Miles Okazaki - Trickster - Trickster Booklet

TRICKSTER

Miles Okazaki

Miles Okazaki

TRICKSTER

1

Kudzu

5:21

2

Mischief 

3:24

3

Box in a Box

5:47

4

Eating Earth

6:43

5

Black Bolt

2:42

6

The West

3:46

7

The Calendar 

9:16

8

Caduceus

6:41

9

Borderland

1:07

Miles Okazaki

guitar 

Craig Taborn

piano

Anthony Tidd

bass

Sean Rickman

drums

All compositions by Miles Okazaki ©  2017 Salish Sea Music, SESAC pirecordings.com milesokazaki.com

Produced by Miles Okazaki Executive Producers: Seth Rosner, Yulun Wang, and M-Base Concepts, Inc. Recorded January 14-15, 2016 by Joe Marciano and Max Ross; and mastered by Michael Marciano at Systems Two Recording Studios, Brooklyn, NY Mixed by Anthony Tidd at TidbiT Sonos, Philadelphia, PA

“We constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.” – Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art  T he trickster figure is an ancient archetype in human folklore. Tricksters are creative in nature, using mischief and magic to disrupt the state of things, breaking taboos and conventions, opening doorways. They exist outside of the mainstream, working from the margins, creating movement across the borders. They cause damage and they heal. They are storytellers and improvisers. Because these ideas resonate with my approach to music-making, it occurred to me that the trickster could be a fertile source for a new book of compositions. As I began my research, I looked for themes that seemed musical in nature, translating them into compositions for quartet. My main concern was that the musicians focus on testing the limits of each composition through improvisation, with the sensibility of storytelling in mind. The listener can get a sense of the trickster narratives by following the rhythms, which have many twists and turns and are not always what they seem to be. About the music:

Kudzu is a type of rapidly growing vine that covers structures and trees, creating the giant alien leaf sculptures often seen on the side of the highway. This song is an introduction, inviting the audience to follow a winding, slippery path into the wilderness.

Mischief is inspired by the African deity Eshu (Eleguá in Cuba and Exu in Brazil, honored at the opening of ceremonies, rituals, performances). In one stor y, he wears a hat that is half red and half black, causing two neighbors to argue about its true color. The confusion over this teaches some lessons about context and ways of knowing. Different people will hear the playful rhythm of this song differently: none are wrong, but none are completely right, either. Box in a Box considers the labors of Raven, a trickster from the native peoples of the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest. Raven disguises himself as a child to steal the light of the world, which is hidden in the center of an infinite number of nested boxes. The composition works at this feeling of continual unboxing through a number of musical devices: rotating all-interval tetrachords, their intersection with symmetrical melodies, a perpetually shape-shifting bassline, an illusory drum figure. This machinery all fits into a conventional, square-shaped musical form. Eating Earth comes from the Indian tale of Krishna, whose mother asked to look in his mouth when he was accused of eating dirt, only to see the entire universe inside. She even sees herself looking into her son’s mouth — the whole contained within the part. In this composition, each instrument floats through time at different speeds, colliding and combining into sonic constellations, never forming the same shape twice. The melodic material comes from four interlocking complementary hexachords. The piano improvisation guides us through. Black Bolt is a brief interlude, a fractured song where twelve tones are separated into four triads, and the regular drum groove is broken into a series of jagged phrases.

The West is a passing

storm, featuring the drums. The Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk received a vision from the thunder beings of the West, which allowed him ac t as heyoka,  a sacred clown. Depictions of heyokas often show them holding sticks to beat out thunder on the drums. Black Elk describes the heyoka ceremony where “everything is backwards, and it is planned that the people shall be made to feel jolly and happy first, so that it may be easier for the power to come to them. You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.” [from John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks] The Calendar is

a song about celestial movements, and comes from the story of the Egyptian god Thoth, a trickster who beat the Moon in a game of dice. The Moon owned 360 days, and Thoth won 1/72 of them. He then added these five days to the original 360 to make a 365 day calendar. The Moon lost some of its light, and was forced to wax and wane. This composition draws on these numbers for its form, along with the ancient Babylonian calendar, which is built on the conjunction of 235 lunar months and 19 solar years. In this song, mutating harmonies wax and wane through all 19 configurations of three notes, moving by only one pitch at a time. Caduceus is the staff

carried by the Greek trickster Hermes. As an infant, he created a lyre out of a tortoise and hypnotized Apollo with his improvisations, convincing him to trade his caduceus for the instrument. To test the magical power of the staff, Hermes threw it between two fighting serpents who then wound themselves around it in harmony and balance.

This song is made from multiple melodies in counterpoint winding around a central axis, where the improvisational challenge involves navigating across the borders of intersecting spaces. Borderland is the threshold, the doorway out, the liminal

space that we pass through before moving on. The composition is a short rhythmic canon for solo guitar. About the Artwork:

In origami, all models are made by folding a single uncut square of paper. The central challenge is to create new forms from this basic shape. When the paper is unfolded, the architecture for the model is revealed in a pattern of creases that has a beauty of its own. All of the compositions on this album are contained within simple shapes - 12 or 16 bars of 4/4 or 3/4. But this fact is largely disguised by various rhythmic illusions and internal “folds” within the form. I’ve always believed in the idea that working within constraints focuses creativity, sharpens technique, and ultimately leads to greater freedom than having no boundaries at all. I wanted to make an image with this concept in mind, so I found instructions for the two trickster animals fox and raven and slowly learned how to make the required folds. They appear in conversation on the c over, and the back cover shows the unfolded figures with their internal geometry exposed. - Miles Okazaki

Folding and cover photo by Miles Okazaki Fox design by John Montroll Raven design by Quentin Trollip Package design by Miles Okazaki Band photo by Dimitri Louis

Thanks to: Craig Taborn, Sean Rickman, and Anthony Tidd for making it all happen. Steve Coleman for encouraging and supporting this project. Yulun Wang and Seth Rosner for giving it a home. Rio Sakairi and Ed Gavitt at The Jazz Gallery for giving us the space to work out in public. Nancy, Joe, and Mike Marciano and Max Ross at Systems Two Recording Studios for capturing the sounds. Dimitri Louis and Alex Levine for documenting the whole process. Thomas Goodwin and Linda Okazaki for direction and inspiration in research. Arthur Okazaki for guidance in the art work. John Montroll and Quentin Trollip for permission to use their origami designs. Musical brothers and sisters Jonathan Finlayson, Dan Weiss, Vijay Iyer, Ohad Talmor, Amir El Saffar, Mar y Halvorson, Matt Mitchell, John Zorn, Benny Green, Adam Rudolph, Anjna and Rajna Swaminathan, Patrick Cornelius, Maria Grand, Alexis Cuadrado, and Rodney Jones. Pavani, Anil, Sivaparvati and Anjaneyulu Thagirisa for supporting and believing in my efforts to make music. For Izabella, Akash, and Arya