Guitarist Miles Okazaki gathers an extraordinary cast of ten musicians to create Miniature America, a collection of 22 vignettes exploring the wonder of chance encounters and “found” compositions.
Available July 19, 2024 via Cygnus Recordings, the album offers a serpentine journey through a sonic landscape created by Okazaki using radical studio techniques and material improvised by Matt Mitchell, Jen Shyu, Anna Webber, Jacob Garchik, Fay Victor, Jon Irabagon, Ganavya, Caroline Davis, and Patricia Brennan.
“finding fresh joy, surprise and what he calls “thisness” in off-kilter musical geometry has long been Okazaki’s specialty.” – Alan Scherstuhl, The New York Times
“Okazaki is a wildly versatile musician, freakishly precise, but also full of emotion.” – Craig Morgan Teicher, The Paris Review
Miniature America is Miles Okazaki’s 12th album and is strikingly different from his previous work, which has been firmly based in song forms and live performance in the studio. After a statement of the album’s poignant theme, the listener moves quickly through a wildly contrasting succession of abstract fragments, atmospheres, and mysterious events. The unusual sound of the album comes from a compositional approach that uses the studio itself as an instrument, where the goal is not just to capture a performance, but to create a library for post-production work. Okazaki describes the idea in his liner notes:
“. . . I realized I could write some instruction pieces to create the raw materials (“slabs,” as I called them), and then excavate them, sanding and polishing to find hidden musical artifacts . . . There are many pieces on this album that use variations on this technique, which makes them less like compositions and more like sonic treasure hunts.”
Sometimes this process is hidden, but it can be heard clearly on “Lookout Below,” where the guitar plays rapid-fire unison melodies with a constantly changing cast of characters. The score for this track found in the booklet shows the type of work involved. Okazaki says:
“I had some environments I would set up and then some instructions I would give the musicians. We made dozens of different little episodes. Dense blocks of sound. I took them home and carved away at them until just the minimum remained, learned that, and then played along.”
Okazaki uses traditional electric and acoustic guitars as well as quarter-tone and fretless guitars. The former can be heard on accompanying trombone on “The Cavern” and the latter on “Whack A Mole,” where the guitar slides to catch the entrance of each of five voices that appear in a three-dimensional space. There’s a rhythmic idea that appears (“Wheel Of Cloud,” “A Clean Slate”) generated by the band reciting the final lines of various poems to produce a field of erratic accents that are picked up by the guitar. The rhythmic tension reaches the peak on “Pulsation Station,” where Okazaki mediates a conversation between two groups at slightly different speeds. In addition to these abstract pieces, there is a melodic theme that runs throughout the album, heard on “The Cocktail Party” as a piano in a room of babbling guests, on “The Cavern” as a melting chord progression, on “The Firmament” as a group hymn, and “In The Fullness Of Time” as a yearning cry by Ganavya. The album closes with a fitting line from “The Artist,” by William Carlos Williams.
The album title is from the drawing by Ed Ruscha shown on the cover. The connections between this art and the music, a detailed look at the studio process, and photos of the session can be found in the booklet for the CD.
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photos dimicology.net
Miles Okazaki is a NYC-based guitarist originally from Port Townsend, a small seaside town in Washington State. His approach to the guitar is described by the New York Times as “utterly contemporary, free from the expectations of what it means to play a guitar in a group setting — not just in jazz, but any kind” (Giovanni Russonello). His sideman experience over the last two decades covers a broad spectrum, from standards to experimental music (Kenny Barron, John Zorn, Stanley Turrentine, Dan Weiss, Henry Threadgill, Matt Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Jonathan Finlayson, Jane Monheit, Amir ElSaffar, Jon Irabagon, Darcy James Argue, and many others). He has released eleven albums of original compositions over the last 12 years on the Sunnyside, Pi, and Cygnus labels. In 2018 Okazaki received wide critical acclaim for his six-album recording of the complete compositions of Thelonious Monk for solo guitar, and was voted the #1 rising star guitarist in the DownBeat Critics Poll. In 2020 Okazaki started the Cygnus record label with his longstanding duo partner drummer Dan Weiss. In the area of education, he published Fundamentals of Guitar on Mel Bay in 2014, taught guitar and rhythmic theory at the University of Michigan from 2013-22, joined the faculty at Princeton University in 2021, and holds degrees from Harvard University, Manhattan School of Music, and the Juilliard School.