JONAH PARZEN-JOHNSON

Although I have been working on it for almost a year and a half now, this year I’m happy to be devoting a large part of my time to performing my solo saxophone project, Michiana. I have carefully constructed a collection of solo saxophone compositions that I am truly proud to perform, and I plan to spend a lot of time this year doing just that.

In January and February I am going to be performing three sets in New York. Although all of them are on multi-band bills I will be playing alone, and I am going to need support from everyone who can make it out.

January 29th – ABC No Rio
w/Gian Luigi Diana, Ben Gerstein, Mike Pride
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For those who don’t know, ABC No Rio is a wonderful spot on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. On Sunday nights they have a creative music series called COMA. I will be sharing a bill with a trio of musicians I admire & its going to be a really nicely ballanced set of music. In a lot of ways ABC No Rio is an ideal room for my solo music and I think it will fill out their space nicely.

February 10th – Sycamore
w/Steven Lugerner’s Narratives & Gym, Deer
At Sycamore I am sharing a bill with two groups making some of the most meticuloulsy organized and emotionally affecting music around. This show is also going to be the unvailing of Steven’s new Narratives tentet, and will be put together in conjunction with Primary Records. Primary is going to be releasing my solo saxophone record in late spring 2012. Look out for many more primary shows in the coming months.

February 20th – Zebulon
w/Father Figures, The Relatives, & Celestial Shore
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This show is going to be the third night of a month long Father Figures/The Relatives Monday night residency at Zebulon. I am going to be performing as a sort of resident opener, playing one or two songs before each band. This is one of the formats that I dreamed up for my solo sax music and I’m excited to try it out.

Three great ways to see me. Come to one, or collect them all. Look out for a CD on Primary Records in Spring 2012. Thanks for all of your support, here comes a big year!

	Echoes Steve Lehman Octet
	Ohp Colin Stetson

Sometimes instrumental/improvised music seems to exist in an environment where musicians perform for their band members as much or more than their audiences. After all, playing in an ensemble that performs improvised music is about a dialogue. Everything that each musician plays exists as a compliment or contradiction to the music going on. The band members have to play towards each other or the music is no longer a conversation. The musicians become building blocks for the band to assemble, or put at odds.

From my point of view, the root aspiration of a lot of instrumental/improvised music is to create a whole that is greater than any of its parts. Ideally, the music that comes out of this process seems to exist on its own, independent of its creators. Another force in the room. This can be extremely moving, and if it happens, the music comes to life. But it also becomes a sort of art piece displayed in the venue, almost as if the musicians have left the room. For me, this moment of musical success is also when the connection between the individuals in the audience and the individuals in the band is severed.

In an interview on NPR, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) suggests that the music that has resounded with him the most has always been the music that seems to be coming from a person, and not just a concept. This statement seemed sort of strange to me at first. Listening to the two Bon Iver records I feel like it would be dishonest to say there isn’t an overreaching conceptual thread present on each CD. I think what he is trying to say is that he does not connect with music where the conceptual intention overpowers the voices (for lack of a better word) and personalities of the musicians. He needs his music to sound like it is coming from someone, and he strives to make that an organizing principle of what he creates in the same way that some musicians reach for a conceptual ideal. Or at least, that’s how I’m going to take it.

Playing instrumental music alone is a sort of short cut in a lot of ways. There are only one person’s ideas, creative opinions, and compositional styles to draw from. Cohesiveness within the band is generally not an issue. But conversely, the creative momentum and diverse quality of a band is completely absent at the outset. To me, it feels like working backwards. When a band writes music together a piece often starts with one persons idea and then a majority of the energy is devoted to building other peoples voices and tastes into the original thread. Somewhere in the building process the idea turns into something created by the whole band.When playing solo, every composition is limited to a single creative voice and the bulk of the work becomes finding ways to add some of the creative tension that is naturally part of a group with multiple points of view.

In the end, It is much harder to create a musical statement that seems to jump into the room, but what is left in its place is a singular intimacy that is very difficult to create with a band. A musician performing on a stage by himself is directly connecting with the audience and everything he plays is exclusively for their ears. For me, witnessing the vulnerability and unobstructed nature of a single individual sharing their music with an audience is as powerful an experience as watching an entire band work in tandem.

