Bill Stevens
 Everyday Utopias

Expansive Territories 
Presence 
Contact 
Everyday Utopias 
When It’s Dark, Look for the Stars

How did the idea of Everyday Utopias manifest itself in light of the pandemic? How can we bring to fruition the imagining of alternative worlds, making for positive living utopias here and now? Thinking pre-pandemic (before 2020), endeavors displayed in the context of the pandemic (2020/2021) and experiences that shape and visualize possible futures - what are the connections?  Are there connections? Is this the present/future we have imagined in our lifetime?

i will erect the new paradise
 i will build and decorate it
 LIKE a garden in an outgoing/incoming vessel 
with ornamented walls 
with a basin in the floor

it is made from light and pleasant materials 
on the wall, lifeforms stand out in relief
 i can feel them ALL when i stroke the wall with my hands 
on the basin floor, lifeforms stand out in relief 
the light forms of water
 i can feel them ALL when i cross the bottom with my bare feet

i can feel EVERYTHING
…i will erect the new paradise 
Poem from Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen 
Translated by Katrine Ogaard Jensen

Bill Stevens - trumpet, effects, compositions using Logic Pro
 Paul Pricer, spoken word on Everyday Utopias
 Eric Peters, drums on When It’s Dark, Look for the Stars

Cover Art by Sarah van Riq

Everyday Utopias

Everyday Utopias
Bill Stevens - composition, field recordings
Paul Pricer - spoken word

Composition commissioned for Well-Being Cities, a unique collaboration between Cities and Memory and C40, a global network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis.

The project asks artists to reimagine soundscapes representing well-being in cities – whether environmental, social, climate-related or cultural – with sound works being presented at the C40 Summit in Buenos Aires in October 2022.

My composition, Everyday Utopias, is a cautionary tale of how simple it would be to enter into a nuclear World War if we are not alert to what that would mean for the planet. We have it within our power and abilities to avert this, as of now, imaginary future. For true sustainability and wellbeing to occur, we must be able to put our differences aside and see where we have commonalities leading to a fundamental shift in thinking that looks to revive and protect our planet looking toward a collective future, a more resilient future.

My tale begins as though in a dream. What future path will we take? One of sustainability or one of mutual destruction? Aside from the musical sections I composed on Logic Pro, I also included the following field recordings:

1. New York City Nuclear Preparedness Public Service Announcement  2. DENMARK COPENHAGEN Sirens in Copenhagen May 6 12.00pm 2020 - Timothy John Hinman  3. United States Nuclear Preparedness Announcement in the Event of a Nuclear Strike on the mainland United States  4. Statement by Albert Einstein as read by Paul Pricer

I do not believe that this is the path we need to follow, but in the words of Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone episode number 68 from September 29, 1961, “The Shelter” …

No moral, no message, no prophetic track, just a simple statement of fact. For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.

Contact - Bill Stevens - trumpet with effects, composition

The pandemic has rendered many things we once took for granted fragile. Among them is the certainty that music holds spaces for us, where freedom, closeness, exuberance, and community are within reach. Few things have been made so ambiguous and unsettling by living with the virus as contact, encounter, and touch. For many the idea of contact is now associated with fear, anxiety, grief, the painful loss of closeness and exchange, or guilt. Some are overwhelmed by the amount of new communication and relationships as they move deeper into the digital realm, while others finally feel liberated from the burden of maintaining contacts at all. Throughout these different realities, the inequality-reinforcing effect of the pandemic becomes apparent, because reducing contact might not be something one can afford, and its ramifications depend directly on their respective social status and economic resources. 

Today more than ever, we need to establish positively transformative modes of contact with other realities beyond our own. And not only between people with different ways of life, in different parts of the world, or between generations, but also with our planetary environment and the diversity of its life forms, which are currently deprived of the basis of their existence at an alarming rate. 

How can we bring back, rethink, re-experience, and strengthen the possibility for exchange and emotional resonance? Because without new and challenging forms of contact in the present, we cannot expect a better, more collective, just, and joyful future.

Contact, CTM 2022 Festival Theme

Contact

Presence
Bill Stevens - trumpet with effects, composition
‘Tears’ for Wayne Shorter, incorporated the Weather Report piece within the composition

While we may not experience historical acts as presence, we might experience something that includes history, a netherworld in which loss and presence begin to dance.

Music that can be simultaneously both a collective and a very personal experience by drawing from a traditionally communal aesthetic and a more individual contemplative nature marks our unique presence as an exploration of the intersection between these modes of listening. 

- paraphrased by Laurel Halo from The Line of Best Fit review

Presence

Expansive Territories
Bill Stevens - trumpet with effects, composition

 The concept of Territory is multifaceted and ambiguous. It relates to notions such as space and place, identity and community, dominion and control. It may refer to areas of land, but also areas of knowledge, activity or experience.

