Tag Archives: teag & pk

‘Convocation’ Out Now

Convocation, the new album by Matt Borghi and myself, is now available. I mentioned it a couple posts back when previewing 2013. The album was officially released digitally on January 31, but we’ve been waiting to really advertise it until we approved and finalized the hard copies.

My collaboration with Matt is five years old this year, and it’s been an ongoing reference on this blog. From our time together in The Elevator Conspiracy to our duo work in a variety of genres under both our own names and Teag & PK, we’ve been fighting the good fight – at least if you ask us for our opinion – for a few years now. A couple of last year’s posts were specifically about us. (See here and here.) Long story short, we cover a lot of musical ground. We started out with lounge-ish and jam-ish rock in The Elevator Conspiracy. Then, as a duo, we first explored acoustic indie-rock territory, but quickly pursued a parallel path of ambient-centric improvisation. We’ve continued down both paths the last couple years, but rarely have we mixed them. As Teag & PK, we perform original songs in coffee houses and on the radio. As Matt Borghi & Michael Teager, we explore sound in art galleries and other “listening space” environments. Convocation is an accidental culmination of the latter, and our first full-length album of either style.

I say accidental because we never intended for this to be an album. At least not originally. After a ~6-8 month spurt with our singer/songwriter material last year, we decided to go ambient at the last minute before a gig. (Matt wrote a great article about that evening here.) That gig’s success reinvigorated our ambient leanings, and so we booked some studio time a couple weeks later at Dan Jaquint‘s The Fort. We entered the studio with no plan other than wanting to capture some our new-found spirit. At best, we hoped to walk away with ~15 minutes of usable material for use as a launching point for an eventual album or project down the road. Because of our low expectations, our “rehearsing” consisted of a couple lunches, phone calls, and emails. Matt sent me about six minutes worth of sketches that he had been messing with, but we hadn’t played together since the aforementioned gig. Horn in hand, I noodled with those sketches for about ten minutes. That was it.

Once we were all set to go in the studio, we told Dan that we just wanted to record some chunks of improvisations. With our levels, etc., set, all he really needed to do was start and stop the recording equipment. For the first attempt, we improvised over a recently-composed loop of Matt’s for about 15-20 minutes. Once finished, we looked at each other with much relief – this was going much better than expected. So over the next ninety minutes we laid down four more chunks: two fully improvised without pre-conceived loops, and two fully improvised over loops that Matt had put together since our last gig. We had surprised ourselves and ended up with possibly more than our hoped-for 15-20 minutes of material.

All five of that evening’s sonic treks make up Convocation. Presented in the order in which they were recorded, all of the source material was recorded live. I say “source material” because Matt did some post-production work with the mix and other audiophile-related items, but, except for cutting out some chunks for brevity’s sake, the musical content wasn’t copied-and-pasted together a la Bitches Brew. Over the next several months we contemplated what to do with the material, finally deciding to release it via Matt’s record label Slo.Blor Media – an excellent source for ambient music and sound art.)

For purists, this album arguably may not be a strictly “ambient” work. While the whole album is grounded in an ambient foundation, the focal point, if there is one, is the improvisational monologues and dialogues. That’s where one may possibly hear jazz-ish influences, though don’t waste your time listening for any bop licks. Each of the five tracks is a collective improvisation over soundscapes, two of which were fully improvised and continually change. No “melodies,” “hooks,” or “beats.” Just sound. It’s somewhere in the nexus of ambient, jazz, sound art, and contemporary classical. (The latter if it were notated, but it wasn’t so it’s not.) Again, neither Matt nor I care what you call it. We haven’t even settled on the nomenclature. This is something we’re very proud of and want to share with open, willing ears. What you call it is a distant second to how you receive it.

Please do check it out if you’re interested. Feel free to drop a line if you dig it. And if you feel so inclined, feel free to leave a review on iTunes or Amazon.

Convocation is now available via iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, and Spotify. And you may order a hard copy via Kunaki. For more info, you can visit:
http://slobormedia.org
http://www.mattborghi.com
http://michaelteager.com

Here’s the official press release from Slo.Bor Media:

Convocation is the work of ambient composer Matt Borghi (www.mattborghi.com) and saxophonist Michael Teager (www.michaelteager.com). Recorded as a series of improvisational structures in spring of 2012, this is the first recording that Borghi and Teager have done together after a half-decade of working together.

With Convocation, Borghi brings in spacious guitar textures to create a harmonic fabric for Teager to lay out his saxophone playing with subtlety and nuance. With a background in classical and jazz saxophone, Teager brings a wide palette of influences to the music. Listeners will hear aspects of Jan Garbarek, John Coltrane and Dave Liebman that’s juxtaposed over Borghi’s pastoral guitar sounds that have more of their timbral origins in the work of Claude Debussy or Ralph Vaughan-Williams than they do other contemporary ambient guitarists.

