PopWars

The neighbors decided to close the pool this weekend. Peggi and I have been on duty the last two weeks, making sure the bottom was vacuumed and there were no leaves on the surface. We took a final swim while Peggi’s bread was in the oven and waited for the alarm to sound.

We had tickets for Alarm Will Sound at the Eastman at 8 pm. The group was started twenty-five years ago at the Eastman by some of the same music students who started Ossia, the New Music group I’ve written about over the years in these pages. The students started Ossia, not the school, in order to perform pieces they wanted to perform, adventurous music that doesn’t fit in the classical or jazz categories, pieces by Morton Feldman or Steve Reich or even their own compositions, in Kilbourn Hall.

I prefer the minimal side of New Music. With twenty-two members, Alarm Will Sound leans mostly in the other direction, although they performed one absolutely beautiful solo piano piece last night. They have a fascination with Aphex Twin, and the group performed two of his pieces last night, both from their new CD. Alarm Will Sound won a 2026 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and their Grammy was under glass in the lobby.

These guys have been around. Tenor sax player Ricky Ford played with Ellington’s band, Charles Mingus, Dannie Richmond, Mal Waldron and Abdullah Ibrahim. Drummer Thurman Barker grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and was a charter member of the AACM, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He has played with the Art Ensemble’s Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Henry Threadgill. Bassist Jerome Harris worked as a sideman to Sonny Rollins, Bobby Previte, Don Byron and Bill Frisell. Pianist John Kordalewski has played with Chico Freeman, Charlie Rouse, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake.

So the Ricky Ford Quartet was fully equipped to pay tribute to John Coltrane last night at the Bop Shop. Except for one small concern. A pad had come off one of the valves on Ricky’s tenor sax. He looked very worried before the show, and the piano player asked if there was someone in town who could work on his sax. Peggi recommended Carl from Shuffle Music. Every horn player in this town goes to Carl.

Peggi gave Carl a call and put Ricky on the phone. Ricky put some super glue on the pad and made an appointment to see Carl in the morning at ten o’clock. Carl works out of his home now, and Peggi said she could hear Carl’s wife in the background telling him they would not be home on Saturday morning.

The gig went off without a hitch. The band roared through seven Coltrane songs and then two Wayne Shorter tunes and a gorgeous version of the Ellington song “Passion Flower.” I have a 45 of the song by Johnny Hodges that I love. This was something else.

I live under a rock and have no idea what Ed Sheeran sounds like. I read the article about Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, saying that Sheeran’s tour could not play at Gillette Stadium if it continued with Macklemore, a rapper who proclaimed “Free Palestine.” That announcement was followed by the withdrawal of Sheeran’s other support acts and the Irish folk band that backed him up on his two-hour-plus performances.

Everyone has to decide for themselves whether or not they want to ignore injustice, but I was impressed that Sheeran went on to play solo at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. The article said he used an array of guitar pedals to loop and layer short snippets of sound to create a live, repeating backing track.

Jake Wark’s tenor saxophone is hiding behind his laptop in my photo. He works in much the same manner, sampling and mixing while improvising on his sax. He sampled some crazy stuff and made it work in loops, weaving layers of electronica with melodic lines.

Pianist Michael McNeill was the perfect partner, such a quick improviser. The duo never let things get out of hand. Their performance stayed musical throughout, and it was quite impressive to watch them land the plane as they pulled out of the soundscapes they had created.

Duane sent us an article on the Missy Mazzoli world premiere of “Lincoln in the Bardo,” opening at the Metropolitan Opera. The 45-year-old says her entry to opera came through MTV with its eye-popping barrage of splashy, jangling videos. Coincidentally, we have been watching a lot of XITE, one of those free channels that come with a Samsung TV, over at Kevin and Jeanne’s place.

