Reflections:
As a maker of music with no formal music education, I think it is important for me to note some of the artists, albums and events that have inspired me.
Joe Maneri Quartet - Joe Maneri is an American composer, saxophone and clarinet player and a luminary of improvisation. Tuesday, June 20th, 2000, Joe Maneri performed with his son Matt Maneri (strings), Randy Peterson (drums) and Barre Phillips who played a double bass with a roaring lion head scroll at Inside gallery in Tremont (Cleveland, OH). Harvey Pekar introduced them. This short performance forever changed the way I will hear music. It was the most illuminating artistic experience of my life.
John Balistreri - I studied clay with John for one semester at Bowling Green. It was my last semester in college. John taught me to work with the strengths of a medium and to bring out the things that are beautiful and unique to that medium. It is a lesson I have carried into the recording studio. It is a great joy to work with exotic instruments, discovering their unique textures and tones. The musicians too are unique, not only in their choice of instrument, but in the way they respond to direction, their comfort level with new material and their ability to bring a fresh improvisational element to their interpretation of the material. Learning to work with each personality is like picking up a new instrument.
Brent Gummow - Brent is my tech maven. Without Brent, I would still be analog, in the digital age. My current creative life would be impossible without Brent's ingenuity and technical support.
John Riccardi - I met John at Bowling Green State University. He played guitar and I played bass in an art rock band called Ribcage Houdinis from 1992 to 2000. With Ron Tucker, we wrote music with complexity beyond our technical capability. We pushed each other musically and artistically. John introduced me to so much music and so many musical ideas, I don’t know what I would and would not know had I not known him.
Thomas Hilty - I studied drawing with Tom Hilty at Bowling Green, for several years. He taught me about the beauty of a single line. He also taught me that thought and concept are meaninless, if it doesn't translate to good art.
Jan Svankmajer - "In the old magicians' books, they say that if we wish to exorcise a demon or a ghost, then we have to give them a name... and I think that is precisely the method I use to get rid of my anxieties and fears. I give them a name in my films." ~ Jan Svankmajer
The aesthetic and movement of Czech stop motion innovator, Jan Svankmajer's "Alice" were the inspiration for my earliest and favorite Trepanning Trio composition "The Lightning Rod Salesman" (which is named for the opening sequence in Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes"). Most of his work is a mix between 3-D stop-motion animation, puppets and live-action. His stories are eerie, delightful, and surreal. His actors include real people, machines, socks, clay figures, antique dolls, pencil sharpeners, and skeletons or stuffed corpses of animals, among other things. His sets are usually decaying Czech buildings or landscapes, decorated with waste of the industrial age: rotting furniture, rusty nails, sawdust, oily screws, etc.
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue isn't merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it's an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence. This was the first jazz album I ever purchased. It remains the last I would ever part with.
"Kind of Blue" – 1959
The Cuyahoga County Public Library - Through the library I discovered the great works of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Zorn, Dmitri Shostakovic, John Coltrane, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, Wayne Shorter, Oscar Peterson and countless other mind-expanding artists.
The main branch of the Cleveland Public Library also has a complete set of albums published by "World Music Library" which documents traditional music from around the world.
Mozart: Requiem - Selections from Mozart's Requiem were included on a Telarc sampler my Uncle Arthur gave me for a birthday present when I was very young. Years later I hunted down the entire recording. This was the first classical music I was able to identify by ear. If I could have one recording to listen to for the rest of my life, this would probably be the recording.
Rachel's - Avant-chamber trio from Louisville, Kentucky. An ambitious blend of post-minimalist modern classical music and post-rock experimentalism. My brother Matt told me about Rachel's when we were in college.
"Handwriting" - 1995
"Music For Egon Schiele" - 1996
"The Sea and Bells" - 1996
"Selenography" - 1999
"Systems/Layers" - 2003
John Zorn / Masada Chamber Ensembles
"Bar Kohkba" - 1996
"The Circle Maker" - 1998
Kecak Ganda Sari: "Kecak: A Balinese Music Drama" - My brother Matt discovered this recording in the Columbus Public Library while researching Gamelan music. It is unlike anything I have ever heard. It captures the raw power of the human voice as an instrument, harnessed executed with incredible complexity and precision.
"Kecak: A Balinese Music Drama" - 1990
Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir - The Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria belong to The National Radio and Television Chorus, the premier women's choir popularized worldwide through the efforts of ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier. His recordings, issued on various import labels before appearing on Nonesuch, made a big splash in Western Europe and the US, cultivating vast new audiences for the group's dramatic adaptations of folk singing styles. Their spine-chilling harmonies, punctuated by whoops and quavers, are presented in full choral arrangements and smaller groups - duos and trios - with and without instrumental backing.
-Myles Boisen (AMG)
"Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares" - 1990
