stakerized.com

Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

This Interview was conducted over email, but I didn’t get his answers back by deadline, so this didn’t appear in Salt Lake City Weekly; instead there is a link at bottom to the article I wrote about his work instead of this.

BS: What were your early musical inspirations, and how did they inform the music you have created?

PM: My family had a huge impact on me. My brother Mike is an excellent trumpet player, as is my dad, and my grandfather was a professional trumpet player as well. Also, growing up in rural Missouri was pretty huge for me in terms of a sense of scale, and being near Kansas City was huge in that I was able to start working with great musicians at about age 14. And the Kansas City scene at that time was fantastic, I had played hundreds of gigs with great players by the time I left there when I was 17.

BS: How has your style of playing and composing changed since your early work on ECM? How do those early works still resound in what you are doing now?

PM: I am more of someone who accumulates and gathers rather than redirects. I rarely, if ever, throw things out from my past interests, it is more like adding on new rooms to a house, rather than building a new house. Kind of everything that I have ever gotten to over the years is still viable for me.

BS: How is Orchestrion a departure stylistically from previous works, and how is it an extension of recent progressions in your playing?

PM: It allows a set of options that are unique. i have no desire to stop doing all the other things i have done, but this does bring the idea of vision into a different kind of focus.

This is such a unique project in every way that I can’t really compare it to anything else. It is kind of 360 degree experience for me in that I am responsible for every aspect of every note of it all, whether improvised or written. That is often largely true by degrees in other situations as well where I am the leader, but because I am functioning as a kind of mulit-instrumentalist in this environment, it challenges me on many other levels. The total concept of this was kind of “improvised”, so that fits in there too. It is hard to break it all apart.

Structurally, the record really is thematically connected. And the kinds of development that are invoked here are certainly related to the kinds of long form writing that appears often in “classical music”. But I think it is really hard to find a way of describing this piece that is directly connected to anything else. That quality is one of the most fun things about the project; I have had to make up a lot as I have gone along since there were not really many places to look to see how others had done this before.

BS: Where did you get the idea for the Orchestrion project, and more importantly, why were you so driven to pursue it? How did the use of instruments change your compositional techniques, if at all?

PM: The idea has been knocking around in my brain for about 30 years. Every year I would look around and say “Wow, no one has done it yet”. It is just something that I have been fascinated with since I was a kid.

Yes, there was a period when the instruments started finally coming in where I had to find out what they were good at. And like anything else, you want to write for the strengths of any given situation.

BS: What statements might the project make about the emotive power of music, as well as the role of technology in the world today?

PM: It is simply a different medium, in this case one that has rarely been explored. Behind this or any other musical effort the basic qualities of spirit, soul, feeling and of course a high level of content harmonically, melodically and rhythmically must be there, at least for me. It is easy to get lost in a discussion here about the “how” rather than the actual music. For me, the satisfaction in what this has been so far has been 98% musical and about 2% for the tech/”how” aspect.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Comparison of Pat Metheny vs. Captured By Robots, another musical entity who makes use of mechanized instruments, played Burt‘s Tiki Lounge recently (capturedbyrobots.com):

_____________________________

My article in City Weekly
Here