SKY PIECE Liner Notes - 1998by John Hohman

Sky Piece

So much sky
in the space of desert
my soul rises
from a mournful Earth
into a clarity
above Time.

While Time is
it is best to be
in both worlds
Music
as the bridge.

—Thomas Chapin

Thomas Chapin’s sense of time emerges with the energy, adventure and subtle knowing that characterize his
musical sensibility. It embraces a deeply collaborative yet individualized spirit steeped in a perfection of time; what has led the man and his music to now and what can be.

“Sky Piece” comes forth from that particular universe, part of a moment of realized aspirations; satisfaction with a level of performance and composition that simultaneously leads to new challenges and directions. That yearning to move forward can be detected in the title track. We envision a sky in motion, Chapin’s rueful bass-flute melody greeting Mario Pavone’s insistent bass line. Like the sky, Chapin gathers velocity.

Wherever he is, Chapin makes the most of time, especially of those quiet moments when nature, spirit and the beauty of circumstance combine to inspire music. In February, 1996 Chapin was enthralled when he visited a Moroccan coastal town, which became the name of his composition “Essaouira.” It’s pronounciation, Ess-ah-wee-ra, seems to surface in this sparsely exotic form of incantation. The tune came to him at four-thirty in the morning as he meditated atop his hotel roof in an open courtyard overlooking the sea. “It seemed the still, star-domed sky held a deep presence, perhaps many—” Chapin recalled.

An after-midnight nature walk several summers before, this time in suburban Connecticut, inspired “Night Bird Song.” The sky was again still, but pitch black. “I heard a marvelous bird singing in a tree. It sang for about twenty minutes, never repeating its phrases, improvising away as I stood motionless, just out of the beam of the street light.” This haunting composition was conceived around a bass line that Pavone had previously written and to which Chapin added a melody, overall structure and improvisational vamp with a flamenco rhythm. It has been played by the trio for years, and is now considered one of their signature pieces.

“Triptych” is a testimony to what the Thomas Chapin Trio can do as pure improvisers. Real time and spontaneity are to be heard in this three-minute and twenty-two second, three-part extemporization by Chapin, Pavone and drummer, Michael Sarin. (For the record, Pavone and Sarin’s long-time collaboration with Chapin, now going on seven years, has yielded some remarkable music and “Sky Piece” finds them at the height of their communicative and musical prowess.)

Part one opens with a jabbing, flippant bass and saxophone dialogue placed upon an edgy percussive landscape. In the second, the saxophone and bass are languid, prowling and intermittently prodded by the chameleonic percussion. In the last, the trio’s intensive high-wire digging-in is sure evidence of fleeting moments well spent.

Listen closely, very closely, to “Just Now.” Chapin plays a wooden flute and incorporates a clock, a “Little Ben.” The melody reigns but our perception of it is nonetheless altered by the ticking constancy of time. More aggressive is the ringing alarm of this clock in “Alphaville,” awakening us to the concerns evoked in and beyond this allusion to the Godard science fiction classic. Chapin is using time, or more specifically its implements, to help convey, as he says, “a kind of paranoiac dreamlike state as evoked by Dali’s melted watches.”

Monk’s “Ask Me Now” comes as a pause that is refreshing to Chapin as both composer and performer. He pays his respects to Monk’s harmonies and provides his own invigorating melodic invention. Jazz history permeates Chapin’s sense of time, but his references produce new information and he never plays in the past. We are reminded of Chapin’s innate inclusive aesthetic. In fact, Jazziz magazine writer, Chris Kelsey, reviewing Chapin’s August, 1997 performance at the Knitting Factory, commented “If New York’s downtown jazz experimentalists ever decide to appoint a missionary to proselytize among the uptown traditionalist masses, they’d be wise to choose Thomas Chapin…arguably the most complete straight-ahead jazz saxophonists of his generation.”

The photographs that accompany Sky Piece were taken by Chapin in Namibia during a trip to southwest Africa in March, 1993. They capture a time of interior exploration while he visited a relatively isolated place on a continent that has deeply fascinated him since childhood. Interestingly, these photographs reflect the dynamics of a trio—silhouettes of three figures inside a great stone arch in the desert, three pelicans perched on a rooftop in a fishing village, and an elegant triangular skeleton of an old railroad sign in the desert just outside of town.

As we listen to the Thomas Chapin Trio we can begin to view the photographs as mental images of the influences and inspirations that imbue Chapin’s work. In the future we can be sure that whatever form these images take, they will hearken back to certain roots and leap forward in vibrant and original expression. In the meantime, we have Sky Piece to savor and in doing so, move our own time a little closer to a perfection.
—John Hohmann

John Hohmann was one of the producers of “In Harmony,” the fall, 1997 concert held in New York featuring musicians who currently play and have played with Chapin.

Thomas Chapin: alto and sopranino saxophones, flute, bass flute, pinkullo (woodenflute), bells, whistles, alarm clock
Mario Pavone: bass
Michael Sarin: drums, percussion

All compositions by Thomas Chapin © Peace Park Publishing/BMI, except “Ask Me Now” by Theolonious Monk © Theolonious Music Corp./BMI.

Recorded July 1996 by Robert Musso at Quad Studios.
Editing and mastering by Tom Ruff at Sony Music Studios.
Album cover photo by Thomas Chapin in Namibia (SW Africa)
Design by Dave Bias

Special thanks to Sam Kaufman for facilitating this and other projects through difficult times, and to Robert Musso for production assistant, as well as his incredible recording expertise.

May God bless my family, friends and fans for they have truly blessed my life through their love and generosity. I love you all.

Sky Piece is the property of Akasha, Inc., P.O. Box 720083, Jackson Heights, NY 11372, U.S.A.