After some much needed days off I returned to Chicago, further behind than ever- not the best feeling in the world. Still have never figured out how to balance time off with “time on.” Still feel that I’m most at home with the process of being on the road. Regarding work, the focus of the last days has been pulling together the Platform 1 material (recorded in May last year, at the Coimbra Jazz Festival in Portugal; with Magnus Broo, Steve Swell, and Joe Williamson also contributing compositions, and Michael Vatcher playing drums). Got the rough mixes out to everyone, people selected their favorite versions of their pieces (we had a total of 21 selections from 4 sets of music recorded over 2 nights); the total minutes is close to 90, so now I’ve got to suggest cuts and a sequence so that I can mix everything with Bob Weston on Tuesday and Wednesday next week… The music sounds fantastic, quite an extraordinary band with an amazing diversity in compositional approach- hard charging energy to static color, beautiful solos and group interplay. The album should be out on Clean Feed in time for our tour this October. In addition to this, I met with Richard Hull at the DePaul Art Museum to take a look at their online us pharmacy performance space and to have further discussions regarding our mixed-media project, also scheduled for October. Ideas are coming together for an hour long performance combining Richard’s filmed visuals, music composed for an improvising chamber group that includes text in 4 sections out of 10 for the concert. Now to start to actually put the elements into action! Realizing that I leave Chicago in a week for more than a month so I’m continuing to see as many films as possible, don’t watch much while on tour- I’m either asleep while in transit, or up late after the concerts catching up with friends, so there’s little time to screen anything significant on my computer and be awake for it. Took a look at “Rockabye” from the “Beckett On Film” collection, the text is astounding but I much prefer the actual reading by an actress as opposed to the “internal monologue” presented by the director, Richard Eyre, in this version. George Clooney’s, “Ides Of March” felt like a re-write of “The Candidate” for spin doctors. But Scorsese’s, “Taxi Driver,” held up with all its brutal glory. Where have all the directors and actors of the 70s gone… Merce Cunningham at the end, still brilliant:
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