begins to smell like heaven’s garden, take it out and stir again. Let cool for a while, stirring occasionally. Once it cools, add a fistful of dried fruit Exactly, no more or less. Be precise. and stir it in.

That’s it. If I can do it, any prat can make it work. Half a cup of this mixed with a half cup of yogurt makes this My Favorite World.

Today’s Music

This morning, Bitter Southerner posted their 25+1 favorite CDs to come out of the South in 2014.I wrote this last week, so the date’s off. With just a couple of exceptions, I had not heard of the musicians on the list. So I pulled one up to provide the soundtrack for granola wrangling: Curtis Harding’s Soul Power.

An ATL-based guitarist/singer, Harding serves an updated take on one of my favorite styles – late 60s/early 70s soul and R&B. Isley, Curtis Mayfield, Issac Hayes, Al Green…not that he sounds just like any of these folks, but that you can feel the through-line from the pioneers up to more recent R&B authenticos like Prince and Cee Lo. (Harding was in Cee Lo’s band for a while.) He also reflects the great blues vibe of Muddy Waters and the like. And then comes “Cruel World” to wrap things up and I’m reminded of Los Lobos and the great guitar of David Hidalgo. All in all, I really love it. Just one more surprise puzzle piece that fits right into MFW. I’m sure it made the granola more better.

And now we’re into Amy Ray’s Goodnight Tender. I’ve met Amy in passing a few timesNot that she’d have any reason to remember. and she’s truly one of the world’s good people. Loving this album, a heaping helping of pure country. And all respect for the incred harmonies that pal Kelly Hogan is dropping here. M. F. W.

I’m looking forward to checking out the whole list, especially the latest Lucinda Williams, whom I adore, yes I do. And if you don’t know the Bitter Southerner, get to know them. They provided more than a little bit of inspiration for establishing this here little bloggy vineyard.

My Favorite World #3

Welcome back to MFW, a weekly feature that highlights the things that make this My. Favorite. World.

The Music Supreme

On Tuesday, December 9, 1964, the John Coltrane Quartet set up in Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The music of that night stands with the greatest achievements of human creativity. A safe bet: if someone tells you they only own one or a couple or a few jazz recordings,A Love Supreme will be on her shelf. The album is emblematic of a transitional period in jazz from the be-bop/post-bop phase to the eruption of free jazz. It is an utterly radical departure from most of what came before and is also, incredibly, completely accessible to anyone willing to listen.Challenging, yes, but not forbiddingly so.

You probably know all this already. Writing aboutA Love Supreme is akin to writing about Bach, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare. It’s so famous, and so much has been said/written about it…I doubt that I have much to add. Ashley Kahn’s 2002 book, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, provides deep detail about the sessions, the preparation, and Trane’s personal philosophy that drove the conception and composition. Go there for the history. Stay here for reflection of how this album, perhaps more than any other, made me realize that this is My. Favorite. World. I grew up on rock and roll, especially the blues based stuff. My early ambition as a hustling neighborhood lawn mower man was completely spurred by my desire to buy every album ever made. Clapton. Hendrix. Duane. One day, I bought an album by Carlos Santana with some guy named John McLaughlin. “Hey, Carlos is cool, maybe a little weirdly exoticWhat with all that Latin rhythm stuff., but basically a blues cat,” thought my 14 year old self. The opening track was this, a “cover version” of Acknowledgement, the first section of A Love Supreme.

Jesus H. Christ staring down Satan in the desert!

This was the first time I had heard of Coltrane, and I had no fking idea what to make of it. I had no frame of reference, nothing that helped me understand if it was good, bad, or utterly ridiculous.I felt all three ways about it on any given day. But I couldn’t stop listening to it, whatever it was.

Still, even with the occasional jazz-ish oddity like Mahavishnu Orchestra or Al Dimeola or Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow in my collection, I was a rocking dude. Jazz remained not-too- vaguely-otherish, if not downright musty.Props paid here to my old man, who dragged me off to such like as Count Basie at Carnegie Hall and made me listen to Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton and such, thereby laying a foundation. But still…jazz was geezer fart music. Shit, the guitars weren’t even distorted. Lame.

A few years post-Watergate, I went off to college at the University of Georgia, where I fell in with a notably disreputable crowd: the volunteers at the campus radio station. WUOG-FM’s programming then was a polyglot, a defiant holdover from the earlier days of alternative/pirate/underground radio. You could hear Hendrix into Flatt &Scruggs into Velvet Underground into John Cage into Cecil Taylor into Scott Joplin. There were a few fellow students there who really knew their jazz, and I fell into their fiendish grip.Visualize a segment fromReefer Madness here. Pretty soon, I had stopped listening to rock and pop almost completely.This was the peak of the punk/new wave era, which I basically missed in a cloud of jazz and world music. So much for your Narrator as a eagle-eyed surveyor of prevailing zeitgeist.

