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

Please join us Friday, December 4 at 8pm for our first concert of the season – Words and Music – featuring the winners of the Forecast Music 2009 Call for Scores.

Renee Weiler Concert Hall
at Greenwich House Music School
– only $10 at the door –
46 Barrow Street, New York, NY
Tel: 212-242-4770
Directions: 1 train to Christopher St./Sheridan Sq or the A, B, C, D, E, F and V trains to W. 4th St.

James Barry: Songs of Issa & unfulfilled
Clifton Callender: chansons innocentes (*call winner)
James Holt: Ham-Sah (**Forecast commission)
Jeff Myers: La Beaute (*call winner)
Jody Redhage: Starlings & This November
Eric Schwartz: Tra La La
Demetrius Spaneas: Moonlight of Lost Dreams

Performed by sopranos Amberleigh Aller, Jacquelyn Familant, Cameron Russell and instrumentalists Rose Bellini, William Harvey, Elaine Kwon, Isabelle O’Connell, Jody Redhage, Demetrius Spaneas.

Soprano Jacquelyn Familant joins the NYC based Sapphire Ensemble (Elaine Kwon, piano and Demetrius Spaneas, clarinet and composer) for an afternoon of classical and contemporary chamber music, presented by the New Rochelle Council on the Arts. The program will feature music by Henry Purcell, Anton Rubenstein, Franz Schubert, William Susman, and myself, including my Three Graces for Clarinet Solo and my Moonlight of Lost Dreams, with text by Ms. Familant.

Ossie Davis Theater, NRPL
Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 3PM

On Lineage

We are touched by those who share their wisdom with us. As artists, we are an amalgamation of our teachers. Even though we may not be completely aware of this influence and how much it effects our creative process, it is undeniably there. Of course, sometimes the influence is negative and our creative reaction is to strive to be nothing like that teacher, but this is also influence.

I am writing this the day after the passing of one of my most influential teachers, Joe Maneri, a great creative spirit who taught at New England Conservatory. Joe was a free spirit, a kind and gentle soul who was very giving with his wisdom. I am also writing this because I have had three influential teachers pass recently, all of whom had incredible impact on my artistic life and whose teaching and concepts I have tried to pass onto my students. The other two were composer George Russell and composer/saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre.

Recently, I have been thinking a great deal about artistic lineage. I feel blessed to have been the recipient of great knowledge from those who were considered to be the masters of their field. The older I get, the more important this sense of lineage is to me. The older I get, the more concern I have for following generations that they are not only unaware of the lineage that they are a part of, but also that they have lost any sense of their place in the evolution of their art form. Most disturbingly, I find that many of the younger generations have no idea of history and have no idea who any of these people were.

Unfortunately, it shows.

I worked with Joe on both the performance and composition of microtones. Microtones for Joe meant dividing the 12-note octave into 72 notes. Suddenly, when you’re dealing with 6 notes to the ½ step, your sense of intervallic relationships becomes far more heightened. Being a color player (from the Joe Allard concept of wind playing–another tradition that has lost it’s adherents in the last generation–which is why this matters so much in my playing), the extensive work I did with microtones opened up so many new dimensions of my playing that I am still exploring it and finding new ways of applying it to what I do.

But Joe wasn’t just an innovator; he also came from a tradition.

Joe, along with others of his generation who taught at New England Conservatory, came from, either directly or indirectly, Arnold Schoenberg’s inner circles. Regardless of whether they were in the jazz or classical realm, the common denominator was Schoenberg, who taught in Boston and NYC after moving to the US. Love him or hate him, a contemporary composer can not deny Schoenberg’s influence, and I embraced his concepts because they were being presented by his disciples, who referred to him as “The Master”. None of us are dodecaphonists anymore–in 2009 one shouldn’t be–but the techniques that developed through Schoenberg, Berg, and most especially Webern are used constantly, even though the sonic outcome today is much different. They have evolved–I use them in my own way for my own music–but they are there.

I remember when my theory teacher, who was a composer–they were all composers then, real composers, not theorists–reprimanded me for daring to add a major seventh interval to the final chord of a choral I had written. “You are a disgrace to this class, music, and everything that The Master had ever stood for” bellowed from my teacher…I learned and eventually, I understood.

My theory classes were taught by these composers. They used Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony text, which is a wonderful book. They taught theory not by analysis, but by having us, all of us, write music using what we learned in class. Teaching the structure of music by actually doing it, not through the dry, chord by chord analysis and speculative methods of current pedagogical music theory which amount to little more than mental masturbation. Unfortunately, the current methods are now standard, theory has taken the place of craft, and the passing of knowledge is dying quickly in our universities and conservatories.

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Elvis Costello.

What I find equally disturbing is how little both classical and jazz performers understand the lineage in which they come from. I will mention Jimmy Giuffre, for example, and most young saxophonists will look at me with blank stares. I would then explain that Giuffre was the spear-head of the jazz avant-garde in the 50s and 60s; their answer: “That stuff has no effect on me, it’s dead, so why should I care?”. Worse are classical players who have no idea of their own teachers pedigree…no idea that their flute teacher comes from a tradition that goes back to mid-19th century France and that’s why he teaches them a specific playing style and interpretation. They don’t know, they don’t care…they only care about the grade and finding the easiest way out.

Most disturbing are the composers; those that create music. There seems to be this new idea that traditional training is no longer pertinent; they supposedly don’t need it. “Who cares about Monteverdi or Palestrina? They are long dead and won’t get me a job writing music for video games”. I know so many young composers–and for the record, the younger generation of teachers–who know so little of the tradition that they are supposedly continuing that it is laughable. Major composers whose works should be at the tips of their tongues are disregarded. They see people achieve fame outside of traditional modes of education and believe that they don’t need to learn anything other than how to land a job.

I am writing this because I have great concern about my art. I see what has been lost and am saddened greatly by the knowledge that no longer passes from teacher to student. This isn’t about conservatism or stagnation; for an art form to evolve, the sacred knowledge must be passed from the teacher, then the student fashions it in a way to reflect modern society. The process then continues. You must learn how to write by studying Monteverdi and Bach and Mozart, just as you must learn to play by studying (and understanding!) Heifitz and Gould and Bird. But it’s up to you now to evolve and continue the lineage; never looking backwards, but always moving forwards.

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

The Sapphire Ensemble, directed by Elaine Kwon, piano, and Demetrius Spaneas, woodwinds, will be presenting a concert at the ICO Gallery in NYC on March 18. The concert will feature soprano Jaquelyn Familant. Includes works by Purcell, Schubert, William Susman, and myself, including my Three Graces for Clarinet Solo, and the premier of my Moonlight of Lost Dreams for soprano, clarinet, and piano, with text by Ms. Familant. Reception to follow.

Demetrius Spaneas performs the music of William Susman at The Stone in NYC. Works include Waves (with Quintet Tabor), Native New Yorker (for multi-wind player, strings, and percussion with film) and Duo Montuno (with Elaine Kwon, piano). 8PM

Demetrius premiered his Three Graces for Clarinet Solo, which he paired with the Stravinsky Three Pieces for clarinet, as well as performed his Margarita’s Dance (version for soprano saxophone and piano). Forecast Music, Tenri Cultural Center, NYC, November 1, 8PM.