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"raw and communicative ... contains a salty bluesiness" — Marlbank
Connectedness by Jacob Shulman
Released November 14, 2021 - Get it on Bandcamp
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Jacob Shulman - saxophone & compositions
Hayoung Lyou - piano Simón Willson - bass Avery Logan - drums Track Listing 1. Opening Up 2. Ordinary 3. Boiling 4. Zenith 5. Indigo Conjunction 6. Reflected off the Water 7. Viridian Forest & the Night Sky 8. Nadir 9. A Crack in the Ice 10. Long Line Endectomorph Music Catalog No. EMM-012 Recorded by Josh Hahn at the Relic Room, NYC, March 2021 - Mixed and mastered by Lee Meadvin - Produced by Kevin Sun - Cover art and design by Knar Hovakimyan - Liner notes by Jacob Shulman - Total length: 59:11 All compositions by Jacob Shulman (Natural Logarithm / SESAC) |
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Liner notes
If you let it, music will soak into every part of your life. Music mirrors the universe — mysterious, rigorous, emotional, sublime — and thus naturally glues together one’s whole experience of life. It has something to contribute in every area: the intellectual, the social, the sacred, the corporeal; and yet, despite all these prongs, music is an inseparable mass, a continuous fluid that resists any attempt to discretize or classify it. That we can harness the energy of music at all is a human miracle, an endless source of gratitude. The composer-builder Harry Partch is right on when he calls music “The Ancient Magic.”
The power to conjure music, then, is proof of the majesty of humanity. Along with language, religion, and mathematics, music brings out the human spirit’s tendency to bite off more than it can chew, to create and wield technology that we don’t fully understand. Abstraction meets urgency; the heart directs the hand. Mercifully, no one is alone in any musical quest. We absorb and filter knowledge from teachers living and dead, and then we combine our efforts in ensembles. With friends, music turns into a simultaneously challenging and forgiving group ritual that strings together millions of moments, countless half-decisions carried out by an emergent democratic organism. What we capture on tape is a projection of that process, recompiled and refracted by the listener’s ear — which is to say that you, the listener, are not merely an observer; you are playing with us, letting it soak into part of your life, which surely has something to say about our music, consciously or otherwise. And whatever you say or feel about a recording sheds new light on what one might naïvely think of as “the same” piece of music. This generates a new variant for each listener’s experience. Musicians know that the identity of a piece of music contains all of those variants, past and future — a vast, multidimensional web that far overshadows whatever composition or planning went in originally. These webs, moreover, have structures and textures that bewilder and inspire in equal measures.
The mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, in the 1960s, revealed that many natural as well as mathematical phenomena are characterized by a fundamental infinite “roughness." One cannot simply measure the straightened-out length of a coastline nor the flattened-out surface area of the sea that defines it. There is detail at arbitrary levels of zoom, and hence the universe is not solely made up of 2- or 3-dimensional slices — the world is fractal in nature, with dimensionality floating somewhere between the counting numbers. So too with music: try to find where a note truly begins or ends, and you will come up against a rough, undefined barrier, more like tree bark than a man-made knife’s edge. Whole continuous lifetimes pass during phrases, and the spaces in between are just as pregnant and fragile as the notes they surround.
It's all one thing — one big action in defiance of sterile, boring silence.
* * * * *
The music on Connectedness — born in Boston, reared in New York, with ancestry in Armenia, Austria, and Japan — is both for and about my friends Avery, Hayoung, and Simón. I wrote the music because they are my friends, but they are my friends because of the music. I accept the paradox in order to express something of my own personality through these special people. They judge me not when I bring in a transfiguration of music from Pokémon or a saxophone aria in a half-Persian, half-cowboy style. And in fact, they intensify such visions; they ripen the fruit of the heart and the mind by being open, musically conscientious people. For that I am immensely grateful, as I am to you for listening and thus being a part of the music-making process.
Jacob Shulman
Brooklyn, NY
Spring 2021
The power to conjure music, then, is proof of the majesty of humanity. Along with language, religion, and mathematics, music brings out the human spirit’s tendency to bite off more than it can chew, to create and wield technology that we don’t fully understand. Abstraction meets urgency; the heart directs the hand. Mercifully, no one is alone in any musical quest. We absorb and filter knowledge from teachers living and dead, and then we combine our efforts in ensembles. With friends, music turns into a simultaneously challenging and forgiving group ritual that strings together millions of moments, countless half-decisions carried out by an emergent democratic organism. What we capture on tape is a projection of that process, recompiled and refracted by the listener’s ear — which is to say that you, the listener, are not merely an observer; you are playing with us, letting it soak into part of your life, which surely has something to say about our music, consciously or otherwise. And whatever you say or feel about a recording sheds new light on what one might naïvely think of as “the same” piece of music. This generates a new variant for each listener’s experience. Musicians know that the identity of a piece of music contains all of those variants, past and future — a vast, multidimensional web that far overshadows whatever composition or planning went in originally. These webs, moreover, have structures and textures that bewilder and inspire in equal measures.
The mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, in the 1960s, revealed that many natural as well as mathematical phenomena are characterized by a fundamental infinite “roughness." One cannot simply measure the straightened-out length of a coastline nor the flattened-out surface area of the sea that defines it. There is detail at arbitrary levels of zoom, and hence the universe is not solely made up of 2- or 3-dimensional slices — the world is fractal in nature, with dimensionality floating somewhere between the counting numbers. So too with music: try to find where a note truly begins or ends, and you will come up against a rough, undefined barrier, more like tree bark than a man-made knife’s edge. Whole continuous lifetimes pass during phrases, and the spaces in between are just as pregnant and fragile as the notes they surround.
It's all one thing — one big action in defiance of sterile, boring silence.
* * * * *
The music on Connectedness — born in Boston, reared in New York, with ancestry in Armenia, Austria, and Japan — is both for and about my friends Avery, Hayoung, and Simón. I wrote the music because they are my friends, but they are my friends because of the music. I accept the paradox in order to express something of my own personality through these special people. They judge me not when I bring in a transfiguration of music from Pokémon or a saxophone aria in a half-Persian, half-cowboy style. And in fact, they intensify such visions; they ripen the fruit of the heart and the mind by being open, musically conscientious people. For that I am immensely grateful, as I am to you for listening and thus being a part of the music-making process.
Jacob Shulman
Brooklyn, NY
Spring 2021
Press
"He has a warm tenor sax sound with a nice bite to the tone, and his playing is exceptional for its phrasing ... a fascinating work" – Art Music Lounge
"...a fine debut and one that continues to deliver surprises the further you listen" — Marlbank
- Vinyl Mine (December 2021)
- Marlbank (November 2021)
- Avenue C (October 2021) - radio (starting 1:06:25, commentary at 1:12:00)
- Midwest Record (October 2021)
- Art Music Lounge (October 2021)
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