Tags: Audience, Bon Iver, Justin Vernon, Musical Voice, Performing Instrumental Music, Solo Performance, Steve Lehman

Our Anniversary (Live) Bill Calahan

No One Ever Tells You Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra was the first singer that made me want to listen to the lyrics. I was struck by his diction. Every word is so clear and carefully placed on his recordings. Listening more, I realized that it was impossible to be so deliberate about the words without being very careful with the melody. I would venture to say that every great vocalist has a close relationship with melody. But, when a singer goes the extra step to make sure every word comes through loud and clear, to me, the melody gains a new level of nuance. Focusing on the words to a song automatically creates a logical hierarchy of importance for the melody pitches. I think every note should have a specific level of importance. When instrumentalists play the melody they often use the harmony to help them decide which notes are most important to their performance. The lyrics offer explicit emotional and rhetorical cues. Whatever the justification may be, musicians decide what notes matter most every time they perform a song. I think of these decisions as structural improvisation. Shaping the song as you go, creating a solid frame to drape the melody over. Frank Sinatra is one of my favorite improvisers. Sinatra rarely changes the melody notes and is always very true to the lyrics, but he is constantly improvising new rhythmic, and textural framings of the notes and words. His vibrato is constantly changing and he shapes the dynamics of the line very deliberately. The sound of a melody is about so much more than the melody. Beyond the fact that I really like his conceptual approach to music, Sinatra has the sound and range of a baritone. This has allowed me to really get into his music in a way that is often difficult to achieve with other singers. Maybe it is a result of the roles that have evolved in music, but I feel that most instrumentalists aren’t as occupied with having a wide arsenal of ways to play a melody as their vocal counterparts. Instrumentalists get to focus on which notes to play without worrying about how it affects the lyrics. By trying to really get inside of Sinatra’s performances, I have learned a lot about performing the melodies of songs. I really enjoy a lot of acoustic folk influenced music. In a lot of cases this music is literally telling a story with the lyrics. If you take the words away, the story is lost. This has been a consistent source of difficulty for me. How do I capture the essence of the song without the words. Bill Callahan is an interpretive genius. The color of his voice, the rhythm of his performance, and the shape of his melody lines, all communicate the essence of his lyrics. Sometimes it feels like the song would tell the same story if he were singing nonsense words. In this way, he is like Frank Sinatra. The structure he builds to place his lyrics over tells the same story as the words. His melodies are simple and sparse, sometimes barely sung, but the tone and the placement is so strong that everything he does is incredibly illustrative. Both Sinatra, and Callahan could perform a song and tell the story with or without words.

Tags: Bill Callahan, Frank Sinatra, Lyrics, Musical Voice, Performing Instrumental Music

I often find that when something makes me smile it also makes me sad. Lately, I have been focusing on finding emotional references for my work that feel important to me. I have had many happy times in my life, but few are as important to me as the ones that have immediately filled me with joyful melancholy (for lack of a better term).

Michiana is a small beach town situated on the boarder between the states of Michigan and Indiana. The Michiana solo saxophone pieces are a collection of melodies and structures I have composed with memories of Michiana as references. In exploring my childhood experiences at this beach town, I was overtaken with the desire to contextualize the way I felt. The powerful nostalgia that I feel when I look back on these moments in my life is a wonderful place from which to draw musical ideas.

Interestingly, it is the nostalgia itself that I feel a need to explore, and not the memories that cause it. I am a very nostalgic person. I think it is big part of who I am, how I look at the world. I believe in leading a life that is very cognizant of the past and its relationship to the present. The music I am writing for this project is about the way I feel as I remember, and not the memories themselves. I hope that makes sense.

The compositions presented for this project utilize melody in conjunction with shifts in tonal color and noise techniques to paint a landscape of joyful melancholy. The music is heavily influenced by archival recordings of American folk music as well as the work of Joanna Newsom, Jose Gonzalez, Devendra Banhart, and Bill Callahan. I believe that by arranging this music for solo saxophone, I can highlight the emotional qualities that I find so striking in these musicians’ compositions and that I hope to create in my own.

