An arrangement of a classic American folk tune from a suite of music inspired by the traditional Appalachian ballad called "Awake, Awake" featuring the great Wayne Horvitz on piano with Douglas Detrick's AnyWhen Ensemble. This program of music will be released in our 14-15 concert season.

Featuring Wayne Horvitz, piano; Douglas Detrick, trumpet, arrangements, compositions; Hashem Assadullahi, saxophone; Shirley Hunt, cello; Steve Vacchi, bassoon; Ryan Biesack, drums.

Awake, Awake!

For more information on this track, please visit http://sleepfacingwest.com/sleepfacingwest/gl012-and-just-like-that

This loop was created for game and animation use. Though this track is available for download here, I've posted it mainly for review purposes. There are high quality files already split into intro and loopable sections available on my blog (The review track here often doesn't include notes that lead back into the beginning of the loop again). If you would like to use this track or commission new work visit me at http://www.sleepfacingwest.com

GL012 And Just Like That

For more information on this track, please visit: http://sleepfacingwest.com/sleepfacingwest/2015/8/12/gl018-the-watchmakers-daughter

This loop was created for game and animation use. Though this track is available for download here, I've posted it mainly for review purposes. There are high quality files already split into intro and loopable sections available on my site. (The review track here often doesn't include notes that lead back into the beginning of the loop again.) If you would like to use this track or commission new work visit me at www.SleepFacingWest.com or contact SleepFacingWest@gmail.com


GL018 The Watchmaker's Daughter

the waters of speech are silent

Thanks for joining us again at World Cup Coffee and Tea, NW 18th & Glisan for another OMN Coffeeshop Conversation.
Joining me today is Douglas Detrick, the Executive Director of Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble which I have been covering since before it was a real organization about ten years ago, and before there was an OMN.
Since he became Executive Director he along with Ryan Meagher and Mieke Bruggeman-Smith have made PJCE into a real cultural force in Oregon. They’ve got a large amount of concerts and events coming this fall and we’re going to get the inside scoop on them. Douglas is also a trumpeter, composer and arranger. How does he have time for all this and his two little kids? Let’s meet him.

Douglas Detrick: CC #117   Making Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble into a cultural powerhouse

Edna Vazquez joins the PJCE’s 12-piece jazz ensemble February 15th at the Old Church in Portland, February 16 at Mt Hood Community College in Gresham, and February 17th at the Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River. If you get your ticket before they all sell out, you’ll hear the incredible passion she brings to every performance. Her energy is unforgettable, and even if you don’t speak Spanish, you’ll understand every word.

Edna Vazquez

The Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble gives two world premiere performances of James Miley’s newest work “Watershed Suite.” This six-movement piece is inspired by distinctive bodies of water in the Oregon landscape, from the Tamolitch Pool to Oaks Bottom, capturing the spirit of each through music. James Miley joins PJCE Executive Director Douglas Detrick for a conversation about the piece taped at Sellwood Riverside Park, on the banks of the Willamette River. Learn more at pjce.org/watershed. Episode Transcript [Doug] Welcome to Beyond Category. I’m Douglas Detrick. The Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble gives two world premiere performances of James Miley’s newest work “Watershed Suite.” This six-movement piece is inspired by distinctive bodies of water in the Oregon landscape, from the Tamolitch Pool to Oaks Bottom, capturing the spirit of each through music. Head to pjce.org/watershed to learn more about this new piece and the performances in August, 2018. And stay tuned for the release of Trio Untold, with James Miley on piano and keyboards, Mike Nord guitar and electronics, and Ryan Biesack on drums. It’s the thirty-third release on PJCE Records, and it drops this September. Here’s the episode. [ambient tape: “I hear water”] ? [James] This is James Miley, I’m a composer/pianist. [Doug] Meeting near a waterway seemed appropriate. We are down along the Willamette River, this is Sellwood Riverfront Park. We’re looking at the Sellwood Bridge, listening to waves from a really noisy boat that just went by a little while ago. I’m doing two projects with PJCE this summer. First is a trio recording that’s going to be out in September with Mike Nord and Ryan Biesack, and that’s called Trio Untold. It’s all freely improvised music in the moment. And the second is a new piece for the ensemble and that’s called the Watershed Suite. Each section is inspired by a waterway here in Oregon. And I’m using watershed, the term, fairly loosely. I settled on it mostly because of the connection to the idea of a drainage basin, a large area that a river gives identity to. And, the concept of shedding, as musicians. [Doug] This is a bit of a musician’s joke. If you hear a musician say they need to “shed” a particular piece of music, that means they need to practice it. Shed is short for woodshed, which is where a musician would go, as the story goes, to practice away from an audience. [James] I wanted to write a piece about the Tamolitch Pool, the Blue Pool, down near Eugene up off the McKenzie River. Which is an extraordinary place. If you haven’t gone, you need to check it out. It’s a spot where the river goes under ground then bubbles up in this intensely deep blue color that doesn’t seem real at all. I wasn’t prepared when I saw it. I thought “oh it’ll be some water, and it’s blue, and it will be pretty” but it’s really really wild. It’s, I don’t know, thiry-ish feet deep, and you can see all the way down to the bottom, just a really deep, kind of intelligent kind of blue. I had all these sketches, all these ideas, and I just couldn’t come up with the thing that was working for me to elicit some sense of that place and how it makes me feel. In the process of doing this, we were editing the trio disc and all of this improvise music that we just kind of made up in the moment, and there’s a piece on there that &nbsp;really speaks to this place. So I went back into that and used that material to write a new large ensemble piece. Static is not the right word. It feels very serene. All the way through it feels like it’s got this flat sheen, there’s a feeling that you’re looking at something very deep but it never burbles to the surface. Which made me think of that pool, where you stand and you look at it and if you jumped in you wouldn’t be able to swim to the bottom of it. It looks closer than it is, but nothing is quite what it seems. The water is the connecting point...

Awake, Awake!

Douglas Detrick

Related tracks