Ryan asked me to play this show and the very next day had to back out upon realizing he’d double-booked himself to sit in with Swing Kids in LA the same night. Obviously I wasn’t going to begrudge him taking the bigger gig, but it did leave the question: how the hell do you play at the Witches Tower?

The Witches Tower could barely be called a tower and has nothing to do with witches, but once upon a time the squat building was a jail cell used by the early Spanish colonizers. Now it’s been formally re-dubbed the Pattie Memorial and less formally the Witches Tower, for the large brick pentagram built into the roof. There’s no power, no lights, no infrastructure for a show — but of course, playing experimental music in this town, we’re used to that.

Rush hour on the 8 East is a special circle of hell so we went extremely early for Margarita Monday at Bully’s up the street from the venue. Why don’t I always hit up a Happy Hour before a gig? Yet another point in favor of the 5:00 show.

I didn’t get much of a chance to speak with Zane Alexander S.B. so his set (and his white track suit) got to do the talking for him. (I’m sure he’d be grateful.) Apparently Zane heads up the San Diego New Verbal Workshop with Dom of Abominomicon II fame and a quick look at the credits for his recent album American Invention lists the SdNVW alongside Matty from Make Believe and Batya from the Smoke Show Strings. It really do be a small world.

I had grand plans to play a modified version of my alto sax etude Contraction only to realize on opening the case my reed was split neatly in two and I, being an idiot, had not brought any backups.

Thankfully Contraction was only going to be the first part of the set and I had also packed my concertina to play a short excerpt from my long piece for concertina and electronics “A Shallow Well”; I simply made that short excerpt a little less short and no contraction proved necessary. Maybe I’ll finally record it next!

Coach Campa and Jacob Gonzales visited us on tour from San Antonio, having just played the night prior in Ojai with Rob Magill. The duo exhibit two very different schools of technical virtuosity: Ethan attacks his kit with the full arsenal of the free jazz expressionist, piling up broken cymbals fluttered with mallets and brushes, while Jacob made his past as a metal guy clear with layers of melodic legato shred through a Line 6 modeling amp. Never seen one of those at a free improv show! (I always love when someone’s playing communicates to you directly their musical background, and especially when they inhabit that surprisingly porous borderland between jazz and metal — anyone remember Hank Shteamer’s Heavy Metal Bebop? Man, I miss blogs.) And of course they played in a trio with Piper, whose low end rumblings perfectly filled the bass role even without his usual wall of sub-octave pedals.

I told Piper before the show how grateful I am to have had so many opportunities to play with the guy recently — I don’t like to say “gifted,” but he really is one of Thee Monster Players in town — and then we did the math and concluded the last time we actually sat in a room and played together was in August. Time is evil!

Driving to the show playlist:

I’ve been workshopping this playlist for a while of (mostly) 2000s r&b centered on plucked string samples, particularly MIDI guitar and harpsichord sounds. Lots of Usher and R. Kelly on this specific shuffle, climaxing with Ginuwine’s ecstatic “In Those Jeans.”