Convocation, as a whole, aims to create a deep and timbrally interesting listening experience while also bringing together an interesting musical pairing and improvisational process. Saxophone and ambient music have never sounded like this, and Borghi & Teager attribute this to their friendship, their approach to the work and their diverse musical interests.

Buy the hard copy CD here now, or you can visit online retailers such as Amazon, iTunes, or eMusic to name just a few…

Style & Canon

Style is much larger than a happy mix of canon and jargon. In fact, it can be downright incendiary.


(Photography by Jillian Hakala)

The week before last, my partner Matt Borghi and I – together known as Teag & PK – had a couple local radio spots. The first was a part of 89.7’s Coffee Break and featured a brief interview, during which we were asked the dreaded question: what type of music do you play? We offered a lengthier-than-necessary non-answer (telling the host what styles we don’t play as opposed to those we do), hopefully hiding our annoyance – not with the host, but with the question. We abhor discussing it. As I touched upon in this post, our collaboration features many different musical avenues: one night we’ll feature electronic ambience and improvisation, the next it’ll be completely acoustic and Matt will improvise vocal blues a la Son House (and well, might I add). Simply saying “folk” does more to exclude a large chunk of what we do than cast a wide net. We’re not bluesy enough for the blues-ers, not folky enough for the folkies, and not jazz enough for the jazzers. Instead we are what we are and quite happy with that. (Although it does present an ongoing PR problem.)

I mention this because “style” in general has been a personal nuisance for many years. A label, on paper, may just be a single word – folk – or handful of words (post-hardcore [huh?]), but in context it presents a multitude of problems. If something is “folk,” then what kind? Appalachian? Woody Guthrie? Hungarian? Ani DiFranco? If none of those, does the label then somehow do a disservice to those disparate forbears? If it’s completely different, why use the label at all? Simply because it’s acoustic and not on commercial radio?

A few weeks ago I finally watched Jazz In The Present Tense: Icons Among Us, the 2009 documentary that “answered” (to put it lightly) Ken Burns‘s Jazz. Now, I know that people love to complain about the Ken Burns behemoth, and I’ll be the first to jump all over it. After all, it spent ~19 hours exhaustively discussing everything jazz from 19th-century roots music through hard bop, but then gave ~45 minutes of lip service to the 1960s avant-garde and highlighting Young Lions of whom Wynton Marsalis approves. Cute. But for all its sins, Burns admittedly did a lot of good – the archival material alone is worth the time and money. And it does a wonderful job of presenting jazz and its beginnings as a product of African American culture, and (rightly) how the music fits into the context of US race relations. However, perhaps the biggest fault (or virtue, depending on your viewpoint) is that the whole documentary is based upon a particular canonical view of jazz and its stylistic definition. It really is pretty solid for the first 5 or 6 episodes, but becomes exponentially narrower as the series progresses. It goes from being all-inclusive  to a museum exhibit, allowing access only to those musicians (curators) who once associated with those now-or-soon-to-be-dead icons. (Wynton played with Art Blakey and therefore is the designated torch-bearer, right?) As one of my favorite professors in graduate school said, “Classical music is now mainly an amusement park for old people.” (This coming from a harpsichordist.)

Enter Jazz In The Present Tense. While the documentary of course features many contemporary musicians from the broader jazz spectrum, it’s thesis has to do with the word “jazz” itself. Whereas Burns (and Wynton, or rather Wynton via Burns) stated This is jazz, JITP asks What is jazz today?. The answers come from all sides – Terence Blanchard, John Medeski, Bill Frisell, Wynton Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Robert Glasper (his newly-released Black Radio is getting much press), Donald Harrison Jr., Marco Benevento, and more – and it’s quickly evident that these disagreements aren’t  slight. For example, Harrison’s obsession with both hard bop and his association with Art Blakey would even make Wynton blush. The divide between the more traditional jazz-is-anything-up-through-hard-bop and jazz-needs-to-keep-changing-to-stay-alive camps is quite evident. The filmmakers also take some time to focus on the word jazz‘s parallel in rock: jam band. I was very refreshed to see that, as “jam band” is more of a bad word than anything according to many musicians. After the Grateful Dead, most bands who featured improvisation wanted to be called anything but a jam band, a problem that continues to this day. Of course, Herbie was the one to perhaps best state the problem, saying, “The term jazz, in a sense perhaps, is its own worst enemy.” Herbie, one of the last remaining living legends – literally – is still light years beyond not only many of his peers but also the younger generations, both artistically and intellectually. (One of the many reasons I hold him on such a pedestal.)

