SpiderMonkey Stories

My digital disappearance starts to take on Pynchon-esque proportions, as my website languishes untouched. I swear, sometime soon it will rise Phoenix-like from its own ashes. In the meantime, some upcoming appearances of note in early 2010.

Thursday, January 7, noon - 3pm: Out to Lunch, WKCR 89.9FM
I’ll be sitting in the studio at NYC’s most venerable of jazz stations, mostly discussing matters of brass importance in preparation for the upcoming Festival of New Trumpet Music.

Friday, January 8, 7:30pm: Jason Kao Hwang’s Edge
St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Ave (at E. 54th St), NYC
JKH - violin; THB - cornet; Ken Filiano - bass; Andrew Drury - drums
part of Reggie Workman’s Sculptured Sounds Festival

Saturday, January 9, 8:30pm: The Thirteenth Assembly
Cornelia St Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, NYC
THB - cornet; Tomas Fujiwara - drums; Mary Halvorson - guitar; Jessica Pavone - viola
part of the Company of Heaven Jazz Fest

January 13 through 16: The Festival of New Trumpet Music
Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand Street, NYC
This should be an amazing event, and I’ve spilled much blood, sweat, and tears working on this over the past several months. (Not just an idle cliche, as one of the gigs will feature Lew Soloff.) Click here for the full details, which include a celebration of the great Wilmer Wise and concerts by Anti-Social Music, Charles Wuorinen, Chicago Underground Duo, The Low Anthem, Meridian Arts Ensemble, and many many more. Each night is only $15, a festival pass is only $40, an absolute steal. But here are the shows where I’ll be actually putting horn to lips:

Thursday, January 14, 9:00pm: The Chamber Music of Ornette Coleman
Wilmer Wise & Lew Soloff - trumpets; THB - cornet; Meg Okura & Scott Tixier - violins; Judith Insell - viola; Will Martina - cello; Warren Smith - percussion; Gerald Cleaver - drums; Darcy James Argue, Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. & JC Sanford - arrangers
I’ll be conducting Ornette Coleman’s “The Sacred Mind of Johnny Dolphin” for trumpet, string quartet, and percussion, featuring trumpeting legends Wilmer Wise and Lew Soloff. Then we’ll be premiering new arrangements of Coleman works by members of the Pulse Composer Federation for the same instrumentation. It should be a fantastic evening of music.

Saturday, January 16, 9:00pm: Open Circuit International Trumpet Ensemble
THB, Jean-Luc Cappozzo, Franz Hautzinger, Joe McPhee, Itaru Oki & Herb Robertson - trumpets & cornets; William Parker - bass; John Betsch - drums
Thanks to the generous support of the CMA/FACE French-American Jazz Exchange, we’ll be reuniting an international trumpet summit first convened in France by Jean-Luc Cappozzo in the spring of 2008. A really incredible cast of performers from France, Austria, Japan, and the US, something not to be missed!

Sunday, January 17, 7:00pm: FONT in Philly
International House, 3701 Chestnut St, Philadelphia
Co-sponsored by Ars Nova Workshop, FONT makes its first showing outside of NYC, with a triple bill featuring the Chicago Underground Duo, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, and the Open Circuit Internation Trumpet Ensemble. More brassy joy than even the city of brotherly love can handle.

Saturday, January 23, 9:00pm: Fred Ho’s Green Monster Big Band
BAM Cafe, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
Fred’s 20-piece big band makes a ruckus sound celebrating his new CD.

Then I close out the month with three extraordinary projects in my favorite city in North America, presented by the wonderful folks at the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society:

Friday, January 29, 9:00pm: Anthony Braxton 12+1tet
Christ Church Cathedral, 690 Burrard Street, Vancouver, Canada
AB - reeds; THB - brass; Nicole Mitchell - flutes; Andrew Raffo Dewar, James Fei, & Steve Lehman - saxophones; Sara Schoenbeck - bassoon; Jessica Pavone - viola; Mary Halvorson - electric guitar; Reut Regev - trombone; Jay Rozen - tuba; Carl Testa - bass; Aaron Siegel - percussion
For more info, click here.

