Demetrius Spaneas |

It’s official!

My new CD, Sfumato, has been released!

This recording is a series of meditative duo improvisations with Russian Medieval/Byzantine-style vocalist Galina Parfenova. I will present a solo performance and reception on February 21 to mark the release. I am also happy that I am presenting this in my home town of Lowell, MA. Reception begins at 4PM, with the performance starting around 4:30.

One very important aspect of this recording is that I am not only the performing artist and composer on this CD, but I am also the producer, the publisher, and I have created my own record label, DSM (dspaneasmusic)–in which this is the first release, DSM-01–that will solely be an outlet for my own creative endeavors.

It was a lot of work, but very satisfying!

The CD is now available on digstation, CD Baby, and iTunes. Amazon and downloadable ring-tones available soon!

Once the whirlwind of this weekend is over, I will have all of the CD information up on this website–sooner rather than later!

As serendipity would have it, on the following day, February 22, I will be a special guest of both Middlesex Community College and Lowell High School. I will give a talk/presentation about myself and my career to LHS students. This special program is organized through Middlesex Community College. Below is a description of the program:

The Middlesex Community College Music Outreach Program started 5 years ago.  Our goal is to present high quality musical events which go beyond the normal school music curriculum for Lowell area high school students. These have included concerts, lectures, demonstrations and workshops presented by professional musicians of the highest caliber, including members of the Boston Symphony, as well as MCC faculty.  Lecture/concerts are presented in the Assembly Room of the newly renovated Federal Building on E. Merrimack St.

This is exciting for me! As any of you who have followed my travels know, I love giving these types of talks…not to talk about ME, per se, but to talk to students who may be interested in pursuing a career in music. I will tell them the truth…both the good and the bad, the happiness and the frustration, the elation and the devastation. The ones who are serious will hopefully understand…others, well, others may not be ready to hear quite that intense of a message.

Also, it’s important for me in these talks to discuss other cultures and how the US is looked upon internationally. I will also tell them the issues that I have personality encountered as an American traveling into less than friendly regions of the world. Again, many may not understand the weight of such issues, but the ones who are ready will listen, and begin to understand.

It’s always an issue what to tell someone who wants to pursue a career in the arts, to major in it at college. It’s a difficult call; usually, I would tell someone that if they can do something else, anything else, do it…

…the problem is when you can’t do anything else. I’m not talking about skills here…I’m talking spiritually. If your soul will not allow anything else, then you have no choice…you must. If it can allow other possibilities, then don’t do it. This is the issue that most young people don’t understand until it’s sometimes too late. They liked singing or playing in a band in high school, and then think that they’ll do this only, usually with very poor guidance from teachers and mentors…they have no real understanding of what they need to do, or what will be expected of them.

They also have no idea what they’re getting into…

This is where these talks are helpful. Young people can ask questions…this is where I can be of best service to them. They have to understand that most of what they know about the career, about the economy, about music education at the high school and college levels in the US, and about the reality of job opportunities are completely wrong.

It’s all about honesty, which is unfortunately something that young people don’t always get when being wooed by college programs or other types of–for lack of a better word–promoters.

But I’ll do my best for them–I have to.

One last thing–for those of you who are keeping score at home, I have decided to go back to my metal Otto Link 8 on tenor…‘The Cannon’, i. e., the Dukoff 10* is going back in the archives as a memento of a past life. We tried for a while–we were mutually exclusive for a month, but just decided that too much time had passed and we had drifted apart…

Actually, in all honesty, I like a lot of what the Dukoff brings in so far as power and edge, but the Link is overall the most complete mouthpiece. Well, that’s OK…I started on a Link, almost exclusively played on a Link until I was with the Funk Brothers (actually, I switched to the Dukoff when I played with Three Dog Night for some reason…). I mean, Coltrane played on a Link…you can’t get better than that.

Peace,
Demetrius

ps–I did go back to my bigger set-ups on clarinet and bass clarinet recently, but that’s a story for another time.

Old and New

January 14 is my birthday–my 41rst, to be exact–so I feel the need to write something. Nothing overly erudite or philosophical; I just want to muse through some updates, some new projects, and a rediscovery.

