Recordings from a live solo set at Orotund Music in Chicago, 17 February 2019
Solo free improvisation mixed with some devised music for cello amplified by contact microphone.

Intro

In a somewhat traumatized state after a flurry of police activity on my block, during a spell of gun violence in my neighborhood in the fall of 2018.  There was a shooting at the same entrance to the park I walked through some hours prior. For home, the desire for safety, sanctuary, trust, community...
Recorded with the windows open in the living room of my apartment, 4 October 2018.
The whirring is from a police helicopter overhead; the beeping from a garbage truck having a difficult time turning due to the nearby intersection being choked up with police cars.

TWI-002

(This is a re-upload of a recording from 2016)

Watch the video here: youtu.be/BUbNy8aMxoA

Performed by Noah Jenkins (violin), Rodrigo Orviz (clarinet), and Joshua Thomas Graham (bass drum and bowed crotales)
20 May 2016, Galvin Recital Hall, Evanston, IL

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Still, subdued; growth

Relativity / A lot more else

Brandon Quarles, alto saxophone

     This can be said in other words, other sounds
     but aren't they all imperfect means, distilling
    (remember it's the coming together)

          Hear it all(,) understood(,)
          as peculiar perfections

Imperfect Means is a study in the small and particular, and the much that lies in what seemed ordinary. The beauty to be found within shadings of "imperfection" requires sensitive focus towards the small embouchure manipulations of delicate multiphonic sounds, and the subtle timbral nuances discovered in repeated, slow-moving intervallic-melodic material. It is slow, quiet, close music.

Written for Brandon Quarles and premiered 10 March 2018 at the North American Saxophone
Alliance Conference at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, OH.

Imperfect Means (2018)

Live recording of a duo set with Sebastian Strinning, 14 March 2019, at Space Oddities Bookstore in Humboldt Park, Chicago

Sebastian Strinning, bass clarinet and saxophone
Wilson Tanner Smith, (sometimes-amplified) cello

with Sebastian Strinning at Space Oddities (14 March 2019)

Long-form solo cello improvisation, recorded live at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Chicago, 5 November 2019, as part of the Music Stillness Solidarity series of meditative music run by Jonathan Hannau.

A fountain is heard throughout, trains rolling by, car sounds...

wilsontannersmith.com

Wilson Tanner Smith

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