As April draws to a close, I am preparing for a month-long trip to China. I will be meeting with various musicians and teachers, as well as gawking like a tourist. I’ll keep blog updates on this site. Look for info and pics on Shanghai, Hong Kong, Zhengzhou and Beijing!

Meanwhile, I am also finishing up CD projects with The Just Desserts, Sangeet Millennium and my own new world music project My Exotic Other. Look for concert info in June, as well as uploaded sample mp3s from the recordings.

2010 also seems to be the year of Georgetown (Texas, not D.C.): Since January I have been playing a weekly residence at the Landmark Tavern, on the square in Georgetown, above Amante’s Italian Restaurant. Every Thursday, my cohort Lamar Pecorino (piano & vocals) and I explore classic material under the name of Joint Venture. 7-11pm. Full bar, comfy chairs & couches, and a balcony complete the vibe.

Just around the corner, master chef Francois offers up fine French cuisine as well as lighter bistro fare at La Maison. Live music every Saturday from 6-9pm. I would be there every week if I could, but check my calendar for performance dates. There will, however, be equally cool & talented musicians there pretty much every Saturday.

In June, after I get back from points east, there will be several CD release parties and general festivities. Check my calendar for details.
- PK

From the desk of PK, International Man of Mystery & Music.

After years of talking about it (until close friends rolled their eyes), I finally put together a trip to Asia. Stops included Hong Kong, Bangkok, Macau, and Taipei. The plan was to catch up with old friends, expats from the U.S. who have made their home overseas, and check out the various music scenes going on, with some touristic sidetrips as well.

The trip exceeded my expectations. It was a real mix of ethnomusicological fact-finding, meeting and jamming with various musicians, absorbing new music, and making new friends and musical connections.

I kept a diary of sorts, and now that I’m back in Austin I’m supplementing it with what I can remember of the last month, before it starts to fade in the searing Texas heat

4/18/08
I have been in Hong Kong about 5 days now, just getting used to the island and the constant bustle. As I said to a few people, it is like a mixture of Manhattan, San Francisco and Istanbul. Or more accurately, imagine tying those 3 cities together with bamboo scaffolding, and plunking the assemblage down in the middle of a New Orleans summer.

I’m staying in the Mid-Levels, which is up and up the hill from the harbor about halfway. It is fairly easy to get from the airport on Lantau island to Hong Kong itself, using the Airport Express metro train. It was a little confusing for a jet-lagged musician, even with some advance warning from my Austin-expat friend Linda who has been a Hong Kongian for years now. The drill goes like this (pretty much true for all my international hops): You de-plane, shuffle your way through customs, avoid the taxi scammers trying to glom onto dazed foreigners like yourself (they’ll take you for a ride at a jacked-up price), find an ATM machine, get some local currency, then look for local metro or bus transport. You get your metro ticket from a machine that only accepts cash, that’s why you hit the ATM first. For the Hong Kong metro (MTR) you can buy a single-fare ticket, or get an Octopus card, which is the way to go if you’re going to be riding the MTR for awhile. The Octopus card is like a debit card that you add value to, and the turnstiles have sensors that can read the magnetized strip through your wallet or purse. Very convenient in the crowded hustle and bustle of urban mass transit, even if it does feel a bit Big Brotherish (we can track you anywhere, etc.). You can use the Octopus card on all public transportation except taxis, and you can also use it in chain stores like 7-11. I know that some U.S. cities which have good mass transit systems are now introducing these cards. It’s definitely the way of the future, and Asian mass transit systems are ahead of the curve. I soon discovered that the metro systems in Bangkok and Taipei ran the same way.

The Airport Express train only has 3 stops, Tsing Yi, Kowloon, and Hong Kong Station, so I could relax in the quiet comfy metal tube that hurtled through the evening, watching the lights flash by outside. A green LED display near the ceiling of the car showed the progress of the train. Hong Kong Station is next to Central, the station for the regular MTR line. Linda met me there and acted as my sherpa, guiding me through the urban ascent back to her apartment in Mid-Levels. There is a central staircase and escalator (I think it’s the longest continuous escalator in the world), though the escalator stops running after about midnight, just when one is staggering home from the bars.