I am very happy to say that my Tajikistan project is coming together nicely for May. I will be collaborating with the Bactria Cultural Centre and the US Embassy to bring jazz music to a festival in Dushanbe, surrounding urban and rural areas, and up to the villages in the Pamirs Mountains, one of the highest occupied areas on Earth. Both the BCC and the US Embassy are striving hard to make this happen, and I just today finished a grant proposal for funding. All I really need is a plane ticket, which, by the way, is ridiculously expensive since there is no easy way of actually getting to Tajikistan and getting around the country is downright treacherous. We’re hoping for the best!

It looks as if February 21 will be the date for the CD release party of Sfumato, my collaboration with vocalist Galina Parfenova. By party, I mean a reception and solo concert at the ALL Gallery in Lowell, MA. Times TBA. I will also probably have the international on-line release fall on the same weekend, possibly the 20th, which interestingly, coincides with the beginning of Pisces, which, if I’m not mistaken,  represents the final stage in spiritual evolution. Why, you may ask? I don’t know, the date felt right. Sometimes, you go with your gut.

I am starting a new collaboration with Boston-based sculptor Laura Evans to create an installation work for the Transcultural Exchange 2011 Conference (titled The Interconnected World). We met today face-to-face for the first time. I like her as a person even more than her work, which I think is fantastic. I feel that on one’s birthday, one should not only take measure of the past, but create something new. I believe the project will center around the concept of blending the mechanical and the biological and will incorporate evolving perception-based sound and visual elements; this is all that I’ll say for now.

On to rediscovery. So, I’m a tenor player…really a tenor player: sound, conception, improvisation…I do it like a tenor player. Before I went to Russia in 2007, I played tenor almost exclusively (as far as the saxes go). Because of the difficulties associated with traveling with instruments, I went small: I started traveling with instruments that I know could fit on almost any plane with no trouble (for saxes, I’m talking mostly alto, since the case is compact; even soprano can have issues because the case is long). Since I have been back, I have been rediscovering the joys of playing tenor; although many of the composers I work with still write for alto (which is the ‘standard‘ horn, or at least has been for most classically trained composers), I have been incorporating the tenor into my own projects as much as possible.

Now, before Russia, in 2006, I made a decision to get out of the rock life. I had been on the road for years as a rock/R&B tenor player, which gave me both some of my greatest and all of my absolute worst experiences; basically, it was a wash. Now, being a rock tenor player, I played on a certain piece of equipment that was–and let’s put it bluntly-unacceptable in any other genre. This mouthpiece, which I lovingly dubbed ‘The Canon’, was a metal Dukoff 10* that has a baffle that you could spelunk on (every classical and straight-ahead jazz saxophonist reading this just shuddered…audibly…). When I finished my stint with The Funk Brothers in 2006, I decided that I needed to sound a tad more, oh, tame to fit in with the scene in NYC. Musicians are very, very difficult when it comes to equipment. Not just mouthpieces, but even using certain brands of instruments can get you black-balled…were I to show up with that mouthpiece on even a progressive big band gig, I’d catch Hell for it from both the bandleader and the rest of the sax section. Forget playing a show or a pops orchestra gig. Understand, I’m a loud player with an extremely full sound to begin with; using The Canon, I could punch holes in brick walls at 100 paces (I’m only half kidding). It wasn’t built to blend with cellos or clarinets (although I can make it, and have), but to ‘edge through’ amplified rhythm sections.

So, The Canon went into the drawer and I pulled out a metal Otto Link to blend. It’s a nice mouthpiece, but I felt like a major league baseball player off the steroids cycle…I even went as so far last year to switch to hard rubber, still an Otto Link, an 8*, so nothing to sneeze at and still darn big, but I was starting to sound more and more like a 1950’s straight-ahead jazzer (which is what everyone wants) and not like, well, me.

This morning around midnight, I was listening to a live performance (1992) of Paul Simon singing Still Crazy After All These Years (one of my absolute favorite songs, and appropriate for my birthday, I think). I was loving the experience when all of  a sudden it went up another notch: the late, great Michael Brecker–who needless to say influenced all of us tenor players one way or another and who recorded the sax solo on the original–played. That sound! That is what a tenor sounds like…that’s what I sound like in my Platonic Ideal…what I used to sound like.

It was after midnight, I live in an apartment, I couldn’t break out the tenor then…I had to wait until this morning. I opened the equipment drawer in my studio and there it was, The Canon, like a re-found lover…it wasn’t a rekindling, but a roaring blaze of sonic ecstasy.

