LINER NOTES FOR TIME TRAVELERS

Rick DiMuzio – tenor and soprano saxophones and all compositions
Phil Sargent - guitar
Mark Shilansky – piano
Keala Kaumeheiwa – bass
Austin McMahon – drums

Produced by Rick DiMuzio
Recorded at Thin Ice Productions, North Andover, MA on June 25, 2017; July 30, 2018; and Sept 13, 2018.
Recording engineer and editor: Bob Patton
Mixing engineer: Dean Albak
Mastering: John McCaig
Artwork: Stefan Trudeau

New Hope – I wanted to begin the album as if the listener had walked through the door of the club and the band was already in the middle of its first number – so the sax solo introduces the tune (and the album) before the melody arrives.

   From a compositional timeline, the first pitches of New Hope to be written were the opening piano melody with its accompanying harmonic progression. I then took the basic contour from the piano melody and inverted sections of that phrase to create the more active sax/guitar counterline that is placed above it. This idea continues, as it is transferred to the slower, more lyrical melody played by the guitar. The piece, with its climbing phrases, has a character of joy and optimism, thus the title. It was a composition that flowed through me rather quickly and easily (compared to a majority of my writings). I resonate with what Leonardo DaVinci once said: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  I can continually tinker with a tune until I ruin it!

Glockwork – For this piece, I wanted to create a work based on a twelve-tone row, but one that employed the row in a more tonal way. The opening three phrases comprise 11 of the chromatic pitches, and the twelfth pitch (E) arrives later as the pedal.  I attempted to derive as much material from the original motive. For example, the harmonies of the solo section are based on those three phrases played as chords (rather than single notes); and the somewhat more lyrical melody, introduced in the middle of the piece and later developed near the end, is a retrograde inversion of the original tone row melody.

    I also wanted to include the glockenspiel in this piece, as a way of re-invoking that nostalgic sound commonly heard in many of the pop songs of the 60s and 70s, a sound that pervaded the airwaves for a decade and then quickly disappeared.

Betty Fast – One of my favorite tunes to play is Benny Golson’s Along Came Betty, so I wrote a contrafact (new melody) based primarily on the changes of that tune.  I also felt a need to include something on Time Travelers that was a bit more uptempo and swinging!

Beloved – This piece is dedicated to my wife, Jenny – my best friend and life partner for the past 30 years. All that time, she has been a constant source of love and support. I don’t know how she has endured the countless hours of saxophone (plus piano, drums, and occasional clarinet and bass) that invade every inch of our house almost every day of the week. This piece is only a small token of my overwhelming appreciation (she deserves a symphony) for her endless support of me, complete with all of my musical habits.

Time Travelers – This was the first piece written after the release of my debut recording, First Offerings. It was difficult after that project to gather the inspiration and momentum needed to create and compose again, so I decided to revisit my adolescent years, when I had discovered the progressive rock bands like Kansas, Yes, ELP, and Rush. My idea was to tap into the energy, mystery, and complexity of their repertoire, but to add both a jazz spin and a Brahmsian flair: a commitment to tightly weave all the sections together with the same thematic thread. The piece is also presented in a loose sonata form – with the sax solo representing the development section. The composition bore no title for many years, but when I finally came upon the idea of time travelers, it seemed to match the character of the piece in so many ways: it spoke to the epic and heroic qualities that I was trying to portray; it related to the many time signatures within the piece that had to be “traveled,” and from a macro-view, the sax solo section in 11/4 parallels my primary breathing cadence in the middle of my regular 4-mile runs.

Chai for Five – the main melody for this composition began as a mixed-modal dictation exercise that I had written specifically for the freshman Ear Training 4 class I teach at Berklee.  As I repeated the 4-bar melody over and over again for the students to transcribe, I became more attracted to the “stickiness” of this short 4-bar phrase. 

    Within the piece, there are some loose musical references to the North Indian classical music genre: the pedal point/drone, the soprano/shenai relationship, the descending glissandos in the piano, some hand-drumming, a few repetitions in threes (tihai). But none of these elements is meant to be taken too seriously (hence the lighter title). There are plenty of other non-Indian musical references in Chai for Five.  For example, the form of the A section more closely resembles the phrase structure and harmonic motion of a blues than that of a raga.

Parallel Worlds – This started as an academic exercise and a modest rebellion, in a sense, against the idea of counterpoint.  Both melody and harmony move in parallel motion, with the pitches of the melody positioned as major thirds (in the third phrase, I switch to minor thirds).  The third repetition of the theme is accompanied by a descending line running in the piano and guitar – meant to imitate a continuous spiraling drop.  As the piece reaches its climax, this descending line takes on the character of the main melody, gathering major thirds as it falls toward the last rubato playing of the theme. The guitar signals the end with the only ascending scale in the piece, and a couple deceptive resolutions before landing home.

November – I wanted to write a shorter trio tune in the style of the group Fly (with Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, and Jeff Ballard), and November was the result.  The piece is based primarily on the interval of a 4th, and I wrote most of it in the month that bears its name.  I attempted to depict the emotional dichotomy of that time of the year: the warmth and anticipated joy of the Thanksgiving holiday juxtaposed against the starkness and chill of the Northeastern landscape.

Footnotes – This piece began with the idea of incorporating a repeated eighth-note rhythm in the piano, which appeared in some of the popular songs of the 1980s (like Supertramp’s Logical Song, or Toto’s Hold the Line, to name a few). Lots of fourths sliding in half steps define much of the vocabulary generated in Footnotes. The opening bass notes of the piece later become the repeated sax melody near the close of the piece. During the sax solo, the pulse of the piano eighth notes is augmented to quarter notes, while the bass recycles some of the rhythms (the footnotes) from the main section.