Queens trumpeter Peter Evans blats on the bleeding edge of out-jazz while also circling the fringes of noise-punk, sound design, and Rothko-like colors of pure tone. Although his music leans towards the dissonant and disorienting, Evans has a tender, forgiving touch with his instrument--a gentle love cry that towers over both the herky-jerky bluster of his quintet and the punkjazz splattercore of side-project Mostly Other People Do The Killing. Earlier this year he dropped his second CD of solo trumpet pieces, Nature/Culture, an ambitious double CD of live and studio works released on Evan Parker's label Psi. Nature/Culture is a brutally stark document: sometimes working as subtle be-bop, sometimes working as blurry honkgaze fluttercore, and sometimes capturing pure, honest sound at its most fragile. Opening track micro" manages to squeal out gorgeous dueling microtones--like Tony Conrad jamming with Pita Rehberg, maybe--and even packs an enormous whallop of Hendrix-level feedback... only, you know, it's all somehow coming from some dude's lips.
Peter Evans on micro"
What inspired micro"?
Sort of difficult to say. I don't really play pieces inspired" by any specific thing. A lot of times, whether live or in the studio, a lot of what determines what I will do in a piece is the time limitation. So in this instance I might have decided to do something in the two-to-three-minute range, which then led to a certain area of exploration and structural unfolding of sounds. I called the piece micro" after the fact, since in terms of timbre and structure it seemed to be a miniature version of the next piece on the album, which stretches to 18 minutes and is called macro."
When you perform your solo trumpet pieces do you think about think ambience and texture of the room, or do you think only of the notes coming out of the horn? A blurry, echoey production makes your pieces exciting--which is more of a rock" thing than a jazz" thing...