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GalleryI first heard and met Hugh Ragin around ten years ago at the now defunct Wine Cellar, in Fort Collins, Colorado, where we both lived. In 1991 we began a regular gig together there that ran a couple of years. After that ended, we continued working together over the next few years on a weekly basis at several other venues. This was an important period of my career on several counts. It was the first time I had worked so regularly, and since we played pretty much the standard jazz repertoire during that time, the repetition gave me incentive to be as creative with it as I could. Also, since several of the places we played were essentially "college bars", we often played music with a consistently high energy level and groove, and this made demands on my playing. We often played for three hours straight with no break, so I learned a thing or two about pacing, too. While most of our gigs were with a quartet, we also played a number of dates as a duo. I found this uncomfortable at first, since I felt I had to be bassist and drummer as well as pianist, but I eventually learned different ways of functioning in that situation, and I now find the duo to be one of the most satisfying environments for my own expression. Perhaps most significantly, this series of gigs marked my first time playing regularly with a musician of the stature of Hugh (and by "stature", I am not referring to his height, although as Bob continually reminded me during this recording session, Hugh does have around a foot over me). Hugh is a constant source of ideas, and this pushed me to keep up. He is also very responsive to my own ideas, which encouraged me further. The way he relates to an audience (and vice versa) really affected me as well. The whole experience was very important to my musical development. This particular recording came about at a time when Hugh and I had not been working together as much, but the times we did were always magical. I have especially fond memories of a duo concert we did in Albuquerque a few years ago, and I treasure the tapes that were made that evening as some of the finest music I have been associated with. I think this is what put the idea in our heads that this duo was really something special and worth recording. When I found myself with some free studio time a couple of years later, I decided to try to recapture some of the Albuquerque magic. We recorded a few duo tracks, three of which ended up on my Cadence release Second Course and resulted in the opportunity to record this CD. There are two compositions by Hugh on this CD, both of which we had performed together a few times, including a quintet concert in Boulder two years ago in which these two pieces made up the entire almost two hour set. About Hugh's compositions, all I will say is that if music is about tension and release, then the bridge of Feel The Sunshine, when it arrives during the last chorus, is perhaps the biggest release of tension I have felt in anything I have ever played. My composition Gallery has never had a proper public performance; Hugh and I just started working on it a couple of months before the session. I wrote it while sitting in One West Art Gallery in Fort Collins last summer. It is a graphic score, meaning that in addition to a very few more traditionally notated lines, there are a lot of shapes (squiggly lines, circles, and so forth) for us to interpret. It was written for a duo, and we actually play it through twice, with roles reversed between "choruses". I thank Bob Rusch for giving us this opportunity, and for his hospitality during our stay. Bob commented in his notes about the unusually hot and humid weather that week, and how the music we recorded was more impressionistic than he would have expected given what he heard from us in the past. I suspect these facts were related. But it is also the case that I have been going through another period of intense musical growth over the last year or so, largely as a result of working regularly with a wonderful vocalist and supportive partner, Wendy Fopeano. I thank her for opening my ears and my heart to new possibilities. Marc Sabatella |
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marc@outsideshore.com |