It hit me…I only do almost exclusively my own projects now. I’m not running to Broadway shows or big band gigs and hustling work. I’m a soloist, why do I care if I blend with anyone? My sound and my color palate have always been unique. Like any relationship, The Canon and I have to patch-up some things, and in some ways re-learn how to communicate; but I think we’re both in it for the long haul.

Nice Birthday

2010 and Transitions

Is there a year that is not a transition year? In the grand scheme of things, change is constantly happening around and within us; the size and scope of this change, and how it effects our consciousness, defines whether or not we consider a period to be one of transition or not. For me, the idea of being ‘stable’, at least in a non-psychological sense, is so far removed from my consciousness that the idea of staying in one place, one job, or one state of mind, for an extended period is almost a dream. Change happens, constantly; for some of us, a life in constant flux is the standard.

It’s also interesting how an artist’s concept of self changes, or at least matures, over their creative period. 10 years ago, I was composing very little (although I was working as an arranger/orchestrator), running around as a saxophone teacher to multiple colleges, and freelancing full-time, playing well over 200 gigs a year…sometimes up to 4 a day. I would run from orchestra rehearsals on bass clarinet to matinee performances of a musical theater production to an evening jazz or rock gig on tenor. On the road, in constant motion, was a standard state for me. I actually couldn’t turn down work quickly enough, and I took less than half of what I was offered, purely for the fact that I couldn’t physically do everything and be everywhere–if I could fit it, somehow, regardless of the physical or psychological strain, I’d do it. I was one of the most working musicians in the Northeast, and I was miserable.

Many of my colleagues have asked me why. They tell me that their life’s goal was to play gigs; for many years, I also defined myself by what I was doing and with whom I was playing. “You’re working constantly”, they would say, “you get to play out every day and play with all of these great musicians and ensembles. I would kill for that.”. Yes, I was, but the excitement of it–realize, I enjoyed the crazy life-style much more than the actual gigs–was wearing thin and I found myself progressively more and more unsatisfied.

My transition from freelancer to artist started in the early 2000’s. After an extended period of both physical and spiritual trauma came to an end, I started focusing on me as artist rather than me as ‘worker bee’, or a better analogy, ‘drone’. Work was becoming less and less during this period, anyways; the post-9/11 world had little desire or funding for the arts or interest in live music, and gigs, once plentiful, dried-up quickly. Within the first year following the attacks, my gig numbers were half what they were the previous year and dwindling rapidly. It was then (2002) when I decided to record my first solo CD and start to seek both a national and international audience.

I also began to compose again.

I always wanted to be a composer. Even in high school, I wanted to write and major in it in college, but there was no one to advise me. I had a great saxophone teacher in high school (Tom Ferrante, who taught at (then) U Lowell) who pushed me to New England Conservatory, where I studied classical and jazz performance, as well as took private composition lessons. I had always seen myself as a composer, and that my performing was just a means to this end. My original goal was to get a doctorate in composition, teach full-time at a university or conservatory (I actually love teaching), and by my 40s be doing both composing and performing, with composing becoming more prominent as I matured. Well, life (gigging, making rent every month) got in the way and I never achieved this. No time and not enough money to do it. I had to work, I had to hustle.

But through the many twists and turns over the last 20+ years, I found my way.

Amazingly, now, in my 40s, I have a similar artistic career to what I wanted. I don’t have the doctorate nor a full-time teaching gig, but I have created a unique career as a composer/performer. I don’t gig much any more–this means I’m not playing music that I don’t like just for money–but play either my compositions or music by my friends whom I want to help, to champion. I don’t have the stability that I yearned for, but I do have the flexibility of not being tied to a specific city, or country. I’m no longer on the first-call list for orchestras or pit bands, but I am on the international festival circuit as a performer and composer, which is amazing. I’m finally an artist, and thankfully, still growing and maturing as one.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that it’s OK to be a creative artist and not a money-making machine. It’s difficult to not let life get in the way of living fully. Maybe my New Year’s resolution will be to turn this thought into a daily mantra.

That being said, I look forward to the transitions of 2010. I have been living in Boston since fall 2008. My position at Northeastern University may well be coming to an end in June (I have a two-year contract, renewal dependent on funding) and again, I will be in flux. Chances are, I will be in another city, if not another country–options are being weighed–dependent solely on opportunities and how they evolve over the next couple of months. Even if my position continues unaltered, chances are that I will move back to NYC and commute; I thrive in that creative atmosphere, and all of my important artistic work in the US is there…Boston, for me, holds very little of artistic interest.

