MP3 Mathieu, Marsh & Wilsey - The Bloom
Group improvisation at its most risky, most awake, and most beautiful. The more you listen, the more you receive.
20 MP3 Songs in this album (57:02) !
Related styles: Avant Garde: Classical Avant-Garde, Avant Garde: Structured Improvisation, Instrumental
People who are interested in George Marsh Jennifer Wilsey W. A. Mathieu should consider this download.
Details:
W. Allaudin Mathieu, piano / Jennifer Wilsey, marimba and percussion / George Marsh, drum set and percussion
Allaudin: People are going to want to know how we came to play the way we do.
Jennifer: I always wanted to play a certain way. As a teenager I’d sit at the piano at night and improvise in the dark. It was a feeling of communion with myself, with being-ness through sound, and now I get to experience that same communion with others.
Allaudin: When I was seventeen I’d play the piano for my girlfriend, a beautiful dancer, and that created a kind of heaven world for me. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was playing, but I loved her so much it sounded beautiful. Then I started actually listening to it, and building a musical language that came from that love-feeling.
George: For me it’s a bang-wop-ding song I’ve always been singing — maybe a weird way to sing, but it’s how I sing, how I play. When the playing and the listening are the same thing, the music just happens. And knowing that your buddies are also playing and listening, you just do it and music happens.
Allaudin: It does it.
Jennifer: Surprise!
George: Making sound and being responded to gets more surprising all the time. The music we make can take you anywhere — from a roller coaster to a slow stroll or anything in between.
Allaudin: What’s constant is the way we trust one another. That’s the way Viola Spolin taught theater games….
Jennifer: .…and it works two ways: our improvisational approach depends on our sense of trust and the music helps our sense of trust to grow.
George: Trust is a kind of love.
Jennifer: Whole-being listening is the presence in which love can arise. Pauline Oliveros has said, “Where there’s listening there’s music”, what’s also true is that where there’s listening there’s love.
George: The games help and the structures help, but you have to go past the games into pure feeling.
Jennifer: I like the continuum between the more structured pieces, like Bloomsicles, Ga Ga Ga, and Gong-a-ji to the looser structures of the games like the Duet Circles, all the way to “just play.”
Allaudin: I’m glad we spent so many years learning so many different ways of playing together but, yeah, the real magic is when the games disappear….
George: ….when the music opens into the surprise of the unification of us three.
Jennifer: It’s an unfolding that happens inside the music through listening together, a flowering of the moment.
George: ….and a flower doesn’t have an agenda other than what it is.
Allaudin: A blooming flower is a slow-mo version of how it feels in the middle of an unfolding improvisation.
George: When you really look at a flower it pulls you in into its sexuality.
Jennifer: Well, a bloom is born, it reproduces, and then it dies. That’s a part of the attraction of improvisation, dealing with beginnings and endings.
Allaudin: Sex and death….
George: Oh no! Not again….
Jennifer: You know, this conversation we’re having right now isn’t all that different from the music we play.
Allaudin: It’s part of The Great Conversation going on all the time, the human improvisation opening out everywhere at once.
George: It’s music, man it’s bloomin’ music.
William Allaudin Mathieu is a composer, pianist, teacher, and author of four books on music: The Listening Book,
The Musical Life, Harmonic Experience, and Bridge of Waves. He has composed a variety of chamber and choral works, numerous song cycles, and recorded prolifically, including the duet album with George Marsh, Game/No Game. He was an arranger for the Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington bands, a founding member of the Second City Theater, director of the Sufi Choir, and has been a teacher of improvisation and composition for five decades.
Jennifer Wilsey Marsh performs, composes and teaches music with a focus on improvisation, polyrhythm, and Deep Listening® practices. A concert percussionist, she has performed internationally with diverse artists and ensembles, including Timeless Pulse (with Thomas Buckner, Pauline Oliveros, George Marsh, and David Wessel), The Good Sound Band, and Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Ensemble. Jennifer’s recordings can be heard on the Deep Listening, Mutable, Taiga, and Pitch-A-Tent labels. She teaches and directs at Sonoma State University, and offers creative music lessons for children and adults in her Santa Rosa, California studio.
George Marsh is a drumset and percussion artist, composer, and teacher, currently with the David Grisman Quintet. He wrote Inner Drumming, which deals with energy flow inside the body, and can be heard on many CDs including those with John Abercrombie, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Allaudin Mathieu, David Grisman, Jerry Garcia, Denny Zeitlin, Maria Muldaur, and Noam Lemish. Modern Drummer magazine says “Marsh is, in himself, one of the most versatile percussion sections in jazz.” George teaches at University of California Santa Cruz, at Sonoma State University, and at his studio in Santa Rosa, California.