John Esposito: Laura

  Like most American musicians, my live performance schedule dropped precipitously during the first two years of the Covid 19 pandemic. My yearly average of two hundred gigs dropped to zero during the first year and swelled to a dozen during year two. More importantly, both years brought a heavy toll in losses of friends, colleagues and family.

   Thankfully, my dear friends Ira Coleman and Peter O’Brien were kind and brave enough to play with me once a week during that period, masked and distant with my studio doors and windows open even in February. We kept ourselves sane and maintained our connection with music making by working on a large pile of pieces that I had written during the two previous years.

   During that period I had a rehearsal band with arrangements for three horns. We worked on two dozen of my charts and played just two concerts.  I learned a lot about how much variety of color it’s possible to get with just trumpet, woodwinds and valve trombone. I also had the pleasure of playing in Phil Allen’s concert big band where I was able to learn a lot by listening to his terrific arrangements from inside the band. I also learned how to not spend the whole gig being lost while picking up his eight page charts after they fell off the stand. The pros all use magic. I used magnets.

   Once the pandemic hit, playing with horns seemed like a bad idea. I read research that put the safe distance from brass at sixty feet. Close enough to communicate with semaphores but not good for playing together.

   I finally determined that it would be a shame to just leave all that music unrecorded. By summer 2022 I felt that things were improving noticeably and that it would be possible to do some concerts and record two projects comprising eight sextet and ten trio compositions. After playing one trio concert and one sextet concert, I booked three days with engineer Scott Petito at NRS in Catskill, NY.  We were able to record the sextet music on a Monday with some fixes during a few hours on Tuesday. Then after dinner, the trio returned to record six pieces and we finished the remaining four on Wednesday. Everything was done in one or two takes.

  It felt like waking up after too long being asleep. I’m staying awake now. I hope you enjoy hearing what we dreamed.

  Thanks to Chris Pasin, Eric Person and Phil Allen for pulling their blend together so quickly after not having played together for two and half years. A special thanks to Phil for his two part flight from North Carolina and to Ira Coleman for his drive from Montreal.

  Thanks, also, to Ira and to Peter O’Brien for over twenty years of remaining enthusiastic about playing my sometimes difficult music while making it seem easy and natural. Thanks, Ira, for vacuuming our kitchen.

  My perpetual thanks to my life partner Laura Steele for being there and organizing the house concert that served as our sextet rehearsal the day prior to recording and for hosting 50+ audience members and musicians. Thanks for also taking over my half of the childcare and chores for five days. Although, again, Ira did vacuum the kitchen floor.

   Thanks to our daughter Lyra for being the 8 year old who knows how to hang out with adult musicians.

   Thanks to Phil Allen for enduring the seemingly endless task of working the Sibelius program to make several hundred of my charts readable while dealing with many revisions.

   And finally, thanks to Scott Petito for always knowing the best way to make the music sound right.

– John Esposito 2023