I also look forward to the wonderful projects that I am engaged in; many of these will come to fruition in 2010. As I have said many times, as an artist, one must constantly produce at the highest possible level; it is through this body of work that one is remembered, that one is impactual and influential, and that one continues live in the collective consciousness long after their physical body dissolves.

I am probably most proud of the two recordings that will both be released in 2010. The first, entitled Sfumato, was recorded in St. Petersburg, Russia in December 2007. This is a collection of meditative improvisations with Medieval-style overtone singer Galina Parfenova. The two of us went into a studio and just interacted…it was natural, organic, and if I may say, beautiful. This will be released in February; this was also the first of my recordings that I decided to be the sole producer on, so there is an added bonus that it is the first of my catalog.

The second CD has a very different vibe, but was created in much the same way. November Snow was recorded in Beijing by German sound master Jurgen Frenz. The CD is a collective improvisation of myself, Neil Rolnick, and Bruce Gremo. This series of improvisations uses technology (computers and interactive electronic instruments, as well as acoustic instruments) where Sfumato was purely acoustic. We are planning on sending this to major labels, primarily in Europe–we believe that we have something special and powerful.

It will be a busy year compositionally. Right now, I am engaged in writing a piece for the Rome, Italy based ensemble Piccola Accademia Degli Specchi. This wonderful ensemble has a special love for living American composers. The work, entitled Love Letters in the Ether, will be the centerpiece of their US tour and I hope that it will become a mainstay in their repertory for European concerts and festivals, as well; I am actually working with them to produce this US tour. It’s a big work, and one of the strongest pieces I have written.

I also am going to write a large-scale piano work for my friend Susanne Kessel in Bonn, Germany. I have been wanting to write a piano work of large size and scope for a while now, and Susanne is absolutely a wonderful artist. I also hope to schedule the premier to coincide with my own concert/lecture tour of Germany sometime during the 2010-2011 concert season in which I will travel to multiple cities.

Boston-based choreographer Rebecca Rice and I are working on a new production entitled Energy Theory. This piece will present energy as an eternal force of creation and transformation; this will be done through music, costume, and modern dance choreography. I will write for a small ensemble that features me as improviser.

I need to write an orchestra piece…it’s been a while, a really long while…not counting working as an orchestrator, I haven’t written for orchestra since I was a student. There wasn’t a need to; as a composer/performer, one writes mostly for oneself. But it’s time to have a mature orchestra work in my catalog. I may actually take one of my large chamber pieces or film scores and adapt it for orchestra; I have some compositions that I believe will work beautifully and have a whole new life in this format. We’ll see…

Concerts and traveling are starting to come together for the spring. The main trip in the works is to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. I am organizing a collaborative project with both the Bactrian Cultural Centre and the US Embassy in Dushanbe. I will organize a ensemble that combines American Jazz (me) with traditional Tajik music and musicians. We will be the centerpiece for their Jazz Festival, and then do outreach concerts throughout the country. Of course, this project depends on my fundraising, so I will be working on this intensely over the next few months. More on this later on.

NYC, as always, holds my most interesting US endeavors. My group The Sapphire Ensemble will be organizing our annual spring concert at (most likely) the ICO Gallery. This location will be dependant upon whether or not they have their piano ready; they most recently moved to a larger location in Chelsea. This is why the date is not yet set.

My main concert of the spring, however, is as a soloist. I will present my program Metanoia : A Monologue on Life, Loss, and Rebirth on April 12 as part of the Composers Collaborative, Inc. concert series at the Cornelia Street Café. This is the first time in the organization’s history that they have given an entire concert to one artist; I am grateful for this opportunity.

We will see what happens, and where, in the fall.

I am happy to see 2009 depart. It was a year of angst (my trip to Uzbekistan), triumphs (my trip to China), and loss (the passing of friends, colleagues, and teachers). I am always one who looks to the future and never to the past. There is no event or time-period in my life that I would ever want to relive or revisit, and I would never want to go back…only forward. The wonder of 2010 is that it hasn’t happened yet, so the possibilities–the opportunities–are endless.

Happy New Year

Demetrius

Based in Russia for a year, Demetrius Spaneas conceived and organized numerous interlocking projects and traveled from Germany to Kyrgyzstan presenting concerts. Join Demetrius as he shares his insight on creating international networks, producing concerts and festivals, and working as a Cultural Ambassador for the U.S. Embassies in the former Soviet Union.