The channel’s slogan is “See Your Music,” and it really fits, as they keep the sound off when we’re there. Janet Jackson, Gary Numan, Electric Light Orchestra, Quiet Riot, and even Kansas videos look operatic without the sound. Kevin says he likes the station because they play a lot of Kool & the Gang and all those Black groups that MTV refused to play back in the day. Not only that, they mix in performances from The Ed Sullivan Show like the Carpenters, Petula Clark, and Pearl Bailey. We had to ask them to turn the sound on for Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy.” I never thought those videos from the ’80s would live on, but they do in a wonderful way.

I had my teeth cleaned last week, and I had to interrupt Amy, the hygienist, to tell her I liked “Give Me One Reason,” the Tracy Chapman song that was coming out of her tiny Sonos speaker. Got me thinking about the Beach Boys song: “You’re sittin’ in a dentist’s chair. And they’ve got music for you there.” Her playlist was heavy on Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, and it all sounded so good. She told me it was a Pandora playlist called “Stevie Nicks Radio.”

I loved the afternoon we spent at Storm King in the Hudson Valley. It was the perfect way to celebrate our anniversary. The 500-acre outdoor museum has more than 100 works by many of my favorite artists, but they don’t have a Chillida. There is a mostly outdoor Chillida museum, Chillida Leku, outside of San Sebastián, where all the work is by one man. I would say Chillida Leku is more impressive than Storm King.

Peggi took a short movie at Storm King of some school kids rolling down one of the hills in front of a large sculpture. It brought back memories of doing the same thing with my siblings and standing up so dizzy I couldn’t walk straight. I found a quote from Chillida in the book Hauser & Wirth put out, Eduardo Chillida: Writings, that fit well enough to have Chillida represented at Storm King, and I inserted it in this Margaret Explosion video.

The song was in the big list of performances that were in the running for our new release, Tone Poems, but it didn’t make the cut. I hope you like it. And here is my favorite Chillida quote:

“Isn’t planning a way to steal the present’s greatest mission?”

I heard CDs are coming back.

We still sell cds at our shows and people often ask, “which cd best represents what I heard tonight?” or something to that effect. The players and instrumentation have changed over the years and it is tough to recommend one. I often recommend the very first cd we did, 1998’s “Invisible Idiot.” Our most recent cd, “Field Recordings” is sold out and so is “Disappear“. I’d like to say, just get a streaming subscription and you can hear them all but I bite my tongue. We need more product.

We started collecting songs we played live a couple of years ago and eventually we whittled down the list to fourteen. We sent those to Arpad for mastering a few weeks ago, he brought them to life and we are headed over to his studio tonight to make a few final tweaks. Now we need the artwork.

We named a live piece we did “Bohemia” and created a video for it. The song made the cut for the new release and I thought it might make a good title for the cd. I found a print of a photo (above) I had taken in Indianapolis in the early 70s and thought these guys made pretty good bohemians but the print had what they used to call “satin finish ” and I wasn’t able to get rid of the pixelated look without buying an add on for Photoshop.

I switched gears and started working with the ‘Arcadia” concept. I took this photo on the windward side of O’ahu when we were visiting Matthew and Louise. John Vaccaro recently sent me a scan of a sheet of press type, a font called “Jackson,” and I used that for the title.” Peggi and I used to see this font in Spain. I drew enough of the letters to create the Refrigerator logo back in the nineties and I am thrilled to have a whole alphabet.

That first one looked like a travel ad for Aruba so I swapped out the beach photo for one from Rochester.

And then tried this one. The central figure, the girl standing alone in the water, looks like a Rinekake Dijkstra subject and mood goes in a dystopian direction.

This photo, taken out the window of the back seat of Matthew’s car in Honolulu, fit the dystopian mood and I switched the title after we watched the fantastic”Blast of Silence,” sometimes described as a tone poem.

I lightened up for a few minutes, long enough to entertain putting our cello player’s son on cover.

And finally settled on using an abstract I did incur garage back when we lived in the city.