I found some great musicians and party animals at a jazz club called Vibe, and jammed on some standards with them. There are many little cafes tucked away in the winding streets and alleyways. Each night I discover a few more. The weather is a little sticky and warm, sort of like Texas in June. A typhoon was predicted for this weekend, but so far it has only brought a cooling light rain. The air quality is a little funky due to the heavy industry pollution blowing in from southern China. Hong Kong itself doesn’t spew out much in the way of factory fumes, but the car & bus exhaust tends to hang in the air. It takes a little getting used to. Between that and my initial jetlag, the first couple days were a bit surreal.

The food is great. I have been pretty conservative so far, mainly noodle bowls and dim sum. There is an amazing array of street food like grilled octopus, stinky tofu, fish balls, and various internal organs of various animals prepared in various ways. So far I have resisted the urgings of my local friends here to indulge in these delicacies… Speaking of food, I think it’s time to get away from the computer and hit the streets. There’s a place nearby with great seafood congee, or so I am told…. -PK

I think the idea of First Night, a city-sponsored set of events occurring on December 31 to usher in the New Year, began in Boston, MA, my home town. But it has spread to other cities across the country, including here in Austin, TX, my adopted home.

In a way it is cooler than other holiday public events, because it is less formulaic, less top-down in its conception. Yes, there is the parade, the speechifying and the fireworks. But in Austin, and I am sure in other cities, First Night feels a little like Halloween mixed with Mardi Gras.

I think it has to do with the ritual aspect of ending one time and beginning another: All holidays are rituals, but some are more staid and reflective, while some are about embracing change, stepping outside the normal routine, what anthropologists call entering a liminal state. For a brief time during these holidays we can look back on who we have been and imagine who we might be.

Halloween is of course the ultimate holiday for stepping outside your everyday self. Mardi Gras is similar, though it has less to do with subconscious fantasy, and more to do with overt celebration of life (often to excess). First Night is becoming, I think, a gentler blend of both.

Here’s my reasoning: Halloween and Mardi Gras have their origins in religious rites. Scholars debate the fine points, but we can generally say that these contemporary holidays draw from a melange of ancient Indo-European practices, among them Druidic, Christian, and Roman Pagan. They celebrated basic human life cycle moments, the seasons, life and death, real nuts and bolts stuff.

New Year’s Eve celebrates something a little more cerebral and arbitrary, the end of the calendar year. It’s important and arguably more humanly universal, as we all rotate together on this third rock from the sun. Different cultures use different calendars, but they all celebrate the New Year, even if at different times.

We all mark the progression, and it is both cyclical and linear. One year ends, another begins, in an unbroken continuum. But each year we pause to look back and look ahead, or consciously try to do neither. Champagne helps either way.

This year, on the last day of 2007, I found myself marching down Congress Avenue as part of the Golden Arm Trio brass band (2 trumpets, 1 trombone, 1 tenor sax, 1 baritone sax, 1 sousaphone, and 3 drummers). As we stood in the street waiting for the parade to begin, I saw a good representation of Austin culture: Lots of musicians, lots of costumes, hand-crafted floats and tricked-out bicycles, jugglers, dancers, all kinds of people tickling the edge of the imagination.

It was cold. It was exhausting. It was great. We marched from about 8th street down to Cesar Chavez, then west to City Hall Plaza. It was a bunch of people dressed up and making a bunch of noise, just celebrating the fact that we all made it through another year.

While I tried to keep in marching step, fighting off a headcold, blowing on my ice cold tenor sax with numb fingers, looking out at the folks lining the street, kids digging our barely controlled cacophony, I thought, “This sums up my year pretty well.”

Happy New Year.

I know the key to getting website hits is to keep it current, with cool and interesting posts, or at least something to momentarily distract websurfers from the daily drudgery, in between latte sips. And so the role of musician increasingly comes to include data entry, which is the kind of thing I became a musician to avoid. But like I always say, “I’m not complaining, just describing.”

Well, it has been a busy 6 months, not just for me but for most of my friends. Zipping to & fro, trying to keep one’s balls in the air (or perhaps spinning plates would be a less problematic metaphor), finding more and more arcane ways to pay the bills.
I had several good roadtrips this period: June/July in San Francisco with the Broken Clock Cabaret; August in Los Angeles with the Golden Arm Trio; and September/October in NYC & Boston with my own project Manteca Beat.

