Hi there! It’s been a while since I’ve written, but rest assured, it’s because I’ve been very busy.

Here are some examples of the cool things I had the pleasure of doing this past summer:

First, my wife and I traveled to NYC where I participated in the International Society for Improvised Music’s Cross-Cultural Improvisation Workshop. There were about thirty participants from all over the world, including two guest artists from Korea. We workshopped ways of combining various musical traditions for a couple of days and then presented a concert at Roulette in Brooklyn. Here’s a video of the performance of the quartet I was in.

Of course, we also had the opportunity so see lots of great art and architecture as well as visit with some great friends.

A little later in the summer, Kalin and I traveled to the “left” coast. I worked at the Woodwinds in the Wallowas camp in Northeastern Oregon. Here’s a video along the walk to my office:

After the camp, I went to Portland, OR for a three-day recording session for my good friend Jim Olsen. Jim has written a bunch of great tunes and had a lot of fantastic players on the date (look for it on Origin Records) including Bobby Shew, John Harmon, and Dick Oates. Here are excerpts of first mixes of some of my solos from the date:

Solo Excerpts from Jim Olsen’s CD Project.

After a couple of great weeks in Oregon we returned home to Colorado, and not long after I led the Rocky Mountain Jazz Repertoire Orchestra in a concert of vocalist with big band music. Most of this music was from the swing era and the vocalists were Donna Wickham, one of my colleagues at the Jazz Studies Department at the Lamont School of Music, and David Arthur. Both did a fantastic job, though I have to admit David had the swingin’ edge because I programmed four tunes from the Sinatra with Basie book! Sorry I don’t have audio from that because it was really poppin’!

Michael Wittgraf and I have been working on improvisations with Kyma hardware/software in which I improvised input with my saxophone and Mike improvises with processing parameters that he has programmed into each of the “sounds.” We played a concert of these improvisations at the University of North Dakota and Z Space in St. Paul, MN. It was great being able to hone our chops on this material in preparation for the next summer event.

Next, and last thing on the summer agenda was a trip to Europe to perform the opening concert for the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Brussels, Belgium. Kalin and I spent some extra time in London before going to Belgium and really enjoyed the city! I had decided to borrow or rent a tenor in Brussels so I wouldn’t have to worry about traveling with my horn (airlines are very unpredictable). It was ironic that in the country in which the saxophone was invented I couldn’t find anyone who would loan me a horn for a few hours. However, I found one place that would rent me one for a day, but it wasn’t easy to find. European streets frequently change names unexpectedly and this place was on a street that had both a Dutch and French name (as is common in Belgium) AND a different name two block west of the location of this business. On top of all that, this is what the entrance to the business looked like:

GENE-Electra, DBA Clark’s Music.

I finally got the concert and found the venue in time to do the sound check. That night we played the concert to a very receptive audience of fellow sound geeks. Part of it sounded like this:

I hope you enjoyed the travelogue and look forward to seeing you at the next concert!