12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 322
Date: 11/18/2013
Instrument: Tenor saxophone
Location: An outdoor walkway at CalArts (California College for the Arts). Valencia, CA
Notes:
This morning Bad Luck drove down from San Francisco to Valencia for a clinic and performance at CalArts. After the workshop, I walked around the main floor of the building for some time before finding a large outdoor walkway that wrapped around the South side of the building. A busy, 4-lane road was a few hundred yards beyond the school, and the constant murmur of traffic could be heard while I improvised from the walkway.
Our clinic was a very productive and energy-filled experience, and I wanted to carry this spirit into my improvisation today. During this piece I explored pockets of action with punctuations of my own silence. However the constant hum of traffic had its own kind of persistence, with natural ebbs and flows as traffic increased or decreased. I used my own silence as a very specific barrier to separate my trains of thought, while allowing the traffic noise to act as a bridge between these statements. There was thematic material that naturally emerged from me while playing, but overall I worked to create a variety of sound textures and stylistic approaches, including hollering, screaming, false fingerings and multiphonics.
-Neil
The image “Orange, White, and Blue” accompanying today’s post by Ger van Elk.