Some of the musical moments include: Various states of inebriation and debauchery with the No Salvation Army Band as we tried to keep up with stage performers’ craziness… A quick recording session in L.A. with guitarist Tommy Kay…And my dad’s 80th birthday party courtesy of the Harvard Chemistry Department. I got together with pianist (and former classmate) Joseph Reid and we played some cool jazz while the scientists waxed eloquent over cocktails and memories.

I also had an enjoyable radio interview with Bob Putignano of 88.1 in New Jersey, played some cool shows and re-connected with some Texas ex-pats who are honing their music chops in the Big Apple.

Back in Texas, both my bands PK Sax and Manteca Beat have been staying busy, playing club dates and private parties. I also got to hang out with oud maestro Marcel Khalife and his group when they played in Austin. Really nice people and great musicians.

Along with swanky shows with Memphis Train Revue, and some serendipitous calls to play with other Austin bands like Hot Wax, Take Five, Stephanie Bradley, Austin Hot Trax, Groovin’ Ground, Jon Emery, the Jazz Pharoahs, and other hepcats, it has been a busy, busy fall.

Of course Halloween is the main holiday in Austin, and I celebrated in style at the Enchanted Forest. Many fantastical costumes, as well as the dependable standard fantasies: pirates, cats, sexy nurses, sexy stewardesses, naughty schoolgirls, and a surprising number of sexy Raggedy Ann’s… It’s good to see that tradition still counts for something around here.

Now that November is here, it is just a fast downhill rush into the holidays…tryptophan, tinsel, and New Year’s Eve tiaras, and then onward into 2008!

-PK

PKSAX World is this beautiful place inside my head where everything works out and all my dreams come true. I’m sure everyone has their unique personal version in their own heads, albeit some of us have shrunk the mental real estate dedicated to our hopes and dreams, in order to make more space for doubts, nightmares, and nagging regrets.

But the point is: Dare To Dream. Even if your dreams are childish, self-involved, and totally impractical, you have to start somewhere. So I did, and three CDs later I have expanded the real estate of my personal dreamspace to the point where I have enough room for a computer desk, a Captain-Kirk-esque office chair, and a bouncy yoga ball on which to prostrate myself when reality starts to infringe too much.

The three CDs represent my three musical projects:
1) PK Sax, the jazz/world music group has the CD “Texas Tenure.”
2) The Klemperer Group, an experimental/acid jazz ensemble, has the
CD “Man In Chamber.”
3) Manteca Beat, the roots/R&B band, has the CD “Manteca-licious!”

I’m hard at work, trying to expand the real estate of my dreamscape (hmmm…that sounds like a good title for a New Age Workshop…”Expanding The Real Estate Of Your Dreamscape”: a 2-day workshop in which you will learn techniques to realize your dreams, work through emotional blockages left over from past-life issues, free your inner child, and visualize the person you want to become. Only $350; lunch and weak lukewarm green tea will be provided…)

But I digress. What I meant to say was that, as I develop these projects, I hope to use the internet and my website to communicate and deepen the artistic scope of all my projects, musical, literary, educational, what-have-you. The first step will be to reorganize my main website (www.pksax.com) as the command center or clearinghouse for all my related projects. I am tentatively caling this main site “P.K.S.A.X. World Headquarters” which, after much introspection, I feel is less pretentious than “PKSAX Center For World Domination”… Of course I am open to creative suggestions, so feel free to creatively suggest.

As of now I have several weblinks that will direct interested parties to my various projects:

Manteca Beat has its own site at http://mantecabeat.pksax.com. There is also a MySpace page at www.myspace.com/mantecabeat.

PK Sax and The Klemperer Group will soon have their own linked sites. In the meantime, you can access information on these projects through www.pksax.com.

For internet CD sales and digital downloads you can go to CD Baby at cdbaby.com/cd/klemperer.

I guess that’s all for now. Feel free to leave a comment here, or drop me a line at paul@pksax.com.

