> OVERVIEW - RUSSIA - CHINA - OMAN - DUBAI - ITALY
>> WHY ITALY? - DIARY
JANUARY 2008
FEBRUARY 2008
MARCH 2008
APRIL 2008
MAY 2008
JUNE 2008
JULY 2008
> AUGUST 2008
SEPTEMBER 2008
OCTOBER 2008
NOVEMBER 2008
the isle of san giulia on lake orta
"paradise place", one of 10 recent original compositions for small band
mongolian jazz magic
sunset over carpi
the lvx album - available now!
49a Museum St - the entrance to Atlantis, no less...
hannah & some of stonehenge
CLICK the PIC to play a short video of stonehenge plus part of my new album, LVX.
For the last few months, I've been corresponding with an English poet who lives on one of the most beautiful lakes in North Italy. Gabriel Griffin organises the Poetry on the Lake festival at Lake Orta, near Lake Maggoire, north of Milan, and has shown great interest in getting myself along to play some of my spontaneous "musical haiku" at her festival. My "musical haiku" is an improvisation technique I have adopted in the past for the recording of Jewel in the Lotus and also the PIANO Sessions 5-CD set. It endeavours to depict an emotion, an impression of the natural world, or a fleeting moment in time as succinctly and directly as possible, through the medium of musical expression.
The original contact came through Brian Johnstone, Artistic Director of the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, where the Howl Nonet performed back in 2005. Brian suggested I contact Gabriel and, as I've consistently found when dealing with poetry/literature festival organisers, she was very receptive to my ideas. It's not confirmed as of this moment, but it is looking likely that from October 10th-12th later this year, I will be taking my melodica and my muse along to Lake Orta for sunrise, midday, sunset and midnight performances alongside poetry readings on land and also on the lake itself. I specifically want to improvise in as many different situations as possible, and at different times of the day, for maximum inspiration/interpenetration. Watch this space for further news of this exciting performance opportunity...
Fri 8th August 2008
An auspicious day - the 8th day of the 8th month of the 8th year of the new millenium. It's our last weekend in Carpi before we fly home for a fortnight's holiday in the UK. Despite our being extremely busy teaching students on an intensive English "full-immersion" course, I've managed to find some time to input 10 of my recent small-band originals into Sibelius and email them off to the other members of the Steve Tromans Quartet Italia. Most of the tunes were written whilst we were in Dubai, since that was the last time I had access to a piano. We are going to organise a rehearsal sometime in September after out return to Italy, and I'm very much looking forward to hearing the pieces realised in quartet format. I have always loved writing for small band, ever since I formed my first band at Birmingham Conservatoire back in the early 90's. As a kind of homage to everything I learnt in various bands at the conservatoire, I have named one of my recent pieces, "Paradise Place", after the physical address of Birmingham City University's music conservatoire. I find the simplicity of producing skeleton structures to be fleshed out by a tight-knit unit to be a source of endless creativity. I personally think of Wayne Shorter's writing for small band as one of the supreme pinnacles of jazz composition, in particular, his writing for the Miles Davis 2nd great quintet.
When I was house pianist at the now-sadly-defunct Fiddle & Bone in Birmingham, I was able to produce so much material due to the fact that I could write a tune on a Friday and be performing it live on Saturday afternoon with my trio. I feel most at home as a jazz composer in those type of settings. I was lucky enough to be able to do exactly the same thing in Mongolia during those amazing ten months at the Mealody Jazz Club. Good times. Every night seemed to bring its own set of magical musical surprises at Mealody. I will never forget the night when the French travelling circus came to town and performed mime and juggling alongside the UBop Band, or when Jimmy Fallows braved the cold of the Mongolian winter to deliver his Liverpudlian Bluegrass to the receptive Mongolian audience, or the delight at having Brazilian folk songs sung by a Japanese duo playing ukelele and percussion. My particular favourite moment though was when I was busy explaining to one of the other teachers from our English school how "anything can happen at Mealody...you never know who's going to walk in through the door" when, right at that moment, Rebekah Plueckhahn did just that with her cello, arriving in the doorway of the club after having heard about us from the Arts Council of Mongolia! She went on to record with KHIIMORi alongside myself and Andrew Colwell a week-or-so after her first appearance at Mealody.
With the combined efforts of myself, Andrew Colwell, Ganbat and Purevsukh, and with the resources of the Mealody Jazz Club and the Ulaanbaatar Jazz Academy, we were able to show very clearly that when people work together with the desire to make things happen, then things do indeed happen. As is often said, "When paths cross, lives change". I long for a similar chance to make things happen here in Italy, and am glad to be getting ever closer to the performance opportunities in October. I hope they will be a springboard for many more things to come.
