Dragonfly Arrives
October 26, 2024
Tonight at the beautiful and historic Nevada Theatre we’re celebrating the release of Dragonfly, the new CD and digital offering from Tumble, my band with mbira* player Robert Heirendt and guitarist Sean Kerrigan. (Click here for tickets!) We’re excited to have my long-time Beaucoup Chapeaux and Bristle compatriot Murray Campbell, who appears on the CD, to join us on that most beautiful of woodwinds, the cor anglais.* (You can hear Murray and Robert’s daughter Mei Lin on one of my favorite Dragonfly tracks, Bloodthirsty Wiles.)
(Thanks to Juli Marks for the amazing cover art.)
*Translation time: the mbira is like the kalimba, a/k/a the thumb piano, the cor is a/k/a the English horn, of the oboe family).
Here we are on Robert’s front porch (thank you Marion Charlotte for the photo)–our nearly weekly rehearsals occur on the other side of the window, in the Heirendt residence living room. You’ve heard of jam bands, we are more of a trance band: we’ll sit down to workshop the latest idea–and Sean has a new rhythmic/motivic fragment for us to tinker with nearly every week–and that exploration will last the entire evening.
That constant working out of ideas and the stripped-down trio format, where you can here everyone’s ideas at play, led to the freer, more expansive tunes and arrangements on Dragonfly.
This evolution of our sound was underscored this past summer by the tenth anniversary gig we did at the Raven Rocks House Concert Series in Nevada City on 8/25/24–almost 10 years to the day of our first concert at UUCM on August 23, 2014. (Here’s the great poster from that historic event, designed by Julia Boorinakis Harper Barbeau, who also did the design work for Dragonfly.) Raven Rocks was quite the party, with scrapbook displays and two cakes! Playing to a full house, with my son Callum and our friend Joe Fajen joining us on trombone and tablas respectively, I was struck by how our songbook has grown from Shumba, the Zimbabwean trance tune that Robert taught us at our first rehearsal, to include Sean’s multi-part suites and Robert’s concise yet poetic originals.
Plenty of surprises on this new CD. What I love about this collection of tunes is how it builds on our past work but also frees up our sound–the lead track Surrounded by Dragonflies is another of Sean’s driving yet intricate mini-opuses, while his other contribution The Gatekeeper is a whispery sketch of a tune. My piece Flow and Eddy is a sort of tribute to Sean and Robert, we float through a set of guitar and mbira-ish scales and melodies inspired by their playing styles. Robert was inspired to write the aforementioned Bloodthirsty Wiles after reading Zara Houshmand’s translation of Rumi–it is the glowing centerpiece of the set, featuring the beautiful sound of Mei Lin’s violin and Murray’s cor anglais.
We continue our tradition of including an arrangement of a Wayne Shorter tune–this time it’s the iconic Juju. These are always fun and challenging–how to use the stripped-down format of a trio to evoke the full impact of one of Shorter’s driving quartets of sax-piano-bass-drums. The bass clarinet and mbira function as bass and drums, and we all three blur the line between melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Hope you can make it out tonight to the Nevada Theatre, one of my favorite venues of all-time. We’ll be playing the entire album, plus a few surprises! Never ones to stay still, we’ll be premiering a brand new piece from Sean and bringing in one of Robert’s Wayne Shorter arrangements. Murray Campbell always adds a few twists and turns of his own to the mix. Who knows, we may even throw in a song from Zimbabwe. Come celebrate the past, present and future of Tumble with us!
