Aug. 28, 2022
For several years now, French horn player Tom Varner has held a series of “vespers” concerts at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel with a large improvising ensemble of brass, percussion, and field recordings, drawing on members of the Seattle Phonographers Union (including me) for the latter. My memory of these concerts is that they’ve typically been quite meditative. There may be the occasional raucous moment, but it’s generally pretty sedate.
Last night we came together again in the Chapel to celebrate the release of this new CD (you can also listen on BandCamp). The concert fit the above description, although it was an unusual lineup, with only three brass instruments (French horn, trombone, trumpet), no percussion, and two strings (cello, contrabass), along with myself and Doug Haire on field recordings. The strings were an interesting addition that worked well with the smaller number of brass players, and I enjoyed playing with the cellist and bassist for the first time.
The concert took place exactly three years after the date of the recording, back in 2019. That feels like ages ago now, and I don’t remember much about the recording session beyond that it felt kind of messy at the time. We weren’t recording in the spacious acoustics of the Chapel, but in the cramped studio at Jack Straw Cultural Center. Tom was hoping we’d be able to mic the horns individually and so have more control in the mix, but in reality all those horns in that relatively small space made it difficult to maintain clarity on the recording with everyone’s sound bleeding into each other’s mics.
My fellow phonographer Steve Barsotti bravely took on the challenge of doing the final mix. The result is better than I expected, but it bears little resemblance to our live performances. It’s considerably more rowdy and noisy, and Steve did some pretty radical electronic processing on a few tracks. I think it works as a stand-alone release, but anyone expecting it to sound like our live shows is in for a surprise.