From the saxophonist of yesterday's EarBliss, a haunting collection of free jazz compositions that immediately conjured the films of Carl Th. Dreyer, F.W. Murnau, and silent Fritz Lang – but compositions that, each and all, both stand on their own and flow from one evocative soundscape to the next. Superb.
Saxophone (+ glockenspiel) in a parking garage should not be this stunning but I can’t stop obsessing over the magic Shiroishi creates here. Makes me think of what Sonny Rollins's days of woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge must have sounded like:
A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space and self.
In a single, improvised take, Shiroishi recorded his third solo LP, I was too young to hear silence. The record plays like a stripped-down ode to its star instrument. Solo saxophone dazzles and cascades through tangible air, each note hugged and trailed by a lush, natural reverb. Each silence, of which there are many, feels deliberate, sustained, honored.
A classic as new and vital as the day it landed. Essential.
By turns rollicking and elegiac, often within the same composition. Purchased both this and the upcoming WOODEN MUSIC II on vinyl. So good.
