Water Can Assume Any Form

On Friday, December 4, I’ll be at The Rotunda in West Philadelphia for an album preview concert of music for tenor saxophone and electronics, presented by Bowerbird. For the past several years I’ve been exploring this kind of music, and this concert brings together five pieces from that work: three from my new album and two I’ve recorded before.

The concert takes its name from James Primosch’s Water Can Assume Any Form. It was Jim’s final work, and he didn’t live to finish it. At his request, I completed the second movement, weaving my own improvisation into his soundtrack with the hope of channeling his ideas into my own. Of everything Jim and I made together, it’s our most poignant collaboration, and performing it means a great deal to me.

The piece that started this whole electro-acoustic project is Emma O’Halloran’s Sum of Its Parts, which I recorded for XAS Records. Emma built it from samples of my own playing, and that idea runs through much of the program. The composers recorded, synthesized and reimagined parts of my sound (subtones, growls, multiphonics, percussive articulation) and turned them into electronic soundscapes. I perform against those soundscapes live, often improvising in real time. It’s a strange and exhilarating experience to play a duet with a transformed version of yourself.

Nicholas Cline’s Water Witching was written for saxophonist Jeff Siegfried, and I recorded it for Navona Records. Erin Busch, my colleague on the Temple University faculty, wrote can’t find the words, a work of real delicacy. Each piece treats the combination of saxophone and track differently. Some are intimate memorials, and others are abstract meditations on water and land.

In the middle of all that electronic sound is the one fully acoustic work of the evening: Paola Prestini’s Where the Blue Wave Rocks. Paola wrote it for me, and it’s a meditation on color, connection and communication, inspired by Kandinsky. It gives the program a moment of unprocessed clarity.

Program

• Erin Busch: can’t find the words (2019/2026)
• James Primosch: Water Can Assume Any Form (2021)
• Paola Prestini: Where the Blue Wave Rocks (2006/2020)
• Nicholas Cline: Water Witching (2015)
• Emma O’Halloran: Sum of Its Parts (2018)