Hosted by:

New England Conservatory Alumni Association

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

6:30PM-8:30PM

Offices of Chamber Music America

305 7th Avenue, 5th Floor, Manhattan

New York, NY

Uzbekistan, February 2009

As most of you know, I am a performer and composer who travels overseas extensively, presenting concerts and lecturing at colleges and conservatories, most especially in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.  My cultural initiatives are either of my own creation, collaborations with international artists and organizations, or as a ‘cultural ambassador’ working with the US Embassy system, primarily in the former Soviet Union, to promote American music and artists while stimulating dialogue and interaction with local artists.

You must also understand that none of my work is political by any stretch of the imagination. Unless you’re Pete Seeger, the mixing of art and politics is usually a foul one and is successful only rarely. I don’t care about politics–I do care about Humanism and the soul of the Individual.

This last visit to Uzbekistan, my third since 2007, was quite an experience on multiple levels. It showed me not only the state of the human condition and the fear instilled in certain societies, but it also proved to me the great human desire to communicate and share one’s feelings, and even one’s hopes…

I left on February 22 out of NYC, transferred planes in Moscow (after a 7 hour wait…typical, but I don‘t have any complaints about Aeroflot except the quality of the food…), and arrived in Tashkent on the morning of the 24th.

The first part of my trip was to be in collaboration with the Ilkhom Theater and the Omnibus Ensemble; the former being the only independent and uncensored venue in all of Central Asia (and before that in the whole of the Soviet Union) and the latter being the only contemporary music ensemble in Central Asia. These are wonderfully gifted people who are doing tremendous work, literally an oasis of art in a multi-country region. It must be understood here that this theater has received great pressure from the Uzbek government, and also great assistance from Western Embassies and art/culture groups, most notably the US Embassy and the Goethe Institute (Germany). The founder and director of the theater was murdered in 2007, a few weeks before my first visit. It is widely thought (and understood) that this was not a random occurrence, but one meant to stifle the theater for good, thereby destroying the one venue for free speech…

…but they battle on…

For this, our third collaboration, I was to be a featured composer and performer at the Black Box Music and Vision Festival. We were going to premier three new films scores that I composed especially for the festival: two films by Uzbek film-maker Sukhrob Nazimov which I would perform live to the films on saxophone with electronics, and a large film by Greek film-maker Eri Skyrgianni, which would be me performing as soloist with the Omnibus Ensemble, once again live to the film–basically this one was an hour and ten minute concerto. After much rehearsal, and must exhaustion, we presented a wonderful concert which was met with great reaction from both the audience and journalists present–a great success!

That was the 25th.

The next morning, the 26th, at 4AM I was picked up by the US Embassy delegation to fulfill the second part of my work there, which was as a cultural ambassador and to present concerts, lectures, and master classes in the country’s major cities: Bukhara, Samarkand, and back in Tashkent.

So…for eight hours we traveled across the plains, the cotton fields, the arid morning of Southern Uzbekistan. It was during this journey that it was learned that three Uzbek journalists (friendly to the West) were arrested and convicted of criticizing the Uzbek government….they were given 12 years in prison…

At this point, you must understand that this government, especially on the local levels, is one that is not only based on instilling fear and controlling speech and learning but also quite corrupt. The above mentioned cotton fields are worked by students forced out of school, and the roads are kept clean by the people in cars stopped by police on the highway for only that reason.

These arrests were probably a factor in what happened next.

It seemed as if the local governor of Bukhara decided that having an American jazz musician speaking at his music college was a bad idea. They may have been fear of a pro-democracy riot that my presence would ignite, or fear that jazz, that symbol of Western decadence which was outlawed in the Soviet Union, would allow the students too much of an understanding of freedom…

…these may be, and probably were for the most part, true, but it must also be known that probably the biggest factor was the fact that he was insulted that the US Embassy went above his head and below for permission, but didn’t ask him directly…

…so he decided to put an end to it…

We found out that the teachers who had invited me decided to move the event off-campus to a local music school, thereby following the letter of the law not to allow me on campus, but not the spirit. After a quick talk through, I took stage with three Uzbek teachers who have a jazz trio. We had fun, and the students there got something new and had the opportunity to learn…the director of that school was tremendously stressed because he knew that once the officials and the NSS (former KGB)knew of the location, they’d shut it down and take people away…which is what basically happened.  After we got off stage, and as I was overrun with students asking questions and wanting autographs, the NSS came in, and told the director of that school that he was to report to headquarters…as far as I know, he was only reprimanded.

