Summer’s just beginning and Hybrid Groove Project, the genre-bending new music duo from Baltimore, is already heating things up with their number one summer jam, “HGP Anthem.” In the grand tradition of the great hip-hop conflicts like Tupac v. Biggie Smalls, Dr. Dre v. Eazy-E, and 50 Cent v. Kanye West, “HGP Anthem” brings some much needed antagonism to a new music genre more accustomed to passive aggressive behind-the-back cattiness than drive-bys and street corner stompings.

“By droppin’ this track we’re showing all these new music fakers who the real playaz are,” say Sacawa and Spangler. “It’s like we’re telling everyone, ‘Yo, we’re hot, and you’re not,’ you feel us? Like, y’all need to get out of the game. Plus, we need to show love for Bmore, you know what we’re sayin’?”

Indeed, new music will soon regret its unofficial partnership with indie rock with the release of Hybrid Groove Project’s latest hit, the number one summer jam of 2008. But don’t call it a comeback, HGP’s been making heads nod since 2004. Just hope it’s not too late to return those skinny jeans.

Sitting on the sticky floor at Penn Station, with a glazed look on my face, waiting for the gate number to appear on the board… I’m supposed to be placated by an announcement every fifteen minutes of, “please wait for further announcements.” followed by, “please be patient.” It makes me violent. My 2:00 p.m. train never arrived to get me into Baltimore by 4:30 p.m. to rehearse with the musicians at Mobtown Modern . . . lovely people, I’m sure, but I never got to speak with all of them. I was lucky enough to elbow my way to the front of the Amtrak line to get the last spot on a 5:00 p.m. express train that ended up being 40 minutes late. The mission was to get to the hall by 7:45 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. show. The large man next to me on the crowded train kept insisting that we discuss the life works of Sylvester Stallone for the entire ride. Somehow, I decided, this whole thing was Nico Muhly’s fault.

Our friendship grew out of Juilliard, and revolved around an absurd consumption of dumplings and coffee. He wrote Honest Music for me in 2005, and we recorded it in my kitchen, catching the silences between the grumbling of the refrigerator and the other unidentifiable murmurings of kitchen appliances. A year later, Nico pulled together a budget, and collaborated with Valgeir Sigurdsson to record Honest Music and a handful of his works for Speaks Volumes, his debut album.

Minneapolis

In the fall of 2007, a group of old friends from Juilliard, including Nico, myself, Nadia Sirota and Sam Solomon, along with Sigga Sunna from Iceland, traveled to Minneapolis to perform a collection of works by Nico and Valgeir Sigurdsson. Valgeir was to fly in from Iceland and meet us there to rehearse the night before the concert. Armed with all his audio equipment in suspicious looking bags, he was treated like a terrorist at the infamous Minneapolis Airport and was immediately deported back to Iceland. Valgeir and all his gear were replaced by a few pre-recorded tracks of his music, and we were forced to make last minute revisions and arrangements that could be done without him. There was a lot of tension throughout the rehearsals leading up to the concert, and much of it was comically dumped onto me, with random contests of who could be more racially offensive. In the end, it was definitely between Sam’s and Nadia’s Beijing opera mimicking and Nico’s bombarding of me with erhu sounds off his keyboard every time I’d pick up my violin.

We were running through the program up to an hour and a half before the doors were to open, when I placed my violin on a stool and fumbled around to take off my jacket, too frenzied to remember that my clip-on mic was still attached to the violin. The mic was also accidentally hooked onto a button of my jacket, and as I swung around to throw my jacket down, my violin came crashing to the floor, face down, along with it. Nadia made the most horrific sounding, “Liiiiiisssssaaaa!” roar that still haunts me whenever she says my name. The entire fingerboard popped out of the violin and slid across the floor. As I ran in circles screaming for Krazy glue, Nico calmly dialed the first number that appeared under ‘violin repair’ in the directory and sent me out in a panic to find another instrument. The beautiful people from Claire Givens Violin Shop had two violins waiting for me to choose from, and I made it back to the hall right in time for the show. My violin was thankfully pieced together for the following concert only a week later.

New York

This Honest Music show date was by far the most traumatic-all unrelated to Nico, but I’ll for sure find a way to make it his responsibility. Valgeir was able to fly into New York, and my violin had been returned to me in perfect condition, all just in time for the concert. A huge project I had been undertaking was to help develop a singer whom I truly believed in. I introduced her to all sorts of musicians, producers and songwriters so that, eventually, her own relationships would evolve that would further her career. Looking back, I probably should’ve mentioned that sleeping with everyone along the way would probably be a bad idea. Her husband, fondly nicknamed, “The Android” by our colleagues, finally realized that he didn’t like sharing her with everyone, and threatened to walk away if she didn’t drop out of the band, in which one of her multiple sordid relationships was spiraling out of control. After investing a couple years of hard work into creating an act for her, she broke up the band, and our friendship, the night before the Wordless Music Concert. I was in no shape to perform, but I poured my heart out into Honest Music. Afterwards, I tried to remain somber for A Long Line, also a solo violin worked backed by tape, while Nico, with his demented sense of humor, crashed gongs behind me and cleverly inserted koto, erhu and other ’sounds of Asia’ into my performance. Jackass.

Baltimore

It was 7:45 p.m. and the audience was already seated as I ran in, disoriented and frantic. I hid out in a small room in the side of the performance space where I could change and do a little yoga to calm myself down. Before walking out to perform Honest Music, with no sound check, and then Terry Riley’s In C, without having met any of the musicians or had any rehearsal, I actually felt comforted knowing that this experience couldn’t possibly nearly as stressful as the last two. Despite the hellish commute, nobody was deported, nobody broke-up, and my violin was intact. Although I could never ultimately say, ‘no’ to Nico, there’s going to have to be a lot of begging involved to convince me to perform, Honest Music again.