Sunday, January 31, noon to 8pm: Anthony Braxton’s Sonic Genome Project
Roundhouse, 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver
An eight-hour interactive musical experience with Braxton’s 12+1 tet plus 50-some musicians from Vancouver. A truly revolutionary musical happening.
For more info, click here.

February 4 through 6, 8:00pm: Time Flies 22nd Annual Improvised Music Festival
The Ironworks, 235 Alexander Street, Vancouver
Torsten Müller - bass; Mei Han - zheng; Dylan van der Schyff - drums; Sara Schoenbeck - bassoon; Jessica Pavone - viola; THB - brass; Mary Halvorson- guitar; Fred Lonberg-Holm - cello
A three-day improvised music meeting with various combinations of fantastic musicians.
For more info…

I’ve been having all sorts of computer problems, so my website is many months behind, and I’ve been letting this blog get overgrown with electronic weeds. I’ll be doing a major overhaul of my website around the beginning of 2010, and I’m also going to try and pick up the pace of the writing going on here (promises, promises). But in the meantime, here’s my fall schedule through the end of the year, hope you can make it out to one of these fine musical ventures:

Saturday, October 17, 9pm
New Music by Laura Andel
@ The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune), NYC
THB (cornet), Carl Maguire (Fender Rhodes), Shoko Nagai (piano),
Thomas Buckner (baritone), and the ensemble Gamelan Son of Lion
(Barbara Benary, Lisa Karrer, Skip LaPlante, Denman Maroney, and David
Simons)

Tuesday, October 20, 8pm
Enescu Re-Imagined by Lucian Ban & John Hebert
@ Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, NYC
Mat Maneri (viola), Joyce Hammann (violin), Tony Malaby (tenor sax),
THB (cornet) Badal Roy (tablas), Lucian Ban (piano, orchestrations),
John Hebert (double bass, orchestrations), Gerald Cleaver (drums)
* discount tix available, contact me if you’re interested.

Sunday, October 25, 3pm
Taylor Ho Bynum Quintet
@ Hammond Performing Arts Series at Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston, MA
THB (cornet), Bill Lowe (bass trombone), Jim Hobbs (alto saxophone), John Hebert (bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums)

Monday, October 26, 7:30pm
Bynum - Hebert - Cleaver Trio
@ RUCMA/Vision performance series at Local 269, 269 Houston St, NYC
THB (cornet), John Hebert (bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums)

Friday, October 30
Anthony Braxton Trio
@ Deutsches Jazzfestival, Frankfurt, Germany
AB (reeds, electronics), THB (brass), Mary Halvorson (guitar)

Saturday, October 31, 6:30pm
Mary Halvorson & Jessica Pavone with guest THB
@ Botticino Jazz Festival, Botticino, Italy
MH (guitar), JP (viola), THB (cornet)

Monday, November 2, 8pm
Bynum - Hebert - Cleaver Trio
@ Ars Nova Workshop at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
THB (cornet), John Hebert (bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums)

Saturday, November 7, 8:30pm
Bynum - Morris - Schoenbeck Trio
@ IBeam, 168 7th Street, Brooklyn NY
THB (cornet), Joe Morris (guitar), Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon)
with Never Saw This Coming (Rich Johnson, Kirk Knuffke, Brian Drye, Curtis Hasselbring)

Friday, November 13, 8pm
Tyshawn Sorey Quartet
@ AACM at the Community Church, 40 E. 35th St, NYC
TS (drums), THB (cornet), Aaron Stewart (saxophone), John Escreet (piano)
with Amina Claudine Myers’ Ensemble