From that point on, we were under constant NSS surveillance. Wherever we went: restaurants, hotels, walking in town, driving…we were watched and followed. We would literally turn around and 2 people would duck behind a building…and it wasn’t the same people all the time, either…you would think that they would have better ways to spend their money than to follow a jazz musician all around the country…

The next day, the 27th, we headed towards Samarkand. Now, in this instance, the director of that school was called in before-hand and forced to shut everything down and not allow me anywhere near the College of Music, and anyone who may have wanted to work with me was told that they better not even try. This was frustrating…I’m not the one hurt by this, the students are…their education is being truncated by arrogance and fear…all they want is dialogue, and that’s what they are denied.

To try and salvage something, we were in contact with a number of journalists who wished to do a television interview with me to help set the record straight and to show how beneficial this dialogue with me would be. We planned a meeting at the television studio, only to later find out that the studio was told that if I were to enter the building, it would be shut down. We organized the journalists to meet us in the conference room at our hotel, which we secured earlier that day…when we arrived, all rooms were closed to us, NSS men sitting in the lobby…

…so, we had an informal talk there in the lobby–no cameras were allowed. As it turned out, one of the teachers in Bukhara connected us with the one jazz musician, a pianist, in Samarkand, who invited me to play with him that night at this club in the city.

So, we all went. We had a fantastic time. The journalists recorded everything and interviewed me, and the pianist and I jammed for hours. It was all good until the journalists left…they were ‘called in’ by the NSS, their equipment and the footage confiscated…

Fearing the worst, we left the next morning (28th) for Tashkent to present there at the College of Music, NSS not far behind. We contacted the school and told them what happened, and were told that no one has said anything to them. We arrived, I taught, I played, I answered questions–it was a great event, exactly what the other two should have been. There were NSS men there, I believe (the auditorium was large, so I couldn’t be sure), but they sat and listened, took notes, and must have reported back that no pro-democracy riots had occurred and that I was actually quite the gracious guest…

Obviously, since I was doing something in the capitol city, the seat of government, it must be alright..

After all of this, I worked with some composition students from the Uzbekistan State Conservatory, crashed for about an hour (thankfully, I gave up regular sleeping back in the late 80’s) and was picked up by an Embassy car to go to the airport at about 2AM, March 1rst. They sent me through the ‘diplomatic passage’ just in case, but I don’t think that there was too much worry, but one never knows…something could have been planted on me which would make my stay in Uzbekistan ‘extended’ to say the least…

So now what, you ask? Well, I’m going back–I have to, my work is not done yet. Again, I believe that these actions were generated by fear–fear of losing control, fear of the unknown…the most basic human need is that of communication–this transcends arts and politics–people have a desire for dialogue. These teachers and journalists risked their careers just to communicate with me–this act can not go unheeded . I am in the process of organizing a new, large-scale, cultural initiative which will hopefully, with the Uzbek government’s approval (which by the way, on the highest level I believe wants this) stimulate artistic and educational dialogue between Uzbekistan and the West…

…we can only gain from this…we can only evolve as souls by learning from each other…and talking…

Thank you for reading,

Demetrius Spaneas

Immediately following my concert at the Omnibus Black Box Festival, I will be working with the US Embassy by presenting master classes and concerts in the major cities of Uzbekistan: Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. This will include performance and composition seminars, lectures on American music history and culture, and jazz concerts with university/conservatory students and local professionals.

Please Download the PDF Master Class Poster here

Composer-in-Residence and featured solo performer at the Omnibus Black Box Music and Vision Festival, held at the Ilkhom Theater in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. New multimedia/film collaborations with: Sukhrob Nazimov, Spokoinoi Nochi Vesna and The Cold, Barren Way, both for soprano sax and electronics; Eri Skyrgianni, Artrip 1 (An Ode to the Eye), for soprano sax and chamber orchestra. Made possible by Meet the Composer/Global Connections.

Guest interview on OK Radio; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Lecture on American music at American Corner, Kent, Kyrgyzstan

Lecture/masterclass on composition techniques at American Music Center; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan