A Group Improvisation by the Tone Road Ramblers

This is a long-awaited opportunity for me to write about the Tone Road Ramblers when readers can experience one of their improvisations without its being through the abstraction of prose only. The video comes to us with thanks to Eric Mandat. It can also be viewed on YouTube.

Morgan Powell

As it’s currently constituted, the personnel of the Tone Road Ramblers are: Morgan Powell and James Staley, trombones, and Ray Sasaki, trumpet. These three are original members who have been playing together since founding the collective in 1981. Eric Mandat, the clarinetist and percussionist of odd hand instruments, came in 1989, and though Howie Smith, with his bouquet of saxophone voices (ranging from soprano through contra-bass) has been with the group in one way or another for years, he officially replaced flutist John

Ray Sasaki

Fonville a couple of years ago. Only recently have they been without a formal percussionist, and they find that it’s okay. By nature, the best improvisers are firmly grounded realists, requiring no magic to spin gold from straw. For them, there’s no important difference between them anyway. If you listen, you’ll understand where and how such distinctions dissolve.

I have written about this organization and its members many times before, in Starr Review, New Music Box, and in my book, Sounding OurDepths: The Music of Morgan Powell (2014). Yet, thanks to Eric Mandat’s filming, this is the first time I’ve had video footage from a concert that I could use to show what it is so difficult to tell without the experience. How does the writer translate what is literally inarticulate into words? (See the post before this, in which Ray Sasaki’s helpfully asserts that playing the trumpet is speech for him).

James Staley

The Ramblers generously answer questions during breaks during their concerts because their unique music leaves many with more questions than vocabulary. Let me share a precis of responses to their FAQs:

Everything you hear is spontaneous. It is unrehearsed; there is no initial plan or “setup.” There isn’t a plan about who will play first: Someone will, and there is no discomfort with silence until someone stirs.

TRR has no leader. Ensemble members play (or refrain from playing) in response to what they hear their colleagues playing. No one is waiting their turn. As Ray Sasaki explains it, they are having a conversation that has a life of its own. If we accept the idea that each musician has been speaking with his instrument for most of his life, we are listening in on conversation that takes the many tones conversations do: quiet, calm, argumentative, silly, reminiscent, irritable, celebratory and all the rest. In conversation, sometimes one has nothing to add, or recognizes that he would only interrupt the flow. Sometimes his contribution will deepen it, and sometimes he has  a lot to say. This model may help guide your listening.

Howie Smith

The conversational model also helps listeners organize the experience that is distinctive for having none of the traditional markers we normally depend on to direct us in music: no beat (necessarily), no measured sections, no dependence on Western scales, nothing to guide a listener’s expectations. The music is made of sound, incident, and the ever-occurring present that asks you neither to linger nor to jump ahead. Just listen with the concentration of an eavesdropper: You are all attention, never knowing what surprising gem will come your way, and your heart will race.

Many anticipate chaos at the very idea of group improvisation but listening—and watching—will quickly dispel this notion. This is not a free-for-all, but the production of highly refined musicianship as execution and listening both. Chaos would result from simultaneous exertion of ego, each performer closed to what is going on around him and determined to make his own point. 

Clearly, these musicians aren't in competition with one another but in cooperation. They respond to the sound environment rhythmically and tonally, and they participate in the creation of atmospheres and impulses that will create a whole. They trade places in the composition, moving as the music develops between foreground and background, sometimes supporting with underlying chords or rhythmic punctuations, at other times asserting themselves with outbursts or long lyric lines. All this is executed so fluently that it is often difficult to distinguish voices so protean that they are often unrecognizable from their orchestral exemplars. 

Eric Mandat (courtesy of Rex Gaskins)

The point is not the individual voices, but the experience of a developing composition. Consider the breadth of sounds lavished on the ear and their disposition vis-a-vis one another. These combinations of sound, new to listeners, are new to the performers creating them in the moment. This music occurs because the musicians have made it a practice for over thirty-five years to override deeply-rooted Western musical rules and to free instincts about how to use their instruments—their voices—and what music is in the first place. The Ramblers' conclusion that freedom disconcerts audiences trained to believe that constraints—structure, form and fixed relationships—define music.

But works of art, however they are created, must have limits and feel whole. Performances and compositions, once begun, convince listeners that they've not only stopped but concluded. Ramblers performances will never end with the resolutions of nineteenth-century symphonies, our beloved standard for The End. The frequently-asked question to the Ramblers, "How do you know when it's over?" is not only legitimate, but of great concern to audience members asked to suspend most of their musical information to listen in the first place. 

As with making the music, the decision to conclude a piece is a group decision. Like all their decisions at every point, it could go any number of ways and it depends on what they are collectively and individually hearing. When they hear the possibility of completion, there is no necessity of doing so. If some one or two have more to say, the music will continue, refreshed. But when it ends, it ends with a conclusion—but it's one of countless possibilities in the continuum of sound and silence from which improvised music is made.

The Tone Road Ramblers: "Always Some Surprises"

Thirty-two is a good age: At thirty-two, we are smart, energetic and ready to take on the world. 

The power of a musical ensemble at thirty-two? It's off the charts. For a group to reach thirty-two with original members is remarkable in the first place. Rarely do six musicians have a history of cooperative musical and personal relationships deep enough to withstand the many challenges to solidarity posed by the sawing edges of personality, taste, and ambition. 

Tone Road Ramblers on the stage at Roulette, March 1, 2013. Photo by Doron Sadja for Roulette.

The Tone Road Ramblers have such strength, flexibility, and love. They formed as a leaderless ensemble to play experimental concert music, and their music continues to be renewed by the life experience and musical passions of its members. Personal openness and second-nature sensitivities to the world of sound have led them to create a nonpareil, protean, yet timeless music. 

Jim Staley. Photo by Doron Sadja.

The Ramblers arose out of relationships established at the University of Illinois School of Music. Now far flung as virtuosos with eminent careers, four founding members knew each other and played together in Champaign-Urbana during the late 1970s. They are composer and trombonist Morgan Powell; Jim Staley, trombonist and founder-director of Roulette, the New York venue for new music and performance; composer John Fonville, maestro of the flute in all its forms, and professor at the University of San Diego; and Ray Sasaki, virtuoso of jazz and classical trumpet both, and professor at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. (Powell and Sasaki have appeared before in this blog in the September, 2012 article about Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection.)

I have written before about clarinetist and new music specialist, Eric Mandat, professor at Southern Illinois University, who joined the ensemble during the mid '80s, replacing the original clarinetist. Ron Coulter, a senior lecturer in percussion, also at Southern Illinois, in 2012 became the third percussionist with the ensemble. 

John Fonville and Morgan Powell. Photo by Doron Sadja.

With its core of enduring relationships, the ensemble's members are cooperative and patient; it's no wonder that their performances seem to come as the result of instinct. 

The Ramblers' primary mode is group improvisation. They appear on stage as a new music ensemble in the traditions of classical music: They arrange themselves formally in a "U" and remain seated; they read music from stands some of the time, thus disguising from the audience the long passages they improvise within scored work. Their core interest in improvisation is, in fact, usually associated with jazz. 

Powell, Sasaki, and Staley are all jazz musicians. Sasaki splits his time between jazz and classical trumpet, teaching a large studio from which his students go into both types of professional work. Powell plays jazz day-to-day. Having been brought up with the big band music, his heart is now deeply devoted to traditional jazz. From his Illinois days, Staley moved from traditional and mid-century jazz into free jazz and the avant-garde. 

Fonville and Mandat weren't raised with early training in jazz or improvisation. They each have played a variety of classical, world, new, and electronic musics, though Mandat's love of klezmer has taken him into that spontaneous, ornamental tradition.  

Eric Mandat. Photo by Doron Sadja.

In traditional jazz, musicians improvise as soloists, one at a time, within a formal structure that dictates when and for how many measures each will take a solo. They know the key, they know the tune, and, if they've played it often enough, some of their improvisation may even have become a matter of "licks," or  habitual patterns they've developed to fill the solo-improvisation spaces; spontaneous creation has taken the back seat.

Sasaki likens group improvisation to conversation in the sense that everyone has something to say and through listening to the others finds the best way to say it. The conversation will be as rich, intelligent, and interesting as the participants are attentive to their interlocutors. If no one is listening, nothing will come of the intercourse; no one will have an appropriate response or gambit; there will be no definition or sense to the flow of words.

The Ramblers do play some scored music written by its members. These works often include sections of unspecified duration open for group improvisation. Such writing is characteristic of Powell and Mandat. In Powell's daFunkaMonkus, played at their March performance at the University of Texas, there is a staged, pugnacious verbal discussion among the ensemble members about committing to their musical ideas—"playing their own way"—despite audience objections. The rough dialogue leads into an exciting extended quotation about jazz from W. C. Handy, which points the listener to a big connection between Rambler music and its roots in the impulses of jazz—to the freedom and the drive toward change and surprise. This passage is sampled here from TRR's University of Texas dress rehearsal of Morgan Powell's DaFunkusMonkus on March 27, 2013.

It might seem at first blush that group improvisation would create a chaos: sounds from six performers who "do their own things" simultaneously—the ultimate clash of self-involved cross-purposes. In fact, it is the result of exquisitely attuned listening, focused on knowing where the individual can be make the clearest, most relevant, useful, and distinctive contribution. 

Roulette, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Photo by
Angela Gaspar.

The Ramblers' brief tour during March took them to the University of Texas at Austin and to Roulette in New York City. Their concert at the University of Texas contained scored works by Powell, Mandat, and Sal Martirano, as well as improvisations. The New York concert, at Roulette in Brooklyn, was improvisations exclusively.

John Fonville. Photo by
Doron Sadja

Roulette has graciously provided rough cuts of recordings from the Ramblers' April 1 New York concert that I've sampled here to give my readers some idea of the range of sounds and the level of mutuality both of mind and virtuosity that this music demands. In SAMPLE no. 1 we hear flutist John Fonville open a piece supported by percussionist Colson. One Fonville creates the sound of at least two flutes through his mastery of overtones produced fluently, in flight, in an atmosphere shaded by the use of a subtle palette of microtones. These tones between the scale tones we are attuned to place his sound in neither minor nor major key, but in a zone of his own devising. So delicately, so vividly, so dramatically, Fonville initiates this group improvisation. It's not hard at all to understand how the rest of the ensemble will become charged with ideas and energy from the get-go. 

Ray Sasaki's lyrical trumpet leads to the close of another improvisation in SAMPLE #2. The beauty of his playing can only be experienced: his level of control over dynamics and seemingly endless phrases uninterrupted by perceptible breathing; the molten quality of his sound into which he injects brief passages of tonguing as quick and light as attacks of hummingbirds. Here, he plays blues in a way that proves the evolution that Handy spoke of. This is not blues as structure: there are no measures to count off, but a languorous, sensuous, mournful beauty; a necklace to which the ensemble attaches charms and pendants of differing weights and colors. His line is ornamented by the sounds that accrue to it. And still Sasaki delivers a seductively personal, conversational tone. It's not the tone of a man talking to himself; I think he's talking above the crowd, to us.

Ron Coulter. Photo by Doron Sadja.

I chose this THIRD SAMPLE to
show how adroitly the Ramblers propel themselves through a spontaneous composition—for it's important to understand that they are not merely making sounds together until they lose steam, but that they are executing a spontaneously created composition. Their improvisations have beginnings, middles, and ends, with evident transitions along the way. On one of their CDs on the Einstein label, Tone Road Ramblers: The Ragdale Years , all of the tracks are improvised. Lacking awareness of this fact, there is nothing to suggest that they are not playing from scored parts. 

In this sample, the ensemble is moved from the massed urgency of low, dense voices by the entrance of the piccolo, which cuts through the rumbling just as a fife is meant to do. The new voice redirects the trombones and calls forth sounds similar to its own. Lilting bird songs respond to the dance of the piccolo. The bird songs are generated by: bird calls. Coulter manages the Ramblers' serious arsenal of noise-making toys that are used throughout, as inspiration guides them.

The Roulette Store is the best source for Tone Road Rambler CDs and for CDs by Staley, Fonville, and Powell issued on the Einstein label. The iTunes Store also carries three albums and the individual tracks (including The Ragdale Years and their most recent, Dancing with the Ramblers, with music by Fonville, Mandat, and Powell.)

For a more in-depth profile of the Ramblers, the reader can access an article by this author posted on Powell's website: Off the Charts. 

Clarinetist and Composer Eric Mandat: All Music is New

Eric Mandat, 2012

Clarinetist and composer Eric Mandat asks me if I know aspen trees. He sparkles, describing the impression they made on his first visit to Utah's Bryce Canyon National Park. One ancient, unfettered root system sends up trees in colonies that span millennia. Individual trees can live for over a hundred years, constantly joined and eventually replaced by shoots that arise from the massive, vital root system. The image of connectedness and regeneration fires Mandat's imagination as a kind of ideal.

Mandat invoked the aspens when I noted how frequently the word "energy" occurs in his speech about music—or about anything, really.

In January 2012, I traveled  to Carbondale, Illinois to attend his lecture-recital, "Structural Connections and Motivic Unity in The Sonatas for Piano and Clarinet by Johannes Brahms" at Southern Illinois University, where Mandat is Professor of Music and Distinguished Scholar. His minute and revelatory analysis addressed Brahms' structure in terms of propulsive energy. The lecture marked the beginning of a research arc that Mandat imagines he will be following for some time to come. He didn't have to say this: His enthusiasm for his topic was a static that buzzed and crackled all around him. It clearly took willpower for him to keep from rolling up his sleeves, ripping off his Coloradan's bolo tie, ditching the script, and luring his audience off-road—as a happy naturalist would—to explore for three-note wonders gems Brahms' sublime scores.

Junghwa Lee and Eric Mandat

The scholar Mandat serves Mandat the performer. This recording is of his performance, with pianist Junghwa Lee, of the Brahms Sonata in E-flat, op.120 No. 2, for Piano and Clarinet 

( Movement 1, Allegro amabile;  movement 2, Allegro appassionata;   movement 3, Andante con moto ).   Having heard his so-thoroughly engaged lecture, we in the audience couldn't help but have heightened appreciation for the sonata's elegance, if only because of the phrasing propelled by those motives he had laid out for us.

Energy. The key word to Mandat's analysis of the Brahms concertos is the key word for every aspect of Eric Mandat, musical and personal—to the very small extent that the two can even be considered separate at all. The first composition of Mandat's that I knew was his 2008 work for the Tone Road Ramblers sextet plus soprano, Dark Energy. The liner notes to Dancing with the Ramblers (Einstein Records, EIN-018) explain how his conception of the of interconnectedness operates in this piece: "Dark energy makes the universe expand faster and faster. To many, it is unsettling news that the galaxies are retreating apace from their neighbors. But to Eric Mandat, it is a source of wonder, because orbits maintain planetary togetherness even while dark energy mysteriously undermines celestial unity." Since the Ramblers are an experimental, improvisatory ensemble, Dark Energy is both scored, with open sections for improvisation. At this Amazon site you can find an MP3 download of the twenty-minute, seven-movement work with vocals by Phoebe Legere.

Mandat's vitality as a composer is more than matched by his vivacity as a performer in this playful, charming composition for solo clarinet, Coconut Candy (on Black Swirls, Cirrus Music, CMCD 001, 2007). This antic piece, always dancing, seems to change directions in mid-flight—something that I find characteristic of Mandat's freedom and wit as composer and performer. His program note to Coconut Candy  explains in less metaphorical terms, that the tune "is supposed to sound light and fluffy, when in fact there are some sixty-five non-conventional fingerings. The piece is a rather simple rondo, utilizing pitch collections symmetrical around the interval of a perfect third; that is, halfway between a major third and a minor third." It's cotton candy with a steel spine.

The propulsive quality of Mandat's music often comes from vivid contrasts that pack physical punches. These occur in registers, volumes, and tempos; in rhythmic variety—changes that come suddenly and comically; and in his confident creation of tension and anticipation. Whatever the mood, sparkling, silly, or delicate (in fact, come together in even the briefest work), his music has the listener on the edge of the chair, in the grip of its pushing, brilliantly manipulated pace and pressure.

A key to the drama in what he writes for himself and peer clarinetists is that he writes for "the extended clarinet" (thus the name of his first CD, copyright 1991, The Extended Clarinet, Advance Recordings, FGCD-32, 1991). Mandat is a master of extended techniques, which are unusual ways of playing the instrument that reward the dedicated player who invests in them with the ability to create effects well beyond the expected.

For instance, section five from his 1986 Folk Songs, a sort of flamenco for a dervish dancer, is a tour de force because of the extension of its line: When does this man ever breathe? The flow of the line over the tune's 2 minutes and 45 seconds is so crazily stretched out that it can make the auditor anxious. This is because of Mandat's circular breathing: He takes in air through his nose while he continues to blow through his mouth, thus avoiding the need to "take a breath." As you listen to "Like a Flamenco dancer with St. Vitus Dance" you can listen for the intakes of air through his nose while the notes rush uninterrupted through the second half. Pulitzer Prize winning composer Shulamit Ran appreciates having Mandat play her works in part because of this mastery. Even when her work doesn't call for circular breathing, she knows that Mandat will deliver unparalleled beauty of line, uninterrupted by pauses for breath.

The professional view.

Another haunting technique is multiphonics, in which the clarinet delivers two tones simultaneously as Mandat plays the instrument by breathing and fingering in the usual way and by vocalizing into it at the same time. This haunting piece, "...the looking glass" is from Preludes, book I  on  Black Swirls.

Most remarkable to me about Mandat's writing in forms of any length, is the inherent drama. His music conjures images that are never static. It invokes a natural world of rocks and mountains, trees and forests, stars and the Milky Way, all united by the movement of light and sound. His music suggests dancers—not dancers on a stage, but the people whom dancers represent—people who respond directly to their immediate circumstances, wherever they are in space and time.

Last March, at the Second European Clarinet Festival in Madrid, he presented Shadows from Flames, which he wrote for the (very!) eclectic American bass clarinet quartet,  Edmund Welles . This link for this performance takes you to the first of five YouTube videos posted by Stephan Vermeersch, who recorded each of the five brief movements of Shadows from Flames: Intensity, Longing, Cauldron, Oracle, and Assault. This performance by a quartet of European bass clarinetists—Belgian Vermeesch, Portuguese Nuno Pinto, Spaniard Pedro Rubio, and Italian Rocco Parisi—shows Mandat the composer and the performer at his kinetic best. There is indeed little distinction between composer, clarinet virtuoso, and actor. Mandat spins the sound from every part of his dancing body: from his fingertips; he exhales it  from the pores of his skin. Shadows from Flames seems to have been composed by a giddy boy who has chased around the backyard to catch a bottle of electricity that he could unleash through five clarinets: The music's charge runs up and down the listener's body.


The idea that his music comes through every part of his body isn't an entirely poetic trope:  Mandat understands his clarinet is a literal, physical extension of his body. With the exception of the saxophone, the clarinet is the only instrument that "goes inside you. Everything else is just a little farther away. I can feel the vibrations echoing in my skull. I am the resonator for the horn's sound."


Unlike other instrumentalists, who may own several horns used for different occasions, Mandat has one clarinet, with which he has a singularly intimate relationship. He plays a Buffet RC model, a kind common in Europe and Asia, but hard to find in the States. He's begun a world-wide search, with the help of the Buffet company, to find a 

replacement for the instrument he bought in 1997. Since clarinets last only ten to fifteen year. How will he know he's found The One? "The vibrations that are coming out the holes tickle the tips of my fingers and if I can feel that, a certain kind of tickle...If I get that feel, I know it will work for me."

Masks in Mandat's office, collected on performance tours

Southern Illinois hired Mandat as soon as he completed his masters degree. (He was educated at the University of North Texas, Yale, and the Eastman School of Music, taught primarily by Richard Joiner, Lee Gibson, Keith Wilson, Stanley Hasty, and Charles Neidich). his University award for Outstanding Scholar after eighteen years of the usual academic track, earning with it "support to go anywhere any time for any length to do whatever I deem appropriate and valuable." He has taken advantage of this perquisite from the beginning; he tours for a week or two at least once or twice a year.

Nevertheless, he is committed to teaching and to the University. "When I'm here, I'm here. I'm in this office maybe ten hours a day." He's always felt himself literally an ambassador for the clarinet and teaching is part of the mission he embraces as warmly
as a hot water bottle in a January bed. "I try to show by example how lovely it is, how fabulous it is; and if they can catch that spark, then I feel like I've been successful." And for anyone who's checking, his on-line student evaluations are spectacular, something he's well aware of.  "I crave acceptance!" he grins. "I'm a performer. If I hadn't been a musician, I'd have been an actor."