Friday, November 20, 7:30pm
Taylor Ho Bynum & Tomas Fujiwara
THB (cornet), TF (drums)
@ Clemente Solo Velez Cultural Center
107 Suffolk St. (between Rivington & Delancey)
part of the 28-hour Arts for Art/Vision Festival Marathon Benefit Concert

Monday, November 30, 7:30pm
Jason Kao Hwang’s Edge
@ RUCMA/Vision performance series at Local 269, 269 Houston St, NYC
JKH (violin), THB (cornet), Ken Filiano (bass), Andrew Drury (drums)

Monday, December 21, 7pm
PosCat 3
@ Barbes, 376 9th St, Brooklyn, NY
THB (cornet), Abraham Gomez-Delgado (percussion), Reut Regev (trombone)

I like to do gigs around my birthday. Is it because I enjoy celebrating another journey around the sun by pursuing my artistic muse with some of my favorite collaborators? Or is it because it’s a good excuse to guilt people into coming out to my shows? You be the judge.

So two gigs this week, on the third and fourth days of my thirty-fifth year:

7:30pm Monday August 24
Local 269, 269 Houston St, NYC

Taylor Ho Bynum - Joe Morris - Abraham Gomez-Delgado
THB (cornet), JM (bass), AGD (percussion)
Part of the RUCMA/Vision Performance Series, with Herb Robertson’s group at 9pm.

8:30pm Tuesday August 25
Freddie’s Backroom, 485 Dean St, Brooklyn, NY

The Thirteenth Assembly
THB (cornet), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jessica
Pavone (viola)
Part of the On the Way Out series, with Jim Pugliese’s Big Easy at 10pm.

And coming up in September (yes, mark your calendar now…)
9/19: the CD release concert for THB & SpiderMonkey Strings Madeleine Dreams at the Jazz Gallery!
9/25: Positive Catastrophe at the New Languages Festival!

“Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece…Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?”

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I’ve always had a bit of luddite in me (he writes on his blog…). Maybe it’s because I play an acoustic instrument and a mostly acoustic music. But like everybody else, I got caught up in the “networking revolution”: to be a musican these days (they say) you must have a myspace page, gotta get on facebook, etc etc.

Except I realized a few things recently. I hadn’t gone on either myspace or facebook in months. First of all, the sites are just ugly and cluttered and corporate, I never liked them to begin with. My inboxes would be full of random musician spam, 90% for gigs by musicians I’ve never met in towns I don’t live near, or for opportunities to audition for America’s Got Talent. (I can really see avant improv cornet taking over the reality show circuit.) I started feeling guilty about the ignored friend requests, the unanswered messages. And my avoidance of the “space-book” continuum bled into the rest of my overextended digital existence…you might notice this is the first blog post in a month, my website calendar is painfully out-of-date, and I recently realized the site in general is having strange issues, with audio samples broken and disappearing.

The only thing worse than not having a digital platform is to have them and let them go untended. Better to be invisible than unresponsive, I guess. So I made the decision to cancel my myspace page completely, and I’m currently on the fence with facebook. I’m going to give it a week, see if I can simplify its uses and make it work for me. Otherwise, I want to focus my virtual energies on my website (the only online home I can truly control the aesthetic and design), and return to more regular writing here.

(And focus my real energies on trying to grow an actual vegetable garden. Practice my horn while watching tomatoes ripen. That seems far more appealing than staring into a computer screen.)

Rather than write about my recent sextet tour myself, I leave that in the very creative hands of blogger-with-attitude, guitarist extraordinaire, and papa-to-be, my man Evan O’Reilly over at In This Game A Minute. He tends to have much more interesting times on the road than I do anyway; I stay in the hotel room and practice, he hangs out with snakes at Finnish disco clubs.

