Moe! Staiano’s Moe!Kestra! | Two Rooms Of Uranium Inside 83 Markers: Conducted Improvisations Vol. II

One response to “Moe! Staiano’s Moe!Kestra! | Two Rooms Of Uranium Inside 83 Markers: Conducted Improvisations Vol. II”

1. 
   Moe! Staiano

   January 14, 2007 at 5:46 pm | Permalink | Reply

   The album documents two fine performances at the former performance venue, the Oakland Box Theater, in Oakland, with the Moe!kestra! The first show was a fun, fast and quick performance with a small group (10 musicians, small by my standards, compared to the more desired 25-40+ ensemble I’m more prone to) that was part of a benefit show.‘LET’S USE OUR CRANIUM AND LEARN ABOUT DEPLETED URANIUM’ back in May of 2003. The evening was a unique event to call attention to the health and environmental effects of depleted uranium (DU) weaponry used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moe!kestra! was one of several musical performers that night and was probably the most musically adventurous, if not the loudest. It also featured a few notations I had composed a few hours before the show that I gave to all the musicians, always seemingly puzzled and concerned, asking if they need to play their parts perfect and note-for-note. My response was always “play it as best as you can”. Wrong note? Oh well. Being an anti-perfectionist, I’m more concerned about the form of how something is played rather than if a note was played incorrectly. Besides, accidental moments can have good outcomes.

   The more challenging part of my career was when I “decided” to do a performance with separate orchestra in different rooms. I came up with the idea when I was visiting the radio station KFJC in Los Altos Hills during a radio solo performance. I thought how it would be interesting to put five musicians in one room, two in the bathroom, three in the sound studio, etc., and run around giving off cues sporadically. Needless to say, that never happened there, though a performance at KFJC eventually did happened at one point (and was documented and released on the first Moe!kestra! album,”Two Forms of Multitudes”). Oakland Box Theater was a venue, and was also a place where I was booking various jazz, improvisational, experimental and new music artists, that seemed ideal for such a thing.The venue was basically two, long, narrow rooms; the entrance room, complete with a lounge and a small “bar”, and the performance room. I After booking the show, gathering the available musicians and getting any notations and hand cues prepared, I mapped out the stations where I had wanted each music sections to play at.

   Originally, I thought of just having two groups in two rooms altogether, but after rethinking the placements for the musicians after viewing potential areas, things started falling into place. I had the electric guitars/bass on the stage in the main performance room and placed the reeds and strings along with Matt Davignon on a turntable in the other room, which was the entrance of the space along with the brass in the upstairs in the same room in the balcony area.To keep things together, I had placed the drums/percussion in the main hall, but in the back of the room which was near the hallway entrance where the other room was with the reeds, brass and strings were, so when played with a beat, both orchestras could play without disastrously going out of sync, which would have the potential of having an embarrassing effect. My trusty recording engineer, Michael Zelner, had placed multiple microphones in four areas: one for the guitars, one for the drum/percussion, one for brass and one for the strings and reeds (and a turntable) combined.As you can hear in the recording the two opposite sides of the rooms are separated in the stereo mix to hear what was going on in one room and what was going on in the other with the drums in the center. So you can kind of get an idea what it would be like if you were in just one of the rooms.

   I hadn’t thought of the conduction part with the exception that I would be running frantically back and forth between the rooms conducting, cueing in musicians and whatnot. Pretty much I would be doing what I usually do with one orchestra, but with twice the amount of work with some physical exercise as an added bonus. Some key problems also came to mind. Particularly trying to have the separate orchestras to either play the next cue at once or stop all at the same time. For the former, I thought it would be best that each playing passage could be stopped one at a time, segueing the next section in when desired. For the latter, if my memory serves right, I had to either write down on a large sheet of paper and flash “STOP IN 15 SECONDS”, to one group farthest away,“STOP IN 10 SECONDS” to the next group and cue the last group of musicians to stop altogether and hope it would be close to a stoppable unison. Or cue everyone, somehow, to stop in some way and hope that luck was on my side (and it was, luckily).The drums were instructed to play loud (as they usually are) so that both rooms could hear them from the spot that they were located at. Audience members could move freely within the two rooms as they wish (sometimes I had to dash through people just to move around them) to hear what the musicians were playing in the room at that moment.

   Overall, the end result is a spontaneous composition that, with two separate, yet combined orchestras, produced a whole cluster of a beautiful sound. It was to walk anywhere and there would be a sound that could be enjoyed as a fragment. Here on this album is the unity of all the individual groupings from all corners of a performance space. If I had done the show that evening with everyone in one area, a completely different result would have ensued and I wanted to have the experience of trying something completely new to me that was a challenge. And looking back, it was a satisfactory and fun experience. I hope you can enjoy the music on this album. As far as the album title states, you get where the uranium and the two rooms references come from the two performances.The part of the 83 markers is in reference to the mastering that sound engineer Dan Rathbun did while mastering the album. He used some computer program (what program, I cannot remember) to master the album. While doing so, Dan would mark a section to pinpoint a section that he would later go back to and work on it. The total amount sections that he would go mark would add up to 83 markers that he would later go back to and do his mastering work on. This could be irrelevant trivia, but I thought I needed to explain what the obscure title means. Moe! Staiano | Oakland, California, 14 January 2007

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