XYG (Live)

Hiromi’s Sonicbloom: Hiromi Uehara (piano, synthesizer), David Fiuczynski (electric guitar), Tony Grey (electric bass) and Martin Valihora (drums) playing in Japan (2007). From the album Beyond Standard (2008).

In 2014, Screaming Headless Torsos recorded Code Red, participated in the Berklee Beantown Jazz Festival in Boston, toured Europe and did it again in 2016, continuing active to this day. In 2016, David Fiuczynski published Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian Microjam! with the Microjam Band, made up of his pupils Utar Artun and Jack Sherman on microtonal keyboards, Justin Schornstein on electric bass and Alex Bailey on drums. In it he goes beyond his previous work incorporating microtonal melodies and motifs based on bird songs, as did 20th century classical composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen and now composer Maria Schneider, J Dilla’s hip hop (rapper and record producer who began his career in the mid-1990s) and Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Turkish tunes.

This time, Fiuczynski moderates his impulses and plays in an exquisite way in favour of the work as a whole. The subtitle Pan-Asian Microjam! is due to the participation of Yazhi Guo, a member of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra since 1999, who plays percussion and the Chinese oboe; and the classically trained violinist Helen Sherrah-Davies also provides courageous improvisations. He also invited blazing alto saxophonist and Hindu composer Rudresh Mahanthappa, with whom he had collaborated in his album Gamak (2013), to intervene in three of the themes.

Fiuczynski uses field recordings of five bird songs (the Blackface Solitaire, the Uirapuru, the Northern Nightingale, the Carolina Chickadee and the Common Loon) and transcribes them to be performed by the musicians with their instruments, all capable of emitting microtones, including keyboards. Fiuczynski opens the doors to other musical dimensions by playing notes between the intervals of the twelve-tone chromatic scale demonstrating that the musical possibilities are endless. As you listen to his music, its strange exotic sounds become attractive. When you accept Fiuczynski’s wonderful microtonal world, the universe expands.