I was asked for a list of my five favorite big band recordings, for a downbeat feature Frank Hadley is writing. Even though I know there was a bit of blog-world discussion about this a few months ago (as usual Darcy James Argue was on the case with the roundup), it still ended up being a tough assignment; it’s so hard to nail down just five favorites, there’s so much spectacular stuff out there. (It hurts to have Basie, Gil Evans, Brotherhood of Breath, and however many others left out!) But in the end I went the sentimental route, and chose five recordings I love that have particular meaning for me personally.

Duke Ellington - Great Paris Concert (1963)
It would be easy to have just a list of Ellington records. I probably have close to a hundred Duke records, and honestly, just about all of them are pretty great. But as much as I love the early stuff (especially the Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart eras), and some of the later classics like Far East Suite or …And His Mother Called Him Bill, The Great Paris Concert would have to be my pick. It was one of the first Ellington recordings I ever bought (recommended to me by James Jabbo Ware, see below, when I took a workshop with him when I was a teenager), and it remains one of my favorites. The ensemble playing on this recording is unbelievable, totally loose and relaxed and totally together at the same time; listen to the “Rockin’ in Rhythm” that kicks things off, that’s the best band in the world. Johnny Hodges is in particularly masterful form, that alone is reason for joy. And for about a year when I was in my twenties, I would listen to this version of “Concierto for Cootie” before every gig, I’m still trying to get that sound.

Anthony Braxton - Creative Orchestra (Koln) 1978
Playing Braxton’s large ensemble music has been an inspirational and transformative experience for me for over fifteen years. To use Anthony’s own terminology, it is restructuralist music; it acknowledges, even celebrates, existing musical traditions while reinventing and reimagining those principles in extraordinarily creative ways. The Creative Orchestra Music 1976 album (that was just reissued on the Mosaic box set) is justly recognized as a masterpiece, but I actually like this 1978 Koln concert more; this is a touring band that has truly lived in the music, there’s both a comfort with the material and a sense of exploration that couldn’t happen with a studio record. It’s an incredible bunch of musicians, including an all-star brass section with Leo Smith, Kenny Wheeler, George Lewis, and Ray Anderson. It was also one of the first recordings/tours for folks like Marty Ehrlich, Ned Rothenberg, Vinnie Golia, and Marilyn Crispell, launching them all to pretty wonderful careers; clearly, I’m not the only person whose musical outlook was changed by playing Braxton’s music.

Sun Ra - Purple Night (1989)
Picking just one Sun Ra recording is like trying to pick just one Ellington, there’s so much wonderful music, and such a diversity of styles and eras. I love the subtly tweaked swing of his late 50s-early 60s recordings (Fate in a Pleasant Mood is a particular favorite) as much as the explosive energy of his 70s work (Concert for the Comet Kohoutek). But I’m going with one of his last albums, Purple Night. While this might not be Ra’s most mind-blowing album, it was my first, and it was a beautiful introduction to his sound world. Weird and funny (”Stars Fell on Alabama”!?!) and intimate, one of the best recordings of Sun Ra’s piano playing I know of, a totally grooving army of percussionists, great solos by John Gilmore and Marshall Allen and Michael Ray and all the Arkestra regulars, and the huge bonus of a fantastic Don Cherry guest appearance.

Fred Ho and the Monkey Orchestra - Monkey Part One (1996)
For me, Fred demonstrated the direct inspiration of Ellington, Mingus, etc did not have to be restricted to traditional instrumentation or jazz forms. (It was also nice to find another Chinese-American creative musician named Ho!) Here he combines a full saxophone section (plus trombone, bass and drums), with Chinese traditional instruments and vocals to tell the story of the Monkey King, one of my favorite mythological trickster figures. True to the Monkey spirit, the music is thrilling and fun, evocative and unique. This is no world music fusion buffet; the blend of styles and rhythms is totally organic and all the instruments are fully intergrated into a rich ensemble sound and a great composer’s vision. Yeah, it’s not your usual big band, but the writing clearly deals with that tradition. And every big band should have an erhu anyway.