[Side note: I couldn’t help but literally laugh out loud when Nicholas Payton appeared on my television as the first interviewee, spouting his nonsense. For those at least peripherally aware of online jazz “debates,” he’s heated up the blogosphere the last few months with self-righteous, incoherent rants, stating that jazz is now dead and that we should call what we think of as jazz “Black American Music” instead. Payton’s new term isn’t the problem – it’s his schizophrenic non-explanations of it. He does make compelling points now and again in his various blog entries, but the ongoing argument as a whole is…something. NPR’s perennially-disappointing A Blog Supreme has given Payton’s tripe far more attention than it’s due. If you’ve seen #BAM on Twitter, that’s probably why…]

Of course, this isn’t a film review. My viewing the documentary, coupled with the recent radio spot, are simply two instances out of countless similar experiences I’ve had. But the whole dilemma of style isn’t just an matter of definition, but one of context, as it’s reliant on many factors. One such factor is canon. Every style has its major works that serve as hallmarks. However, once you scratch the surface, you become aware of just how deep the rabbit hole can go, as not everyone will agree on everything. As with the two jazz documentaries, Burns was comfy with most styles through Hard Bop (except for Cool/West Coast), and Icons found almost no consensus on anything.

The classical canon, and expectations of students’ familiarity with it, has stuck in my craw for many years. Going to college and graduate school for (mostly) classical performance is interesting for a saxophonist, considering the instrument is only ~165 years old. Consequently the instrument’s repertoire is only a fraction of the size of the flute’s, violin’s, or piano’s. This causes two issues: 1) saxophonists, unlike most other classically-oriented instruments, are immersed in contemporary music, but 2) this also causes a deficit in performing and knowing older (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, early Romantic) literature. While most classical saxophonists probably couldn’t pick out the second movement of one of Beethoven’s string quartets, we also can pick out and understand the sequenzas of Luciano Berio better than most other classical musicians. Does that mean that classical saxophonists are somehow “less than”? No, it’s just a different animal. Speaking for myself, I have an interest in many of the older/other styles and genres, specifically Renaissance and Baroque music and Wagner. (The latter goes deep.) And my personal (not just academic) interest in orchestral music has really deepened these last couple years. But of course home base, classically speaking, is still contemporary music. (To reference another recent internet meme, I’ve been correcting a musical blind spot. With much enthusiasm.)

I definitely agree that in order to learn a particular style of music (be it a broad category such as classical or jazz, or perhaps narrower like heavy metal), one should be intimately familiar with both the style’s history and the details of its evolution and various iterations. But I don’t believe that it ends there. Not at all. Those who’ve forged ahead to create something new – large or small – have almost always included some sort of outside source or influence. Besides, regarding the above jazz discussion, the biggest argument against the jazz-must-continually-evolve-and-include-outside-styles crowd is that it overlooks or even disregards earlier styles. Following that logic, however, why is it that pre-Hard Bop purists are allowed to do the same for later styles without similar condemnation?

As regular readers know, I’m equal parts classical, jazz, and pop. (Only in that order for alphabetical reasons.) I cringe each time I write, say, or type “classical and jazz saxophonist,” or anything else to that effect. Honestly, I just consider myself, plainly, a “saxophonist” or “musician.” And frankly, at the end of the day, the only canon I’m really concerned with is my own – the canon that has shaped me. As a musician, I’ve worked for years on developing my own personal style and aesthetic. Much work indeed remains to be done, and I’ll arguably never be complete. If someone were to assemble the canon of Michael Teager’s musical education, there would of course be saxophonic references – Coltrane, Liebman, John Harle, James Carter, etc. – throughout, but it would also include the music of the Top 5, Elton John, Richard Wagner, nineties rock, and ECM, just to name a few. Yes, I know A Love Supreme forwards and backwards. (And rightly place it above most other works of art, where it belongs.) But I’m just as familiar with CrashMellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and Aenima (to focus on ’95-’96). And they’re just as important to the musician I am and continue to become as any other “major work.” I discussed this latter point slightly over a year ago here.

It’s not that I think standard repertoire need be diminished or negated, but room must also be made on the pedestal for other, more individualized preferences. In fact, such personalization should be encouraged. While younger generations are becoming more open-minded, it seems that the old guard, especially in classical music, jazz, and other academically-associated musics, remain set in their ways. Slowly but surely, the boundaries are eroding.

