BUST A FLAME

Bust a Flame, composed for Flexible Music, was written during February of 2009. It’s dedicated, with love, to my son, Isaac. I want to express my gratitude to Flexible Music for their musicality, virtuosity, and commitment.

 I found my way into the language of the piece gradually, a language conditioned by Flexible Music's unusual instrumentation of tenor saxophone, guitar, piano and percussion. This instrumentation, suggestive of a jazz group, steered me further in a direction that I'd already been pursuing: incorporating some of the vitality and spontaneity of the music that I first played as a saxophonist (and love to this day) into the music I've been composing. I knew early on that I wanted to take advantage of Dan Lippel's considerable skill and experience as an electric guitarist and that I wanted to use a drum set, instead of the percussion instruments that I'd written for in the past. The 'drumsetness' of the percussion part comes into prominence little by little until it emerges completely fairly late in the piece.

 Each member of the ensemble is featured in turn: saxophone, piano, guitar and drums. These passages don’t always take the form of solo and accompaniment, but more often, the featured instrument dominates in one way or another. There's a lot of dialogue in addition to the monologues.

 The piece closes with slow music in which the saxophone (in its uppermost register) and guitar play a long melody (in unison for the first time) accompanied by cymbals, then cymbals/drums and piano. As the tempo slows, the music becomes louder and even more intense.