Ciao,
Paul Klemperer

This just in from P.K.S.A.X. Command Headquarters:

Manteca Beat, the startling roots/R&B project of saxophonist Paul Klemperer, has actually done something right. The CD, almost exactly a year in the making, is finished, tweaked, powdered and pouffed, and will be available March 9.

Yes, grease is the word here and “Manteca-licious” lives up to its name, with a range of blues & rootsy grooves featuring some of Austin greasiest players. Special guests on the album include: Malford Milligan, Marcia Ball, Seth Walker, Stanley Smith and Mark Goodwin, plus other allstar heavy-hitters adding their own “special sauce”… hmmm, these culinary-sexual musical metaphors are getting a little icky. Leave us just say that if you are hungry for good music, your ears will be well-fed. Whether you’ll want a toothpick or a Q-tip after listening to Manteca Beat is up to you.

March 2007 will see Manteca Beat at several Austin venues, including instore appearances at local record stores. Check the calendar at www.pksax.com, or go to http://mantecabeat.pksax.com for more details.

Later in the spring & summer Manteca Beat will be appearing in other Texas cities, with plans for selected national touring to follow. Wherever they go, their mission is “to bring the grease.”

Check back here for information on Manteca Beat merchandise, including select cooking utensils, protective eyewear, and thumbcuffs. Christmas is less than a year away, so plan your holiday shopping now!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Emergenza Festival Showcase at Momo’s on Friday Sept. 29. My roots R&B band Manteca Beat played in the “battle of the bands” and we got a great response, so we are moving on to Round 2, which will be held in May 2007 at the Parrish. Seems like a long ways away, and it is. By then who knows? We could be doing a world tour or, my other, darker fantasy, holding down the house band slot in the lounge at the regional internment camp for dissidents and doubters. But anyway, that’s months away, and we have many things happening until then…

The Emergenza Festival is an international year-long event. I believe it originated in Italy over 9 years ago, with the purpose of helping to bring unsigned bands into the limelight. Bands around the world compete for slots in the various elimination rounds, culminating in a final competition round which will be held in the summer of 2007 in Germany. The website for this lumbering juggernaut of musical momentum is: http://www.emergenza.net/eng/default.asp
Manteca Beat is happy to be part of the doings, and we’ll see where it all leads. My philosophy is “Just play.” In that spirit we will just play music as best we can, survive as best we can, and hope no one gets hurt too much in the process (especially ourselves).

I want to thank my musical cohorts who lent their talents for the showcase and helped Manteca Beat kick some butt:
Kenny Felton on drums, Brian Vose on bass, David Hamburger on guitar, Andrew Moorhead on keyboards. What a band!
Photographer Emily Ng also lent her talents to document the show.

Plans for the fall include finishing the debut CD and playing some choice venues to showcase the new material. Check the calendar for dates, and also visit the Manteca Beat web page at http://myspace.com/mantecabeat.

Until the next time, may your groove be greasy.

-PK

No matter what musical tradition you train in, there is a logical sequence to developing your skills: 1) Learn the basic techniques of your instrument, 2) Learn existing material, 3) Develop your own style. This sequence is just the way humans learn things in general. You have to crawl before you walk, etc.

Within this sequence of learning there are a lot of different possible paths to take. Some musical traditions emphasize one path over another, some are more rigid than others. High art traditions (schools of training that are very formal) tend to have rigidly prescribed ways to learn, tend to be conservative and discourage innovation or incorporation of new material. European art music, Indian classical music, Japanese traditional music, these are all examples of such formal high art traditions. They are tough traditions, elitist, conservative, but they produce high caliber musicians.

Folk music traditions are often contrasted with high art traditions, because it is easy to see major differences. Folk music is taught less formally, usually orally and passed from the older generations to the younger, in social or family situations. There is greater room for part-time, amateur, and individualistic participation in these traditions, so they seem less rigid. But they can produce highly skilled practitioners. Folk music traditions may be more inclusive, but they still have their building blocks, and if an individual invests time and concentration into these building blocks, the result can be highly skilled and artistically deep music.

The jazz tradition occupies a unique place in music, I think because it defies definition as a particular type of music. It has characteristics of folk, popular and high art music. It is American, but it is international. Structurally it is linked to traditional African music, but it is also so adaptable that it draws from musical traditions around the world and through the years. But, like every music, it has its building blocks.

Let’s look at some specific building blocks. Music can be broken into 4 basic elements: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Timbre/Tone. Different traditions approach these 4 elements differentally. For example, many traditions have only incidental harmony, rather than functional harmony. Some traditions have a very narrow range for acceptable timbre, while others have a broader range.

In the European tradition, students learn basic musical skills by practicing scales and arpeggios. These are your building blocks. Once you have the basic elements, you expand them into increasingly complex combinations of patterns. Look at any music method book and you can see this learning sequence laid out. It is logical and it works.

But there is another way of thinking about music, and by extension, about life. Learning isn’t merely linear; you don’t just start with simple things and get increasingly complex. Learning is also cyclical. As your knowledge deepens, you gain greater perspective and this influences how you see all music, from the simple to the complex. Thus, you can go back and see the building blocks in new ways, appreciate the possibilities inherent in them in ways that you previously didn’t. I think it is important to emphasize this view of music, and life, because it will make you a more complete musician and human being.

Here’s one example: We learn basic music intervals, like a major third, a perfect fourth, and so on. We train our ears to recognize these intervals. Then we can recognize combinations of these intervals which create basic harmonies, major and minor triads, diminished chords, and so on. As we create more extended chords, with 5 and 6 notes in them, the sound gets thicker, more ambiguous. A jazz pianist hits a complex chord, and we say “Oh, that’s C7 with a flat 13,” or something. But the chord itself is still made up of basic intervals, 3rds and 4ths, and if we listen a certain way, our ears can hear those basic building blocks at the same time as we hear the thick totality of the chord.

It is possible to hear the simple components within the complex totality. Likewise it is possible to hear the complex possibilities implicit in simple building blocks. This keeps music fresh, and keeps our outlook on life fresh. Building blocks don’t have to be heard as unchanging, static and formulaic. Of course, they can be used that way, and a lot of the time they are, to produce formulaic music. Music made this way is similar to the other things we surround ourselves with: cubicle offices, fast food huts, treeless parking lots; functional but so much less than they could be.

Listen to the musical building blocks in new ways. Your other senses will thank you.

I spent 10 days in L.A. working on music with my cousin Tommy Kay, the devout guitarist. I say devout because he is dedicated to playing music and, in a town renowned for its high b.s. level, he cuts through the hype and labelling to try to get to the music.

We always have interesting discussions about music & culture, and he kicks my ass to improve my jazz chops. We call these visits Jazz Camp and, even though they are built around a specific project such as recording or playing some gigs, it is all about getting deeper into the music, not about the business of music.

One of the subjects we batted around was the perennial “what is jazz?” issue. Tommy cut his teeth on the blues, and he still considers himself a blues player, not unlike many other jazz musicians who view jazz as an extension of the blues, and attitude more than a set of licks or a theoretical system. The idea is that you play from the heart and try to express something emotionally real through your music. It doesn’t matter what the tempo is, if the song structure has 12 bars, if you use exotic altered chords rather than simple dominant sevenths. The blues is both a starting point and a reservoir, a springboard to leap wherever your imagination takes you, and a place to return when you lose your way and need to regroup.

Self-proclaimed blues purists may be historians, they may be able to connect various parts of the blues tradition into a well-organized musical genealogy. But that is just one facet of the music. Other music historians trace the blues back to traditional African music, through singing style, instruments, lyric content and function. You can get as anthropological as you want, but as a musician the real thread is how the blues shapes and clarifies your own creative approach. If you listen in this way, you can hear the blues in John McGlaughlin, McCoy Tyner, Fela Kuti, Steve Lacy, just to name a few varied expressive voices.

So, Tommy had some songs he had written and we tweaked them a little, played a few shows around town, and then went into the studio and cut 10 tracks in about 4 hours. We played shows at the Bar Coda in Sherman Oaks, and at Vitello’s on Tujunga (when people ask for directions to the place, one just says “It’s where Robert Blake shot his wife” and everyone instantly goes “Oh yeah, I know where that is”) over the week.

