When my band Chaise Lounge played a concert with the Pan American Symphony Orchestra this spring, I knew it was being recorded, but didn’t think much about it. Then the recording engineer, Jeff Gruber of Blue House Productions, invited me over to have a listen. I was amazed at the clarity and sonic presence of the recording. But what most impressed me was simply the energy Jeff captured. It has been quite a while since the band has released a live album, so I picked 12 songs from the concert to release on CD. Some are old Chaise Lounge favorites, with a lush orchestral backing. Others are songs chosen just for this occasion, like Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion.” This has become the Chaise Lounge CD that I am most likely to put in my car’s CD player. Yes…I do that.
– Charlie's Blog –
The Kids Are Alright
My orchestral music has been featured in seven children’s concerts over the past six months. In years past, this might have bothered me: I always like to imagine my listeners as sophisticates, grown-ups who during intermission sip martinis and maybe even (dare I say it) smoke cigarettes. But I’m beginning to come around. Recently, I went to hear the Capital City Symphony play my jaunty and nostalgic 12-minute piece My Own Personal Rocketship for an audience full of Washington, DC public elementary school students. It was an attentive if boisterous crew, and the piece got as great a reaction as I could have hoped for. Afterwards, the kids stuck around to learn more about the instruments from the players. At right, concert-master Robert Spates explains the intricacies of violin playing to a few interested third-graders…or should I say “future sophisticates.”
Only Connect
Sometimes a gig comes along that seems like it’s just about the money, but it rarely turns out to be in the end. This one was a vanity album project that came my way via master rock producer Jim Ebert. The client, Dave, was a man on a mission: to record an album of emotionally meaningful songs as a peace offering to a beloved family member. Dave would sing on the project, but he had zero thought of releasing the album commercially. It was simply a plea for connection through music. I got to arrange the pieces and then play piano in the studio with a bunch of top-flight rock session guys, including the remarkable guitarist Buddy Spier, drummer-to-the-stars Andy Hamburger, bassist Greg Watkins and a superstar horn section consisting of Al Williams on sax, Joe Jackson on trombone, and Kevin Burns on trumpet. With Dave’s emotions flowing through all the sessions, it turned out to be a very good rock recording and an unforgettable musical experience for me.
The Migrant's Story
I live in a county (Montgomery County, Maryland) with a very large and diverse immigrant population. There are streets in Silver Spring where you can hear 20 languages spoken during a one-block sidewalk stroll. So when I was awarded a grant to compose a piece for spoken word on the subject of the immigrant experience here, I thought it would be easy to find personal stories. And it might have been, a couple of years ago. But the level of fear I encountered while interviewing people who had immigrated to this country was striking. Even among people with legal residency or citizenship, many told me they worried that bringing attention to their experiences might endanger them. I can’t say I blame them: We’ve seen plenty of headlines lately about federal authorities imprisoning and even deporting legal residents and naturalized citizens. In the end, I decided to focus my piece on the story of one man who made the terrifying journey from Guatemala and through the Sonoran desert as a child. The “score” for this piece is written for piano, guitar and cajón (rhumba box) along with various other hand percussion. I hope I can musically do justice to his story, and his courage.
Be Like the Swan
Last week, I was in France for a wedding, and a side trip took me to the Loire Valley. While walking along the river in the charming town of Blois, I caught sight of two swans gliding upstream. The Loire has a swift and strong current, so I knew the swans had to be paddling furiously under the water’s surface, but up above it, they maintained a completely calm, beatific look. I thought of one of my favorite words, sprezzatura: the ability to make a difficult task look easy. And that put me in mind of one of my favorite trombone players, Joe Jackson, who is conveniently in my jazz band. Two months ago, Chaise Lounge played a concert with the Pan American Symphony Orchestra, and one of the pieces on the program was Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion,” with Joe playing the solo usually performed on violin. This beautiful, impossibly high lyrical piece would leave most trombone players in tears, but for Joe, it seemed effortless. Of course, I knew his “effortlessness” came from 30+ years of devoted attention to his craft. But the best players, like swans swimming gracefully upstream, can make you forget everything but that beautiful performance.
In Need of Art
My friend Susan recently hired me to play at the opening of an art exhibit she’d curated. It turned out to be a beautiful gig, in no small part because my jazz trio was surrounded by so many vibrant prints and silkscreens from around the world. I fell in love with one of the pieces: a print of a woman in a turban by a Cuban artist named Choco. I couldn’t stop thinking about the piece and, after I got home, I called Susan up and bought it.
It is curious how we need art. In the order of food, shelter, clothing, it is understood to be pretty far down the list of primal needs. But maybe it’s not. Cavemen made cave paintings, after all, and Lord knows they had more pressing things to do, like fighting off saber-toothed tigers. Perhaps the need for art runs on a parallel track to our survival instincts. We can be hungry and still long to see beauty.
The print I love is now hanging on my dining room wall, and it makes every other piece of art in the room look brand new. And every time I look at it I am fed. As we go through our days making work to feed our families (and possibly our egos), it’s good to remember that we might be feeding the human spirit as well.
Him & Jim
My latest play just opened in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Him & Jim is a comedy about what happens when a divine stranger wanders into an unremarkable auto parts shop. My partner-in-crime in this project is director Ara Barlieb. I wrote the play alone, but Ara gave it life, and from what I am hearing he is taking it in directions that I never even imagined. And yet I trust Ara enough to know that whatever he and his talented cast invents, it will make sense with the play. More than make sense: It will make the play a better one.
Retablos Premiere
Last week, maestro David Fanning and the National String Symphonia brought my piece, Retablos, to life for the first time at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The piece features a fiendishly difficult percussion part that requires the percussionist to leap from the bass drum to the vibraphone, to various temple blocks, and back to ten other instruments. For the soloist, Mark Carson, it was an exercise in choreography and stamina as much as it was in musicality. Mark and I (but mostly Mark) worked off and on for months to make sure that this percussion part was playable. The result was a fluid and, honestly, gorgeous performance. The NSS will perform it again in Baltimore on March 11.
Votes for Women
19: The Musical, a carnival ride of a project about the passage of the 19th Amendment, is still taking shape. Last weekend, singers Millie Scarlett, Katie Ganem, and Maria Ciarrochi performed three new songs from the show at The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monumentin Washington DC in honor of Women’s History Month. Lyricist Jennifer Schwed and writer Doug Bradshaw have been the visionaries behind this project, which we hope to keep building and workshopping over the course of the next year. At our Saturday matinee shows, we were blessed with enthusiastic and curious audiences, including one extremely lively bachelorette party all in purple (the color of the suffragists). Could attending historical feminist musical theater offerings be a new bridal trend? For the sake of this show, I sincerely hope so.
Rocketship Premiere
I’m happy to announce that on March 18, the Capitol City Symphony will be premiering a jaunty and nostalgic 12-minute piece of mine called My Own Personal Rocketship. Maestra Victoria Gau will conduct. There’s a second piece of mine on the program: one movement of my symphony, The Blue Chevrolet. It’s a family concert complete with pre-show instrument petting zoo, so if you’ve got kiddos in DC to entertain that day, I hope you’ll zoom by. It’s at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with shows at 4 and 6 pm.