Trio Tour 2024 Notes

 

Photo by Noah Philipose (May 2024 at Sear Sound) – graphic by me via the magic of Canva

I have not booked a series of dates for my trio outside of NYC since 2019. The last time I traveled with my bandmates, it was to Beijing in May 2019 to play a string of dates and then record the trio and quartet music that would form The Sustain of Memory, which we managed to release that same November. 

A major reason for not venturing beyond NYC these past few years is logistics: it's a lot of steps to book dates and coordinate travel and figure out remuneration, and having played weekly at Lowlands from September 2021 through this past July relieved me of the need to find playing opportunities elsewhere when I could just walk a few blocks and dive into music with my friends. 

But I think there's still value in trying to get out of my immediate environs to play, which is to play live for people who might connect with what we're exploring musically and to make some sort of a creative difference in their lives. It is costly, time-consuming, and tiring, but I'm curious to see how this first outing since the pandemic feels and if it's something I'm going to put more effort into in 2025, given the realities of performing opportunities in NYC now.

The first outing of the new formation of the trio (with the ever-elegant Kayvon Gordon on drums succeeding the ever-illustrious Matt Honor) was in November 2022, and we've played over 20 times since then by my count—all of those times at Lowlands (save for one time at Sisters this past July on a double bill with saxophonist Sam Weinberg). The core repertoire has basically stayed the same throughout with some switches and additions here and there.

Some of the songs we have been and will continue to play on tour:

• "Shadowlands," a darker and extended successor to the brighter "Lowlands" theme I'd composed for the bar
• "Shimmering," a similar tripartite form to Shadowlands with inward-bending harmonies and some early experiments with irrational meter
• "Riot in Lagos," a song by Ryuichi Sakamoto that is essentially a rhythm section feature with a groovy drum breakdown and funky, low E-heavy bass
• "Go In," a metrically complex scheme using the harmonic progression of "Countdown" with a melody that takes advantage of saxophone multiphonics and false fingerings

There are some more recent songs as well that I've added to the book, including an arrangement of Sakamoto's theme to the rarely-played Sega Dreamcast game Lack of Love in a quick 13/8, an arrangement of Robert Schumann's "Des Abends" from his Fantasiestücke (Op. 12), and a newer pseudocontrafact called "Belong, Sonny."

We've played "Shadowlands" and "Shimmering" a lot, and at this point I have those mostly memorized (despite the local complexities, each song is made up of short repeating sections, so there's not too much material to remember). I've tried to make simpler versions of some of the music in the book that I can memorize in a more malleable, leadsheet-like form rather than in their originally orchestrated versions, and I'm hoping to play most or all of the tour without referring to sheet music. Obviously it would be nice to work on newer music as well on tour, but I think we're at a point where we might just add one new tune at a time and see what sticks.

I've documented many versions of "Shadowlands" and "Shimmering" from over the years, much of which is available on YouTube. We also recorded what will become definitive versions of these songs at our live recordings in April, but the release dates for those are currently unknown.

If you live near the cities in Arizona or Colorado listed in the poster (or if you know any music lovers out there), please consider coming out for these shows or telling some friends, since I don't know if/when we'll be back. I may or may not report back here with a post-tour post-mortem.