Meaning we’re back from Iceland. We’re still living in bliss. (Especially in this new house. Though there are those boxes to unpack and things to put away…)

. . . is a day in Nice-land! Well, nine days, actually. We’re honeymooning.

There are certain pieces in the saxophone repertoire that I’ve continued to put off learning again and again. Well, it’s not really that I’ve put them off; I’ll take them out semi-annually vowing to dig in, saying to myself that “this is the time I put this to rest, haha!” only to file the music away on the shelf to be confronted another day. (This is also evidenced by the several unfinished drafts of this very post that have accumulated.) It’s a strange relationship I have with a only a few pieces. Tre Pezzi by Giacinto Scelsi is one of them, as is the work currently on my stand and pictured above, Berio’s Sequenza VIIb. The problem is that I hold these works in such high regard that I feel to play them any less than perfectly would be doing them a gross injustice. It sounds neurotic, yes, I concede that, but what stops me from following through with them is that I think that I’ll never play them as well as they should deserve to be played. Adding to this obsessiveness in the case of the Berio is that there are 6 different fingerings for C# (concert pitch B). What’s the big deal? Well, there’s a B that sounds through the entire work and making sure that all the fingerings are perfectly in tune is quite challenging:

The effect is really cool, but it’s enough to drive an intonation eccentric up a wall. But here it is: I am learning Berio’s Sequenza VIIb. Hopefully by declaring this publically, I’ll be bound to some kind of nebulous ethical agreement in which going back on my word would constitute a serious breach of something. The occasion for my performance of the piece will be revealed when we announce Mobtown Modern’s second season.

Mobtown Modern’s first season came to a close last Friday night with an exciting concert performed for a packed house. Once again, we were overwhelmed with the coverage of the show, which included the following wonderful reviews:

Dynamic Minimalist Program by Mobtown
by Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun

Performing Arts - Mobtown Modern
by Charles T. Downey, The Washington Post

The Mob Hit
by Devin Hurd, Hurd Audio

Many thanks go to all of our musicians for giving so much of their time and talents to help make each concert such a success. We’re also grateful to Mack MacLaughlin for making us sound good and especially to Guy Werner for his visual and lighting wizardry, which made the space really inviting. And of course, we love Mike Fila from Himmelrich and Irene Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum for embracing the series with such passion and enthusiam.

We’re already looking forward to an exciting second season, which will include 6, count ‘em, 6 concerts beginning on September 9th. And we’re also putting the finishing touches on a spiffy new website that will launch in conjunction with our 2008-2009 season announcement. As always, stay tuned for details!

1. Forget that wine reception following the performance business, we serve alcohol before the concert. Seriously, how many new music shows have you found yourself at wishing you had something to drink?
2. Learn Katy’s secret Persian recipe.
3. Honest music.
4. You’ve heard Philip Glass, but never with a KP3; and In C, but maybe not with a beatboxer.
5. Four bari saxes. At the same time.
6. It’s the last time you’ll get to hear us before September.

• The CityPaper gave us an amazing Critic’s Pick as well as listing us as a highlight on their website.
• Baltimore MetroMix lists us as a Critic’s Pick as well.
• We were featured in the new b daily in their “10 Spot” as one of the 10 events not to miss this week in Bmore.

And don’t forget to tune in to WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast this morning (Wednesday) at 9 a.m. to hear our conversation with Tom Hall about the series and Friday’s concert.

Update: And if you subscribe to the Urbanite magazine’s bi-weekly email newsletter, you’ve no doubt seen the event featured under the heading “Less is the New More” and also as a Thing To Do on their website.

Update 2: Click here to listen to Mobtown Modern’s segment from Maryland Morning.

In most of the long form improvisations I’ve heard in the not so distant past there seemed to have been several moments when the session could have ended to make a cohesive statement. Instead, these cadence points arrive and inevitably someone on stage gets a little too self-indulgent and mistakes the natural end of a piece for a big solo opportunity. What follows is generally a very similar process to what had just unfolded: 1) the players start mimicking the sounds that are already happening, 2) then they gradually begin introducing something contrasting, 3) and commence a really long build-up that may peak up to 10 times, 4) followed by a very slow decrease in activity and volume, and finally 5) the audience sits rigidly during an uncomfortably long silence praying that no one on stage is inspired any more. I love it when the musicians finish one of these long pieces and then look around at each other on stage and then invariably say, “Should we do another one?” That’s the best. Though I believe that nearly every audience member wants to scream, “NO!!!!!!” nobody ever says anything. Then the players decide to do a “short one.” And the band plays on. And on. And on.

But rather than just complain here, I’d like to make a sugggestion: what about a time limit? Rather than basking in the comfort that you can ramble on for over 30 minutes hoping that inspiration may strike if it’s failed to up to that point, why not try and aim to create a solid, focused, complete, and meaningful statement in, let’s say, 10 minutes? Hardcore folks probably won’t like this idea since it imposes an unwelcome parameter in a musical genre that tends to shun any kind of constraint. But I think that would be more challenging for the players. And likely more engaging for the listeners. Parameters like duration (of the shorter variety) might be worthy considerations for free improvisers who haven’t matured enough yet to sustain a long form session.

N.B. Lest I come off fractiously here, I call your attention to this post, which sort of outlines my take on improvisation based on my experience studying with Yusef Lateef and doing my own playing both in a jazz and free/experimental style.