HUMAN-SIZED MUSIC
…which is why i’m not allowed in any airpot lounge in saskatchewan.
anyway i want to take a moment to talk about a record i made called ‘human-sized music,’ giving a few broad story strokes and some song-by-song thoughts, in the hope that doing so will make listening a more fulfilling and richly detailed experience.
before i get into it, i’ll mention that the project is available for streaming and purchase on my bandcamp, as well as your preferred digital music service.
the project is called ‘human-sized music,' and it’s an exploration of my feeling that the prime mover in all our experiences is relationships. here that means starting with interactions between various musical elements, then the relationships of the people in the band to one another and the music, moving outwards to larger concepts about culture (secondhand dance and scaffolding), love (towards Agnes Martin and map shower), anxieties (stress nap soundtrack, sorry Winston), and little everyday interactions (we’ll be alright, before/again, joy transfusion). this is done through the overarching filter of jazz and improvisation.
there are nine pieces i wrote and arranged, and to play them i’m joined by six horns and upright bass. they are, in score order: Michael Mull (alto sax, soprano sax), Andrew Conrad (tenor sax, bass clarinet), Joe Santa Maria (bari sax, tenor sax), Josh Aguiar (trumpet), Greg Zilboorg (trumpet), Harrison Kirk (trombone on 1, 7, 8, 9), Sean Shackelford (trombone on 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and Emilio Terranova (acoustic bass). they all play beautifully, and take some incredible solos. the record is unthinkable without them. they were recorded with the help of Louis Lopez and Miguel Sanchez, and Dan Eaton did a wonderful mastering job.
it was the last project recorded in the now defunct ‘fingers on fire’ studio, which my dad, the guitarist Peter Woodford, built out in the 1970s. the process of recording it was something of a farewell to the space, and one of the reverbs on the record was sampled from the room itself. because i knew i wanted the record to happen before the studio was gone, the music would have to come together quite quickly. i would need to use the best possible band, and to write/arrange music which for each individual player was straightforward and readable, but that in aggregate created more intricate textures. once the bulk of the writing was done, i booked two nights at a cheap hotel with my score paper, a laptop, and a midi keyboard, where i fleshed out the final details of the charts and how they were laid out on the page. the last 18 months i got to spend with my dad had some challenging moments, and i understood that it was important for me to reset those emotional circuits, and to try to strengthen them once that was done.
let’s go track by track:
scaffolding: i was thinking about various networks which support and enable different ways of being. in a positive and musical light, this could mean the feedback loop between every open-eared member of the band helping each other sound and feel good. in acoustic music as in life more generally, bootstrap myths are almost universally false and harmful, and we can only stand to our full height by helping and being helped by others. the sweetest juice is from our relationships. at the time i was also thinking about this in the context of cultural institutions that have boards of directors, which are always investors by another name, and so they incentivize growing profits and not growing the culture. it was written between the two session dates, to feature Harrison Kirk on trombone. it features him so much in fact that i didn’t give him enough rest from the end of his solo to the start of the melody. ah well.
towards Agnes Martin: in early 2014 i spent every dollar of starbucks tips i had saved for the last year on a month-long solo trip to the uk. i went, as i always do if i’m in london, to the tate modern, which had a whole wing of paintings by Agnes Martin, whose work i hadn’t seen before. it was an overwhelming experience. very large canvasses with pale, warm colors whose texture increases in a beautiful way as you get close to them. her work often deals with friendship and solitude, and she talks about the importance of a blank mind when you’re working. i struggle with all of those things. for most of the piece there are two tempi—one in the drums and another in the horns—but both groups have simple, repeating gestures. the effect i hope to achieve is of a slightly blurry forward motion. in the first part of the song, i have the alto sax and trumpet 2 quite low in their register, while altissimo tenor sax and trumpet 1 play a unison melody.
before/again: this is the oldest song on the record. i wrote it in 2010 for a different band, and i was probably thinking about a relationship whose difficulties were becoming routine. in the intervening decade, it has morphed on me to become about the various pluses and minuses of rituals and habits. the main melody changes instruments fairly often, and is usually accompanied by a crunchy pair of dyads whose dissonance i try to put into a more comfortable context.
map shower: at its heart it’s a simple setting of the poem by Richard Brautigan of the same name. there is an unusual recurring rhythm that forms a lurching, stumbling groove on top of which the melody can float, as a leaf on a lake. i wrote it on the back of a napkin after driving to long beach to meet my friends Brandon and Tiffany, who had just had a son. while not the oldest piece on the record, this is the one that necessitated the project. i fleshed it out while at school in las vegas, and liked it enough that i wanted to write more for this non-standard instrumentation, as well as get a nice recording of it.
we’ll be alright: it's an offering, and my hope is that it can be a balm, a release of some yearning or unmet need, and an encouragement to keep moving. it is a short, undulating phrase played four times, each time with a new element, culminating in a mournful muted trumpet line, and ending with scordatura bass, bari sax, and trombone on a very low-voiced major triad.
secondhand dance: a not-so-subtle nod to afrobeat, and in this context it’s a meditation on culture in a similar way to scaffolding. it grew outwards from the opening drum pattern—Tony Allen, Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield, Tiki Fulwood, Frankie Waddy, andJerome Brailey can all play the downbeats on a snare drum in a beautiful way that enhances rather than disrupts the flow of the song, and i wanted to explore that world and show my appreciation for their work. the melody went through a fair few revisions, finally landing on a rhythmic identity based on quintuplets that i’d heard in a recording of an indian/native american song years before, and using a mostly pentatonic topline. as important as these influences are in the construction of the piece, secondhand dance seemed the only fitting title.
sorry, Winston: an apology to the main character from 1984 for…well let’s just leave that stone unturned. the melody and harmony for this came quickly, and the coda of the song is ’the clocks were striking thirteen’ from the books' opening line, a voicing that took a while to get right and that i’m still pleased with. it’s written in a slightly anachronistic Mingus-adjacent style.
stress nap soundtrack: a short but colorful meditation on moments when sleep overwhelms us. this began as a piano sketch, and presented an opportunity to explore some more delicate colors in the instruments—bass clarinet, multiphonics, overblowing, subtones, harmonics, extremes of register, and so on. some say that to this day there’s still a tiny marking for the absurdly high B on the finger board of the upright bass. that’s not a note they teach you about in sunday school.
joy transfusion: a bit unusually for me, i had a couple discrete goals for this piece before i started to write it. i wanted it to be light-hearted in tone, oriented around a blues, with a firm sense of rhythm, and present an opportunity for some solos. it’s whimsical verging on silly, but i like it. the stubbornly unresolved ending in the bass always makes me laugh.