Apr.4, Middle East Up, Cambridge, MA with MSSV featuring Mike Watt on bass. Our first show in two and a half years! And, Covid-Willing, the band will also be playing June 24 at the Jungle in Somerville, MA, and June 25 at Dusk in Providence, RI, the latter with Minibeast. Miller will be blowing some cornet along with the Beast: always a blast. We’re working up new material at these shows, before recording a new album in July. Excited.
We will be at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on May 10 at the wonderful Castro Theater. We’ll be playing out newest score for the 1921 Dziga Vertov film “The History of the Civil War.” The band premiered the score in Amsterdam last Nov. and feel really good about it (and so did the audience!).
And we had a blast at our recent show at Cornell performing the jazzy/noir gangster film Underworld. If Covid stays down, fall shows will be more common than the first half of 2022. Here’s hoping!
Eight Dream Interpretations (for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble)
The album will be released late summer 2022, in gate-fold LP and CD/digital formats on Cuneiform Records. Work is being completed on the video for Dream Interpretation No.17. Hoping for some concerts in New England for the Fall. This is the most complex set-up I’ve ever created for myself, and the album will likely be one of the most unusual guitar records ever made.
The Fourth World Quartet: More Reviews
The Fourth World Quartet was a band Roger (piano) was in with his brothers Laurence (bass clarinet) and Benjamin (alto sax, electric guitar) and friend Jack Waterstone (alto sax) for two months in 1975. Despite playing only two gigs, friend Rick Scott made an excellent recording and it was released a mere 46 years later (2021) on Cuneiform Records. It has gotten many, many positive reviews, as a missing link that was never heard. Here is what a few of the latest reviews have to say:
SEMJA: The result is a music that defies categorization but effortlessly bridges musical worlds that normally occupy very different cultural spaces, creating a chamber music that is as radical in 2022 as it was in 1975.
Progarchives: Other tracks like “Winter’s Dream” actually employ a melody, with this one sounding like an early rendition of the theme song of “The Simpsons” television series some twenty years before its popularity.
“Blast from the Past”
Miss Shapiro, Live at Northwestern University, Chicago. 1987.
This is a Maximum Electric Piano performance of the Brian Eno/Phil Manzanera composition “Miss Shapiro” (from the 801 LP). This use of loops and expanding a single instrument, in this case electric piano with strings, into an ensemble is the map for my Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble. If I recall correctly, this show took place in some sort of living room and a large shaggy dog lay down near my feet during the entire show.