One night, in a haze of some sort of uber-substantially- altered-mindfulnesslessnessAnd we can just leave it at that, thank you., I was draped across a filthy sofa in a candlelit room when a pal dropped the needle onA Love Supreme. From the opening stroke of the gong to the end of the opening saxophone phraseAll of fifteen seconds., my world changed. And then shit really got real.

I was unprepared, still without a useful frame of reference for what was going on, but here’s the great thing: it didn’t matter. This was music so pure, so honest, so skilled, that I think a herd of donkeys or a field of sunflowers would understand. Mind, this was about 35 years ago, and I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

The album consists of 4 parts, totaling about 33 minutes. During this half hour, I alternated between disbelief, fear, tears, terror, and laughter. But the predominant lingering feeling was overwhelming joy that I lived in a world where something like A Love Supreme could exist.

Over the years, I’ve probably listened to this album more than any other. Times come where I put it asideBeen there, done that…., only to have it pop up on the radio and hit me across the side of the head one more time. Just this evening, I’ve listened through the entire piece twice, and then played specific segments another half-dozen times. There are elements that send a jolt up my spine every time. The gong and opening sax statement. The four note bass theme, as instantly recognizable as the opening to Grumpy Ludwig’s th5. Jimmy Garrison’s bass solo between the first and second parts (and again ¾ of the way through part 3 to bring in the elegiac and somewhat terrifying final movement). The explosion of Trane’s sax as the second part, Resolution, begins. Elvin Jones’ drum solo that opens Pursuance. McCoy Tyner’s relentless block chord comping and butterfly runs. The chanting. Oh, the chanting. But mostly, the overwhelming power and beauty of John Coltrane’s tenor sax, and his uncompromising pursuit of that something that neither he nor we could quite get at directly, but that we knew/know is there. If only….and still.

I learned more in that half hour twenty-some years ago than I had in the 18 years prior. This is music that contains multitudes: the blues, hymns, religious chants, ancient polyrhythms designed to entrance. The lessons learned from A Love Supreme resonate every day I’m in this world: our human potential, the possibilities, the payoff for relentless striving. But more than anything, this…

Music has the power to change the world. And that’s the main reason that this world is my favorite. Any world that can produce a Coltrane is a world worth living in.

My Favorite World #1 Two articles for the debut of My Favorite World. What can I say? I’m enthusiastic.

Room Nels Cline and Julian Lage Mack Avenue Records www.nelscline.com

Nels Cline is a 58 year old, self-described “fake jazz” guitarist known most widely for his membership in the band Wilco. Julian Lage is a 26 year old jazz phenom, the heir apparent to Jim Hall, with unmatched technique and harmonic sophistication. “Room” is their first recording together; if we’re lucky, it won’t be the last.

Straight up: this is music by and for guitarists. Anybody who loves quirky and beautiful music will like it too, but anyone with an addiction to the 6-string beast will listen to this over and over with head shaking ‘how the hell did they do that?’ amazement.

While Cline has a reputation for extreme sonic manipulations, the game here is pure guitar tone. Cline (in the right channel) alternates between a pair of Gibsons – a 965 Barney Kessel archtop and a 1962 J-200 acoustic. On the left side, Lage plays his Linda Manzer archtop and 1939 000-18 acoustic (the latter featured in the recent Lage-Eldridge performance in Tallahassee). No overdubs, no pedals or effects – just a couple of guys having a wide-ranging conversation with guitars. It’s hard to predict how ‘normal’i.e., non-guitargeek people people will respond to this music. At times it is aggressive and dissonant; other passages are melodic, lyrical, and soothing. Crimson-esque angularity gives way to a ballad that Pat Metheny could have written, and here comes something that sounds like Ornette’s harmolodics before we hear the ghost of Jim Hall. The tone and interaction also recall the great duets of John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner. The guitar chops are astounding throughout, but it’s their ears that really do the work here. Lage and Cline are on their toes, keyed into each other’s comments and asides in a way that often makes their free passages sound pre-arranged, with clusters and flurries mounting atop one another and relieved by sparse bell rings at just the right moment. And though their styles are distinctive, there are moments when the sum of the parts makes it impossible to tell who is doing what, moments when they sound like one instrument, one player.

In a recent interview with Premier Guitar, Cline described a compositional approach based on “squibs”, “…tiny written areas of music to be connected with free improv. I would play an idea, Julian would harmonize on the spot, and we’d take it from there before going completely free.”