I am very excited to be debuting the project at The Local 269 on March 30th. I hope you will join me in seeing how it works out.

Tags: Bill Callahan, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Jose Gonzalez, joyful melancholy, melody, Michiana Solo Saxophone Project, Performing Instrumental Music

Last weekend my trio Reed’s Bass Drum opened for Garland Jeffreys at the Falcon Inn in Marlboro New York. Thanks to Garland Jeffreys’ impressive draw the place was completely full. Garland has had some billboard hits and seems to be popular in the area. The audience for the show was definitely there for a rock set. It was great that the Falcon was willing to give us a chance to open for him.

I often talk myself into changing a set in order to please a hypothetical audience, but Garland was very positive and made us feel very comfortable playing our own music. After our set it was still Garland’s audience, but they didn’t chase us away. Either way, we got to play music in front of people that we had never seen before. I didn’t know a single person in the audience. It feels very rare to play in front of a group of people who aren’t at least partially made up of old friends.

By the end of the night we had sold more cds than we usually do as headliners. That was nice. One guy even came up to us and told us that he hadn’t realized how much jazz there was in his favorite rock recordings until he heard us play. We didn’t instantly gain two hundred fans, but we definitely gained a few who would have never found us any other way.

I doubt that Esperanza Spalding is going to gain any Justin Bieber fans by winning a grammy. But she has a good record, and there are lots of people who are going to like it. Furthermore, a large group of musicians and people involved with the music world have given her their support for playing her own music. That probably feels good, and at the very least she is going to gain some fans who probably wouldn’t have found her any other way.

Tags: Audience, Garland Jeffreys, Opening Bands, Performing Instrumental Music, The Falcon Inn

Neil Young Live at Massey Hall 1971

I have gone to a few poetry and short story readings recently. The written word has a very strong and clear path of allusion, and in most cases, this seems to be the key to my emotional response. It’s possible to write something that people will find funny, upsetting, or uplifting, purely because of what it reminds them of. A lot of this has to do with how we communicate with each other. Words seem to be the only surviving form of communication that people understand without any help. I’m not complaining, thats just the way it is. Words have the power to illustrate an idea just enough to allow us to fill it in with our own personal context. I love to feel like I agree with someone. To know that if I were in the world they were drawing I would be as terrified, angry, amused,  as they are. This is how I want to make people feel when I play for them. Knowing how to draw your own images using your audiences imagination is really great, but it’s very hard for me to show people how I feel without giving up my own musical voice. The language of instrumental music can get very cryptic very quickly. For a lot of people, this realization becomes the final confirmation that this music is not for them. Jazz musicians get stuck performing in front of a lot of small audiences. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can perform instrumental compositions in a way that makes the listener feel comfortable imagining the world I am trying to show them. I want to find a way of harnessing the power of allusion while performing original music. Lately I have been working on some music for solo saxophone that is drawn almost exclusively from the way I feel about a place I visited a lot as a child. This is music that I am writing with a specific memory in my mind. These little songs are attempts at capturing and sharing the way I feel when I remember these moments. I want to make you feel that way too. Neil Young’s Massey Hall Concert makes me feel like an insider. When I first heard it, I thought it was so cool how they hadn’t cut out the stage talk in between songs. After checking out a few more solo recordings I discovered that the talking was always left in. This banter is part of the performance of the music. I think it is as important as the songs themselves. Most of the songs from the Massey Hall concert are about moments, places, people. Understanding what he was thinking when he wrote them is invaluable to reaching the place where the song is trying to lead you. These songs have words. When making music that doesn’t even have the familiar feel of spoken language, how can I ever expect anyone to spontaneously understand what I am trying to say? I don’t think that I can. With the music I am writing right now, I want to include the listener. I want everyone to feel like they can at least imagine the way I feel as I play the song, the way I felt when I wrote it. I am spending a lot of time listening to Neil Young talk about his songs on stage. I want to learn how to talk to the audience like he does.

Tags: Audience, Massey Hall, Musical Voice, Neil Young, Performing Instrumental Music