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Mockingbird

John Esposito & Second Sight

Liner Notes: Mockingbird SJCD25

It’s a somewhat embarrassing thing to say, but this music was recorded in two days in 1992 in Brooklyn and it languished in Dante Alighieri’s Digital Purgatorio until I ran across a couple of CDRs in a box of poorly marked CDs and DATs and played them out of curiosity. To my surprise I very much liked what I heard and with the help of my friend Jeff Siegel’s memory was able to identify the musicians and the studio.

At the time of the recording, I was based in Woodstock, NY as was bassist John Menegon. Jeff Siegel had recently moved there and saxophonist Jeff Marx was to join us several months later before moving to Chicago. Marx, Siegel and I were three refugees from Brooklyn, the remainder of Second Sight, which existed in its original incarnation from 1985 -1990, ending after bassist Allen Murphy retired and Dave Douglas left to lead his own bands. Various other musicians played with the core, Marx, Siegel and me until distance made it impractical. The three of us reunited to record Dreamstuff for Ayler Records, Inyo and Tahrir for Sunjump Records between 2005 and 2011. The association ended with Jeff Marx’s passing in 2013 after a final EU tour in 2012.

I suspect that by 1992 I was exhausted from steering the FM Artists Coalition through two years of multi arts performances in collaboration with the Woodstock Guild; ending with producing a 3 day music, dance, visual arts and poetry festival. I decided to temporarily move my focus from leading my own projects to playing piano in bands led by Franklin Kiermyer and Eric Person. Both were fruitful experiences. So I don’t think that I had much of a plan for this session other than going into Michael Brorby’s studio with some new tunes to see what would happen. I don’t recall even going back and listening to takes at the session. It was just “ Ok. Let’s do another one.”

Second Sight was a very exciting band to play with because of the range styles and methods of improvising we evolved through in a few years. Great fun and creatively productive but hard to market because we didn’t fall within one genre at a time when genre based marketing was being emphasized by the Uptown/Downtown Jazz divide. The recordings on this session are a good example of our eclecticism and restlessness: Mockingbird, Fu Fuken, The Invisible and Marx’s lovely piece Fern, named for his sister, all have set chord progressions that we often move away from to serve the melodic development.

The Blues is also present – explicitly and loosely in both Victory Blues and Brooklyn Broke Blues. Bwarat, Compassion and Balance are melody driven with no predetermined chords or set tonal centers. And lastly, Defenestrating George loosely references the chords to Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm.

It seems we were making connections between our Mainstream Jazz roots in Tin Pan Alley songs, Blues, Jazz compositions and Free Music, all of which were in the air when we were growing up: all approaches to playing that we utilized without ever talking about them much. Occasionally, if I had written something especially harmonically challenging for Second Sight, there might be an exchange between Marx and Douglas like, “Dave, how are you thinking about these chords?” Douglas,”Oh no, I’m not thinking about the chords!” That band covered a lot of ground conceptually and allowed everyone to play with flexibility.

So, in some ways this recording marks the end of an era for me, but all endings, I believe, are beginnings and there were more great collaborations with these musicians to follow this one.

I am happy to be able to make one more example of Jeff Marx’s work available to the public. Like multi-instrumentalist Arthur Rhames, Jeff was a great improviser who left the planet too soon and was under-recorded. Hopefully, more recordings of their work will surface. Here’s one more piece of the puzzle.

Jeff Marx – sax
John Esposito – piano
John Menegon – bass
Jeff Siegel – drums

Recording Engineer: Michael Brorby
Recorded 1992 at Acoustic Recording, 279 Sterling Place, Brooklyn, NY
Editing and mastering: Scott Petito
Cover art: Lyra Esposito Steele 7 Laura Steele
Package design: Laura Steele

All compositions c 1993 John Esposito p Sunjump Music except Fern c 1993 Jeff Marx p Sunjump Music

  1. Mockingbird                      5:06
  2. Bwarat                              12:00
  3. Fern                                  7:11
  4. Fu Fuken                          11:05
  5. Compassion                     4:40
  6. The Invisible                     8:13
  7. Defenestrating George     10:27
  8. Balance                             8:35
  9. Victory Blues                     8:24
  1. Fu Fuken 2                       12:33
  2. Mockingbird  2                  7:53
  3. Compassion  2                  6:50
  4. Fern  2                               6:50
  5. Balance  2                         10:18
  1. Mockingbird  3                   3:11
  2. Fu Fuken  3                       11:11
  3. Compassion 3                    6:18
  4. Fern 3                                7:41
  5. Brooklyn Broke Blues        7:39
  6. Compassion 4                   4:48
  7. Mockingbird 4                    3:04