I compose for many collaborative and co-led ensembles, but this trio is my main outlet as a leader. The band plays a unique mix of adventurous
improvisation, intricate compositions, abstract soundscapes, and polyrhythmic
flow. I compose the music and perform on trombone and live electronics, joined by a bassist and drummer.
My second trio album, Forget the Pixel, was recently released by Clean
Feed Records, and features the fantastic musicianship of Christopher
Tordini on bass and Dan Weiss on drums.
Clean Feed Records, 2011
Michael Dessen, trombone/computer
Christopher Tordini, bass
Dan Weiss, drums
listen: Excerpts from Forget the Pixel:
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CD from Clean Feed
About the music
Forget the Pixel is an hour-long cycle of music designed for this trio to perform in a single, continuous set. We recorded this CD in that same spirit, with minimal takes and no overdubs. The album title plays on the first line of the poem "Open Field" by Phillis Levin, in which a crow tells a passerby to "forget the comma." Levin spins punctuation symbols into metaphors for a multileveled experience of time that for me is central to the practice of music. When we use so-called odd meters or "complex" rhythms, people often conclude this is the point: to be odd, or complex. This has never been a goal for me, or for most musicians I work with. If you open your ears to music traditions from around the world, you hear infinite varieties of temporal flow and structure. Music has long been a tool to change our understanding of time, to learn to feel its articulations in new ways. This music zooms in and out of different durational scales and pulse feels, stretching and savoring the grain of rhythmic counterpoint, and magnifying details of line, color and texture.
Sometimes my compositions respond to specific events, such as "fossils and flows," which came together as a (loud) meditation on the BP oil spill of 2010. But usually the connections are more oblique, and most of the pieces simmered over several years as I brought fragments to gigs and expanded them with new material each time we performed. I'm grateful to work with Chris and Dan, virtuoso musicians who bring a deep and personal compositional sensibility to everything they play. My scores provide many details of rhythm, pitch and form, but they also depend on collective improvisation, often blurring the line between the improvised and the precomposed.
Electronics can easily take over a band. My interest in computers is to build upon what we already do as acoustic performers. Sometimes the electronic sounds are prominent, and other times they are subtle, almost imperceptible or just absent. I also use electronics in a very improvisatory way, but like the acoustic playing we do, that does not mean that nothing is developed ahead of time. To me, jazz histories provide inspiring models for thinking about what "live electronics" can mean. I've spent years practicing live processing and sampling the same way I practice improvising with harmonic and rhythmic forms on the trombone. From one performance to the next, live electronics can capture a creative tension of "difference and repetition," just like the art of improvising over cyclic forms that evolved in jazz during the last century. We may be working with some new tools today, but at their core these ideas have been around a long time, and it's humbling to look back at what we inherit.
I hope you enjoy the music. Thanks for listening.
Michael Dessen
Clean Feed Records, 2008
Michael Dessen, trombone/computer
Christopher Tordini, bass
Tyshawn Sorey, drums
Download tracks: iTunes |
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emusic |
lastFM
listen: Excerpts from Between Shadow and Space:
About the music
I first formed a trio with this instrumentation in 2005. I wanted an ensemble that could weave among the riches of cyclic, polyrhythmic flow, but take equal delight in hue, grain, and abstraction. Tyshawn and Chris are extraordinary musicians who play with great precision and nuance, and are fluent with many kinds of compositional material, from complex temporal structures and contrapuntal lines to graphic scores and electronic collage. For me, composing for and with this trio is partly about bringing those kinds of diverse models into dialogue.
Equally important is that they listen and think compositionally, prying open whatever I bring to reveal new possibilities. Like most musicians, I compose partly to amplify something ineffable inside, and compositional choices I make alone (even if we're never really alone) are part of my tool kit. But the past half century has produced a staggering array of improvisational musics that revel deeply in another aspect of the craft: using compositional structures not only as shorthand to bring certain sounds to life, but also to spark, jostle and nourish intensely collaborative acts of imagination. My music draws energy from overlapping musical communities and histories where nothing is more urgent - or seriously playful - than that collective journey.
Track notes
The phrase "Between Shadow and Space" is from the poem "Ars Poetica" by Pablo Neruda. The long rhythmic and harmonic cycles that ride underneath throughout this track were initially provoked and accompanied by a digital text collage, made from fragments of chilling Pentagon statements about homeland's dark shadow. But in the final version the text faded to an apparition, and the piece settled into this purely acoustic form.
"Chocolate Geometry" is inspired by a series of abstract and conceptual paintings by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, and indulges in the sensual alchemy and bittersweet rupture of their shared subject.
I originally composed "Restless Years" in 2001 for the collective Cosmologic quartet, a group that is now like family to me. The internal pressure of the trio's remix caps this first section of the album, and sets a stage for the rest.
The "Duo Improvisation" between myself and Tyshawn Sorey is just that, with Tyshawn's amazingly fluid (but always oblique) sense of musical architecture bubbling up through the cracks.
From the delicate unfolding of Christopher Tordini's bass solo through its shattering final passacaglia, "Anthesis" [the flowering period of a plant] is one long line, at times turning back on itself or hiding its true contours, but always opening.
"Granulorum" is a refuge, a progression of loosely sketched boxes of minutiae gathered from the crevices in the electro/acoustic divide.
"Water Seeks" is a sonic tableau in honor of the late Alice Coltrane, ending the album with a resonant but intricate peace.
- Michael Dessen