James Jabbo Ware & the Me We & Them Orchestra - Heritage Is (1995)
I was lucky to have bass trombonist Bill Lowe as an early mentor (and then lifelong friend). Bill is a charter member of James Jabbo Ware’s Me We and Them Orchestra, one of the great underground New York big bands, still going strong after more than three decades, and Bill brought them up to Boston for a performance while I was still in high school. This was the first real big band I ever heard live, not some school or repertory band, but a working composer-led ensemble with its own sound, and I was immediately hooked. Jabbo comes out of the Ellington tradition, crafting tunes to feature specific individuals and musical personalities, fully utilizing the harmonic and timbral potential of a jazz orchestra, harnessing the improvisational energy of post-Coltrane jazz into extended forms and structures. This album captures much of the excitement I felt that first night, with great solos by Lowe, JD Parran, Cecil Bridgewater, John Stubblefield, and Donald Smith among many others, and master percussionist Warren Smith anchoring the rhythm section.

New Haven is an interesting town…you can go from gritty urban areas to Yale’s ivy-covered buildings to suburban strip malls to rural farmland in about a five mile radius. A little schizophrenic, but certainly provides a lot of variety for a small city.

My favorite thing has been the proximity of some real outdoors; within ten minutes from my home I can be hiking up a mountain, or sitting by a lake. With my first spring outside of New York City in half a decade, I have been making the most of it. Which is a long way of saying I’ve been neglecting my computer in favor of trees. Which is clearly a healthy thing, so no apologies.

But nonetheless, an announcement and a video. My sextet is heading out on tour this week, so to all my dedicated readers in Switzerland, Finland, and Germany, do come out. Here are the details:

Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet
THB - cornet, compositions; Matt Bauder - tenor sax, clarinet; Mary Halvorson & Evan O’Reilly - guitars; Nate McBride - acoustic & electric bass; Tomas Fujiwara - drums

June 5, 9:30pm, Taktlos Festival, Zurich, Switzerland
June 6, 8pm, Kerava Festival, Finland
June 8, 8:30pm, Stadtgarten, Cologne, Germany

And from me and Tomas’ Chicago residency in April, a little live clip of the sextet we co-led; Tomas and Nate in the rhythm section, with Jeb Bishop on trombone, Nicole Mitchell on flute, and Jeff Parker on guitar.

What is a Positive Catastrophe?

A) A drastic economic crisis that forces a once-wealthy nation to acknowledge its wasteful and consumerist ways and chart a new course towards a sustainable, ecological, and socially-just future.

B) A global invasion of giant, outerspace insects, forcing the inhabitants of Earth to abandon their age-old divisions of nationality, race, and religion and unite in their common humanity to repel the alien hordes.

C) A trans-idiomatic ten-piece little big band that will be celebrating the release of a new recording with two nights of music at one of NYC’s finest venues.

D) All of the above.

Positive Catastrophe
Friday May 8 - Saturday May 9, sets at 9pm and 10:30pm
at the Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson St, NYC
CD release event for Garabatos Volume One on Cuneiform Records.

Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet, co-leader), Abraham Gomez-Delgado (percussion, voice, co-leader), Jen Shyu (voice, erhu), Mark Taylor (french horn), Reut Regev (trombone), Jim Hobbs (alto sax), Michael Attias (baritone sax), Pete Fitzpatrick (guitar), Alvaro Benavides (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums).

So I’ve only been on the road with the Convergence Quartet (w/Alex Hawkins on piano, Dom Lash on bass, and Harris Eisenstadt on drums) for a couple of days, and we’ve already snuck into youtubeland, playing a tune by Alex. Five more gigs to come, come on out if you’re in Merrie Olde. And if you’re more a radio person than video, a performance at the Cheltenham Festival will be broadcast on BBC’s Jazz on 3 next Monday, May 4, 11.15pm (Greenwich mean time represent) and streaming the week to follow. Cheers!