When I left NYC for Philadelphia during the COVID pandemic, I had a lot of big dreams and plans about what I was going to do to free myself from the survival game that I had played for 30 years. When my plans fell apart, I was thrown back into the game. I lost the first round really badly, tapped out and took a job as a hospital housekeeper, where as of this writing I’m still working full time. I still work on music and art every day before I work from 3-11pm. Although I’ve been drained physically, mentally, and spiritually, I simply refuse to give up my life’s calling. I still play for peace - for the world and for myself. I still seek transmutation of myself and the
world through music and art. One of my plans that DID work was expanding my quartet into a quintet with another horn player. When I discussed the idea with my big brother Jack DeSalvo, master guitarist, and producer at Unseen Rain Records, we agreed to ask the great Claire Daly, a good friend of mine and the anchor in my 12 Houses Orchestra to join us on baritone sax. Claire is like me in that we have jazz deep down in our soul. All of it. From Pops to 2022. The other change was bringing in another long time friend, pianist, composer, and artist Chris Forbes. I first met Chris at a workshop led by Sabir Mateen. I have always sought his musical counsel with great respect. Chris was in a previous quartet that I had called Morcilla. Over the years I have come to rely on him to help me make sense of my own concepts and ideas. He’s been the musical
glue holding the 12 Houses together for over 10 years. At this point he knows my music more than I do and can essentially read my musical mind. Hilliard Greene and Tom Cabrera return from my previous 2 quartet records on Unseen Rain. As free as I try to be, swing is at my core, and Hill and Tom both bring their very personal and unique crafts to the table. Together they create the ultimate environment for me to truly feel at
home. I feel like I’m in a boat, and Hill is the ocean and Tom is the wind and sky. The Housekeeper melody came to me while playing outside during Covid’s rage with Dan Kurfirst, on a project he and his wife Olya created called Concerts from Cars. I didn’t have a car, but I met up with them in Queens. The melody is really the core of my compositional sound. It’s fast and free, just the way I like it Church in Chinatown is the first melody I ever wrote on my Aunt’s Sherry’s piano when I was a little kid in the 70’s. I had no understanding of notes or harmony, I just started playing this melody over and over. I developed it over the years and realized it could be a hymn, but also like a ragtime swing thing. I never have time to practice piano, but always thought this could be used as a vehicle for my close friend Daniel Carter to play over on clarinet, which we have
recorded twice. For this recording I chose to dedicate it to him with only 1 plan, that Chris Forbes would know what to do with it. I just asked him to think about Daniel and here it is. Trust is so much more than a word. Trust is when you believe in someone or something enough to move past fear and risk something together. Music, and especially jazz based music is about trust more than anything at its core. I trust people to be themselves more than anything, and that’s what most of my music is about. That’s what this piece is about, originally written with lyrics for the 12 Houses. The idea was no solos, just a conversation in fast time. It was FUN.
Harmelodic Monk is what happened when I combined two lines I wrote that I have been obsessed with for months. They’re very Monkish. The idea was to seek Monk’s swing and sound and then cut loose Ornette style. Ornette and Monk hung out more than people realize. Don Cherry hung out with Monk as well. (I learned this after my thesis if anyone is interested) I woke up one morning before work a few weeks before the recording and got out my keyboard. The Last Sunset had been telling me to write it for a few days. The vibe was beyond heavy, not about my own trial, beyond the human race even, this was like looking at the story of Earth from birth through death. The vibe was so deep in fact that after we played it, in my mind I looked in space where the Earth was, and it no longer existed. I like to picture sitting with loved ones watching the last sunset together and thinking about the millions of stories of triumph and
tragedy, and how the stage for all of it would be no more. Finally, a return to the Housekeeper, but slowing it down with a blue inflection and implication, a blue suggestion, if you will. As a hospital housekeeper, I have seen some things. I’ve seen primarily what happens when the human body falls apart and we try to do something about it. At a hospital, everyone there is on trial. The biggest questions are asked every day in every room. There’s no way you can’t feel the blues there. I spend half my day hearing people moaning in pain. Most people there have a shared goal- to get out of there.
To go home
To be free
That’s what I think all of us really want more than anything. We want to do the work, we want to be ourselves. We want to love. We want to be loved. We want to live, we want to exist. Once all the stories have been lived, far off in the future, we’ll all have that one last sunset.
Peace
ML 7/22