Then on monday evening we went into the studio. It was an amazing, strenuous, and musically challenging experience, and I know that we were playing some blues as we paid some dues. Tommy always has great musicians to work with (one of the benefits of living in L.A.), and we had a great band in the studio: Sinclair Lott on drums, Clarence Robinson on bass, and Joe Bagg on piano.
Hopefully Tommy will be able to get the songs out on CD soon for everyone to hear.

When summer hits in Texas there are three possible responses:

1) If you have the time and resources, you try to make the best of what Texas has to offer. This includes primarily frozen margaritas and bodies of water. It ain’t the Riviera, it ain’t even the Caribbean (well, sort of, I guess, since the Gulf of Mexico is only about a 5 hour drive from Austin), but you can find a shady spot by Lake Travis, sip on your beverage of choice, and hurl yourself into the water when you get too overheated. If you have a boat, or rich friends with a boat, there’s that as well. Mostly, my beautiful female friends find the guys with boats to hang out with and I never seem to get invited. I guess once you have a couple of bikini-clad muses sunning themselves on your yacht, a scruffy sax player seems pretty superfluous. But I manage to get my toes wet a little. Special thanks to my surrogate Ft. Worth family at the Chez Hinkle Spa and Recuperation Center.

2) If you don’t have the time and resources, you just hunker down. You try to make sure your car AC works, and you spend most of the summer shuttling from one air-conditioned building to another. If you aren’t a gigging musician, you might even wake up early enough to enjoy the cool of the morning (somewhere between 6 and 6:20 am, or so I hear). You forego heavy & spicy foods, and favor smoothies, salads and chunks of ice. You notice how most animals flop on their bellies on whatever is the coolest horizontal surface - dogs, cats, squirrels, lizards, even the 4-inch cockroaches seem to lay low to the floor in the summer.

3) You get out of Texas, as much as possible. You find yourself making unsubtle hints to your friends in Northern California, Montana, and other cooler climes…”I just called to say that I was thinking about you. Say, how long has it been since we hung out? So, how big is your house again?”

Myself, I’m making a break for the west coast for part of June, to record some songs with guitarist Tommy Kay, play a few gigs, and groove on the SoCal vibe. Getting out of Texas, just for a week or two, helps to break up the summer. Of course, summer in Texas lasts through October, but every little bit helps. How does that saying go? “If I owned Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas…”

Cousin Tommy has a stack of original tunes that we will dissect and ruminate over, in what we call “Jazz Camp”, which usually involves sitting around in our boxers, smoking cigars and trading brilliant musical insights at 3am. He’s been investigating fine red wines of late, so that should influence our musical insights, hopefully for the better. I told him to start a wine page on his website. You can keep abreast of such haute couture at www.tommykay.com.

So, I’ve been noodling on my lydian flat-seven and altered dominant scales, getting ready for Jazz Camp, as well as another birthday looming on the horizon. I try not to worry about where it all leads, what does it all mean. The music sustains you, as long as you don’t expect material rewards. You get a lot back from the art, if you put a little of yourself into it, and I try to remember this as I stand sweltering on an outdoor stage in central Texas, wondering if I’m out of my Vulcan mind.

So far, this has been a year for varied musical projects. My main gig with Memphis Train Revue is a lot of fun, as we cover some great dance music of the last 40 years. The band keeps getting tighter, and the effort we put in each week comes back to us onstage and makes me proud to be part of this group.

I’m about halfway through the recording process for the debut album of my Manteca Beat project. Very exciting, and I have some wonderful guest artists lending their talents. More on that as it takes shape.

I do feel blessed to be here in Austin where some of the most creative musical people have congregated, which has meant unexpected and interesting musical projects falling my way. I’m looking forward to the new Richard Linklater movie “Scanner Darkly,” with music by Golden Arm Trio fearless leader Graham Reynolds. You can hear a little of my sax work on the soundtrack, I do believe. Barbara Kooyman’s Texamericana project will also be making ripples soon, and I will do my best to support that.

Finally, if you find yourself in West Austin on a sultry Friday evening, and want to eat fine Italian cuisine in a cafe patio setting, check out the Flying Tomato on Bee Cave road. You might find an over-heated sax player serenading the diners there, hunkered down in the Texas summer, fighting the heat with some cool riffs and a big glass of iced tea.