A Territory is never clear or neutral. It operates as ground, foundation, a space to act and dwell, but also as a specific domain or locale, in which human and physical patterns overlap, singular perspectives are shaped, and unique communities emerge, inhabit or conflict. Territories are social constructs, products of agency that encompass physical, virtual, social, political, experiential and affective spaces. These inform identities, generate values, produce meanings and ways of living.

A Territory is never static or fixed. It intersects with other territories, and feeds from the transgression of its borders or limits, its geographical, political and ecological interferences. The margins, as territories themselves, are the site of particular situations where differences come into contact, dialogue and exchange. They are in permanent transformation, expansion and contraction, generating new territorial dimensions of convergence, conversion, or conflict.

We propose the idea of Expansive Territories to comprehend expansion as a process of perpetual motion – physical, social, political and conceptual. Through exploratory and erratic movements, different territories overlap, merge, interact, are reconfigured, and reimagined. Expansive Territories seek to gain ground towards a sustained, active regenerative process as a way of resisting any formalization that interrupts their transformation.

- OSSO Research Residency Open Call 2020

Expansive Territories

When It’s Dark, Look for the Stars 
Bill Stevens - trumpet, composition
 Eric Peters - drums

How can we draw on imagery, philosophies, theories, and methodologies to interrogate concepts of home, place and belonging? Home can be imagined in terms of geographical location, or in terms of the body or of the self. It may be articulated through its temporality; a legacy or sense of inheritance, a futurity or an aspiration. It may be conceptualized as occupying the physical, the spatial, the temporal and the cultural realm. It may be conceived of as gaining its coherence in displacement, in exile, in migration and threat. To belong may be interpreted as something that is cultural or religious. Similarly, belonging could draw from affectual states where one feels secure and safe, or excluded from a place or community. It spans the personal, the local and the global, encompassing geopolitical concerns and their impact on people, through communities and on populations, on the consequences of the pandemic, climate change, war. In this way artistic and critical responses may range from the intimate to the global.

Home: provocations on place and belonging, University of Gloucestershire (2022)

This track was largely inspired by Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society output, particularly the mesmeric bass and drone like nature of the rhythm. I’ve fallen in love with the ‘astral jazz’ movement from the 1960s and 1970s and Don Cherry, for me, was the master, not due to the complexity of the work, but for the devotion and mesmerism he was seeking as a player and from his band.

The composition features Eric Peters on the drums and is based on the Don Cherry statement, ‘Ornette’ as performed by the Organic Music Society. The opening solo trumpet is a re-interpreted transcription of ‘Voice of the Silence’ from the album El Corazon with Ed Blackwell and in tribute to Don Cherry.

And when in doubt or alone, always remember, “When It’s Dark, Look for the Stars”.

When It's Dark, Look for the Stars

Bill Stevens has been driven by a quote he attributes to Miles Davis, “I have to change”, but he will be the first to tell you that his music is embedded in a deep understanding of history brought to the present and beyond. He is always thinking about the process of creation, finding the new, pushing boundaries both in his playing and especially in his compositions where he has always looked to follow the voice inside of him toward his own spiritual path throughout a life in music. 

Although Bill’s current music is based in sound and color through electro-ambient sound settings that often utilize spoken word, fine art inspiration and field recordings, he also has a robust back catalog of straight ahead Jazz, modal Jazz in an ECM style with an emphasis on Impressionistic harmony and Romantic based melodies, free Jazz and avant-chromatic funk.

It has been a journey with many accomplishments (signed by iti Records, grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, conference speaker and guest performer in Norway and Australia to name a few), but there have been challenges on the path as well (years of overcoming a distinct fear of performing, a break from the exhaustion of maintaining a career in music that turned into a six year sabbatical to a debilitating almost career ending bout with bells palsey that affected his ability to play the trumpet. Bill refers to his sound on the horn today as a ‘fragile beauty’). But Bill’s middle class upbringing in Syracuse, NY taught him the value of hard work, that anything worth caring about as much as he cares about his music is worth fighting for. It was out of these trials that Bill began to commit toward sharing his love of music with a younger generation in the New York City public schools. Bill has worked to inspire and provide his students with creative experiences through his love of music, performance and composition.

Bill wants his fans to know how important they are to him. He always ends his newsletter by saying, “Thank you for being the most important part of my music”. For Bill this is not just a slogan, but his mantra. He genuinely cares about the lives of the people who listen to his music by often saying that his mission each time he performs or each time someone listens to his music at home is to transport them away from their daily grind, to have them momentarily forget about their job, issues at home, whatever the case may be to find a moment of relaxation and inner peace transforming them through instrumental abstract concepts as a fuel to empower and enlighten.

Everyday Utopias

Bill Stevens Music