Lage: “The squibs are distinctive in nature. Even if only four or eight bars long, they’re very directive and can sustain long improvisations. Nels writes in such a way that leaves so much room for spontaneous composition. It’s so cool that, in this setting, nothing is off-limits—a strong backbeat groove is given equal consideration to something more fluid. It’s really a shared concept, as Nels says—a tip of the hat to Jimmy Giuffre and that whole scene.”

OK, superb playing and a shout out to the monumentally great Jimmy Giuffre.You can bet Giuffre will show up in a future MFW post. I am a happy boy.

Recordings like Room make life worth living. Check out the Premier Guitar interview for more on these guys. Here’s a video clip of the boys in action to brighten your day.

Tatsuya Nakatani Live at Ruby Fruit Manor Tallahassee, FL 11/24/14

Why is this my favorite world? Because you never know when a stray Facebook post from one of the world’s great improvising musicians announces that he will perform in your little town in about an hour. So never mind the torrential rain or the fact that you only have an iffy address in Railroad Square, no contact number, no verification. Get up and go.

And sure enough, there was percussionist/acoustic sound artist Tatsuya Nakatani with a miniaturized version of his percussion array set up in the corner of a 12×12 foot bare room. Tatsuya has performed and recorded with a who’s who catalog of free improv heavyweights, including Joe McPhee, Peter Brotzman, Billy Bang, Eyvind Kang, Ken Vandermark, Mary Halvorson, Shane Perlowin, Kaoru Watanabe, Eugene Chadbourne, and Barre Phillps. I suspect most people will not recognize any of those names, but trust me, this guy is the real deal.

When I arrived, a local artist was kicking off the evening with a solo keyboard performance heavily influenced by Terry Riley. Sustained harmonic spreads alternated with denser drone clusters. Nothing moved fast; this was music for people with patience. The reward – typical of the so-called minimalist movement ushered in by folks like Riley, Charlemagne Palestine, and La Monte Young – comes with the release offered by subtle shifts in tonality at unexpected moments. I’d never heard of Chantelle Dorsey (the artist known as Black Sun Black Moon) before this evening. It was a welcome discovery.

Tatsuya began by chatting up the crowd of 20 or so, talking about touring, sleeping and cooking in the van, good gigs and bad gigs, how he sometimes wonders whether it’s all worth it. (The tour began on September 4; he will finally return home to Pennsylvania in late December. He travels alone.) He’s a very personable guy, with a warm smile and easy laugh. Too often, the improv scene suffers a grim demeanor and heavy mood. Tatsuya is serious about his work, but never somber, and his amiability invites listeners into a compatible collaboration that recognizes the audience as an equal partner to the music and musician. This is no small thing, especially when the music is “challenging”.

Settled in behind a snare/kick/floor tom kit, a rototom, a medium-sized gong, and a pile of cymbals at his feet, Tatsuya began by gently vibrating the gong with one of his handmade bows. It’s hard to believe the range of sounds available from this simple gesture; the buildup of overtones can trick the ear into believing there are violins, a church organ, people singing, a synthesizer. He brought his kick drum in a slow fade-in until a distinct pulse emerged. While his playing is not typically rhythmic in a traditional sense, it frequently features a prominent pulse that provides an anchor for listeners. Always free form and generally abstract, his improvisation displayed an internal formal logic that framed the entire piece.

He moved through a range of sonic manipulations – handheld cymbals and kitchen whisks scraping drum heads; temple bells rubbed against one another or against a cymbal laid across a drum, multiple cymbals rubbed, tapped, and bent against one another. The effect ranged from a stiff wind through a bamboo forest to angelic choirs to a metalworks in full roar. This gave way to a Krupa-esque drum flurry, exactly what it might sound like if someone shoved old Gene down a flight of stairs in mid-solo. And then the bit that really grabbed me – he held a small cymbal to his mouth and blew through the mount hole, treating the metal disc like a horn mouthpiece. This gesture culminated in his blowing through the cymbal as it lay flat on the snare drum to create a roomful of saxophones replicating a pack of whinnying puppies and hounds. The original kickdrum pulse returned, and then back to the bowed gong to bring the entire piece full circle. As the last vibrations faded away, the audience provided a sustained communal silence to bring the piece to a close.

Tatsuya Nakatani’s music is available through his website. I particularly recommend his duo album with guitarist Shane Perlowin. You can also order his handmade bows and conduct your own sonic manipulations in the privacy of your own home. (Gongs and cymbals sold separately.) Wherever you are, keep an ear out and grab any opportunity to see him perform live.

Here’s a pretty good video of Tatsuya solo in 2013.