Ue Wo Muite Aruko (Live)

Hiromi’s Sonicbloom: Hiromi Uehara (piano, synthesizer), David Fiuczynski (electric guitar), Tony Grey (electric bass) and Martin Valihora (drums) playing in Japan (2008). From the album Beyond Standard (2008).

In 2012, David Fiuczynski founded the Planet Microjam Institute, of which he is professor and director, at the Berklee College of Music, whose president Roger Brown is always open to new projects. Although microtonal music is common on instruments such as violin, its application to the guitar is a new development, since it needs to be fretless. Fiuczynski’s goal is to teach his students classical western microtonal sources, such as the compositions of Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Alois Hába and Harry Partch, and those from non-western traditions, combining them in a jazz/groove harmonic context with innovative rhythms and create a new musical language.

To play a fretless guitar it’s necessary to learn the exact position of the fingers on the neck and train the ear to identify the small intonation differences that the instrument allows. In addition, Fiuczynski adds a seventh lower string to the frets neck of his guitar and uses different effects pedals to get unique sounds. Although some claim that everything is already done in the art world, he says that with microtonal music applied to jazz, rock and pop, much remains to be discovered. Also in 2012 Fiuczynski published Planet Microjam with RareNoiseRecords, inviting well-known drummer Jack DeJohnette, in which he gathers contrasting flavors and creates imaginative fantasies with his students, trained by himself to face a repertoire without limits of expression associating African and eastern microtonal scales with western rhythms.

On the other hand, after five years without playing together, the Screaming Headless Torsos launched in 2010 the single “Dead Christmas Trees” with a video. Then they toured Latin America many times and in 2012 played in Mexico’s Vive Latino, the biggest indie rock festival in America, and then at the Jazz en el Parque festival in Colombia, the most important jazz festival in South America, in front of 20,000 people. This led to the revival of the group, which plays vanguardist funk-rock with free jazz tendencies and a strong protagonism of Fiuczynski’s guitar with his microtonal breakthroughs and intense rhythms.