Sat 9th August 2008
A beautiful sunset last night rekindled my determination to finalise the tracks for my new album, to be called LVX. It's a companion of sorts to the NOX 6-CD set I produced whilst in Mongolia, but with the focus being on various sources of light and/or illumination, and my realisation of these musically. LVX is latin for "Light", so Sol, Isis-Luna, Aurora and Prometheus are the four sources of inspiration I chose for each of the four tracks. To listen to excerpts from each of the tracks, simply click on the appropriate headings below...
1. Sol Invictus [excerpt]
2. Aurora Borealis [excerpt]
3. Isis Luna [excerpt]
4. Prometheus Rising [excerpt]
In "Sol Invictus", I tried to capture the "sound" of the sun, and in particular the shimmering midday heat we experienced during our six months in the Middle East, the fiery golden chariot of the daytime, glaringly intense and burning with ancient power. For "Aurora Borealis", I imagined the mysterious northern lights that seem like light beams of the inner sun from the land of Agharta, and the swirling non-tempered chords of this piece, an ancient organ and choir rising up from the infernal depths of the earth, audible only during the opening of the polar iris. "Isis Luna" by contrast is colder, more aetheral and majestic. The austere beauty of the face of the silver moon. The final track, "Prometheus Rising", is an ecstatic hymn to the bringer of light and illumination in all his names/guises. It combines electronically-altered prayer calls I recorded in Oman with slowed-down piano samples from my Howl setting, retrograde vocals from an old unreleased GTS recording of a famous jazz ballad, and my self-realisation of a short pointillistic piece for seven pianos that I wrote whilst in Dubai.
Enjoy you free listening, and please consider buying the album, or any of the others on the RECORDINGS page. I take my music seriously, and the support of my fans is very important to me, emotionally - and financially, too!
Wed 13th August 2008
In two day's time we'll be back in Birmingham. We've already checked-in online for our Ryan Air flights (great idea) and are almost packed and ready for the off. There are only a few classes left to teach tomorrow and we are free for the remainder of the month. Musically, I'm focusing my attention on the upcoming Atlantis Bookshop gig in London on Thursday 21st. The next entry will be after our return home...
Sun 24th August 2008
Ok, this entry is coming to you from back in the UK of E, S, W and NI, not from Italy. We've not long returned from a fantastic few days away from Birmingham. On Thursday night I performed solo on melodica at the aforementioned Atlantis Bookshop in London. The experience of performing at this well-revered hangout of the holy was breathtaking to say the least. The owners, Geraldine and Bali Beskin were amongst the most gracious of all venue-owners I've encountered, and myself and Hannah were well looked after during the time we were at the shop. The gig itself was divided into two sets: the first, an intimate exploration of the three scales I derived to compliment the three chapters of Liber AL vel Legis, realised by myself on solo melodica with an electronic drone backing, producing a sound not unsimilar to a tanpura, or the final minutes of Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room", for those of you who may be Process Music afficianados; the second, a new version of my 2005 work, "Urquhart Fifths", originally for four melodicas, this time presented in a version for 4+1 melodicas - the original four consisting of the album recording and the fifth being performed live by myself.
I have also been invited to perform next April alongside the narration of Liber AL vel Legis. Watch this space as always! I of course recorded the proceedings, and please feel free to click on any of the audio examples below to hear some of the music performed that night...
1. Liber AL Atlantis excerpt [from Chapter II]
2. Urquhart Fifths (4+1) Atlantis excerpt [final solo coda]
The second amazing thing that occured during our sojourn back in England was a cold, rainy but utterly mesmerising visit to Stonehenge in the early hours of the morning for a special access entry inside the stone circle. It was our first visit to the mystickal stones, and it was well worth getting well and truly soaked in the process! If you apply beforehand to English Heritage, you can be granted permission to enter amongst the stones, which have been fenced off for some years now. Whether it is a good thing or not to close the site off is open to debate, and I'm not going to get into that in this diary, but I will say that, for the sum of £13 each, we had access to the area for one hour, and were able to walk in a proper clockwise direction around the stones, rather than the anti-clockwise route dictated by the regular tourist path that is open during the rest of the day.
Looking at the intact stone columns, I was struck by their similarity to the sign of Pan, at least to my eye. This led me to put together a short video of a clockwise circuit around the stones ("sunwise", the Mongolian shamans call it) accompanied by some of the music from my latest album, LVX (see above for audio samples of each of the four tracks on the album). Click on the picture to the left of this text to view the video, and please excuse my enthusiasm for the gradually-changing spectral effect I've put on the film as a whole. The grass at Stonehenge isn't really that colour! Enjoy...