This topic has many tributaries, and if I go any further you’ll need breadcrumbs to find your way back. But it does tie together. Style – jazz, classical, folk, blues, rock, etc. – is more than just a word, like it or not. It implicitly suggests and entire tradition and repertoire. Even slight deviations from a stated style can jar the listener, promoter, booker, and/or critic, taking me back to the introductory anecdote about Teag & PK‘s “style.” What do Matt and I call our project? Does it matter? It seems to be in our interest to avoid  such categorizations, or simply make one up just to end the discussion. Common problems we’ve encountered are:
• We’re not “folk” because of the sax (and occasional electronics)
• We’re not “jazz” because of all the verse-chorus songs
• We’re not “blues” because it’s too folky
• We’re not “rock” because it’s guitar and sax
• We’re not “indie” because…we’re not hipsters? 🙂 (We still haven’t figured that one out.)
• Those ambient improvisations? What the hell are those?!?

And to top it off, we really don’t care what it’s called. We’ve considered calling it “acid folk” – not to be confused with “psych folk” – just to have something consistent. And it doesn’t offend any purists we may encounter along the way. When Matt’s canon – ambient, rock, Flight of the Conchords, and blues that Alan Lomax would approve of – meets mine the result is something beyond either of us. It’s also beyond simply picking one style and sticking to it.

The result is what matters. Not what we call it.

Artistic Direction & “Choice” (TPK Edition)

 

Having moved back to Michigan, I’ve resumed collaborating with my good friend and partner Matt Borghi full time. We’ve been working together for a few years – performing, improvising, rehearsing, recording – both in The Elevator Conspiracy and in various separate endeavors. We understand each other quite well, musically and personally, which makes playing together a real treat. That, coupled with our eclectic collective taste and experience, helps to make us a pretty versatile duo.

Our current project – Teag & PK – is still in its beginning stages but the initial discussions, rehearsals, and performance (pictured above) have all been interesting, surprising, and satisfying, both intellectually and artistically. One facet of our discussions revolved around style and direction. Our past collaborations have gone in a variety of directions: acoustic folk, electronic ambient, rock, mostly improvised, mostly arranged – diverse, but all satisfying. Therefore we discussed whether we’d focus on one style or have an “anything goes” approach. In preparation for our first gig, we decided to head in an acoustic (acoustic guitar, voice, saxophones/flute), singer/songwriter direction.

But, for a variety of reason – gear, environment, where the live energy eventually took us – our first gig quickly evolved from an acoustic “folk” style to something much more rhythm & blues- (the real R&B) and rock-based. We were quite surprised, and rather happy with it. That particular style hadn’t entered our discussions once, yet, without even acknowledging it to one another on stage, we enthusiastically went where the music asked us to go. Now, with that gig behind us, we’re looking at our project from completely different angles, and considering options possibilities we previously hadn’t.

It just goes to show that no amount of planning or decision-making is fully effective in a vacuum. (Even with so much time and effort already spent…) We were aware of this abstractly all along – we had a number of “let’s see how this goes live” moments in rehearsal – however it was still surprising to have such a powerful reminder on stage. We had considered many things, but they all went back to what we – Matt and myself – wanted. It may sound corny, but we hadn’t fully considered what the music itself wanted, and that vote holds the ultimate veto pen. While there are still a number of kinks to work out, we’re excited to see what upcoming gigs over the next couple months hold in store for us…

New Release (thanks to technology)!

In case you’re unaware (though since you probably got here via my main website, I doubt it’s the case), I’m featured on a new work by close friend/collaborator Matt Borghi which was released Monday on VagueTerrain.net.  Because of Matt’s consistent, quality, selfless work in the ambient realm, he was chosen as the debut feature artist for VagueTerrain’s new music series.

I bring this up for two reasons:
1. Shameless plug 🙂
2. The collaborative portion of this release actually took place after my recent move from East Lansing, MI to Houston, TX.

Matt had the piece about wrapped up and wanted to incorporate my playing, but we had largely shrugged it off because of deadlines and my move.  However, amidst the chaos that was my apartment (I’d only been moved in one week), I managed to set up a quiet space for my iMac and saxophones.  He then uploaded an hour’s worth of material to a cloud, then commenced to download and noodle around.  Within a matter of three to four days I had recorded a bunch of material to send back to him.  Days later, voila!  He and I went from living just a couple miles down the road from one another to 1200+, yet we were still able to make music together.  It’s amazing what modern, easily accessible technology allows!

Of course, it’s crucial to remember that prior to this, Matt and I already had two years of close collaboration – both with The Elevator Conspiracy, and in a number of duo endeavors – which really helped the process.  Even though I was alone in my apartment, my familiarity with Matt’s sensibilities and direction guided helped to guide my way.  We definitely wouldn’t have been able to do our separate parts (in the “collaborative” sense) without that prior knowledge and experience.

We have a number of other, older recordings (including another ambient one, that a live performance) on his website – I’ll also get them to mine soon, hopefully.   However, if you have a chance, do check out our (his, really) new release.  We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback already, and are looking forward to doing more of this in the future!