Corollary to Mandat "being here" in Carbondale is that "when I'm gone, I'm gone." "Gone" can be just about anywhere in the world. He may have had a call to play with the Chicago Symphony's MusicNow ensemble under the baton of Pierre Boulez. He has happy memories of tours in Taiwan and Korea, and an especially rewarding residency in 2010 at the Royal Northern Academy of Music in Manchester, England.

But of all the places in the world to which Mandat has traveled to perform, the one he's returned to as to a home has been Latvia. In the late 1980's, a Latvian-American professor retiring from SIU procured a grant that enabled an exchanges of personnel and materials between the countries. In 1991 an SIU professor who had planned to go on the exchange backed out. Mandat went in his place and experienced the heady first anniversary of the Latvians' independence after decades of Russian rule. Mandat was profoundly affected by the passion and energy of a people whose culture had been suppressed to the level that they had been unable to use their own language. In a country with a very low standard of living, he found both the classical and folk music traditions revered and robust. He recalls a folk festival with 13,000 singers on stage; he played a solo in front of an orchestra of 4,000 that included twenty horns. Mandat returned many times over the course of eight years and formed close musical and personal ties. Latvians, he says, are "delicate, gentle people. They love music and they love poetry...The same verb means 'to read' and 'to pick flowers.' I think that's just lovely. And the same noun means 'field of grass' and 'concert hall.'"


An element of Mandat's love of Latvia and depth of experience there transcends the energy of the historical moment, the renaissance of its culture, or the poetry of the language. When he went, he found himself experiencing situations from his dreams and he learned the language as easily as if it had been his own. The tie he felt to the place was uncannily intuitive. This belief in the possibility of a psychic or spiritual connection is something strong and unapologetic in him. His sensitiveity to the unseen forces and energies of the world is profound; he takes to be real what others shrug off, unexamined, as fantastical because they cannot logically account for it.


Mandat's life experience has borne out the wisdom of being present to intuition and feeling. He explains that when he was three, he and his big brother had a recording of the "The Instruments of the Orchestra." Even at that age he fell in love the with nobility of the description of his future instrument: "The clarinet is the Queen of the instrument; it has great range..."

"We decided to keep my clarinet. I am going to
play very hard on it."

His parents rented him a clarinet in fourth grade. He played it happily, but decided that he would let it go the rental period was up. But the night before his parents were to return the instrument to the dealer, the boy was in tears, wracked with regret, pleading for the chance to keep it. His parents bought the clarinet.

Mandat tells this story with zest and a bit of awe. After the Brahms concert in January, he bent over earnestly to tell it to a very young clarinet student, an encouraging "keep at it!" to a ten-year-old artist. In this photograph (right) he shows off a treasured souvenir found in the papers of his late aunt, who was delighted to have a nephew who knew his heart. The letter hangs on his office wall, with equal status among all the framed elite degrees.

In Mandat's telling of this story, I hear in his laughter empathy for the little boy and an awareness of the struggle that intuition faces. He came so close, so young, to eschewing his joy, but he pulled it out through a self-awareness and presence of mind.

The aunt to whom the young clarinetist wrote eventually came to suffer from Alzheimer's, yet Mandat speaks of his time and communication with her in the happiest terms. What others found in her as flawed and diseased, hIs empathy and imagination appreciated as poetic understanding, as a rearranged way of seeing the world. He was the person able to communicate with her: He spoke her language.

These character traits—empathy, and the ability to observe with imagination—are undoubtedly sources of energy. Mandat's willingness to accept worlds where time isn't kept on a clock, and to accept them as real, is an attitude that has implications for us who listen to his music. He would have us bring to his (and to any contemporary) compositions and performances a willingness to be present to what unfolds. He'd have us not compare what we hear to what we think we should hear, or what we have heard in the past. We needn't prepare ourselves to compare the performance as it is recalled from music history courses. Mandat would have us focus on and enjoy what is actually delivered. Be present for this experience. It's unlike any other. Be here.


For an artist like Eric Mandat, "being present" means being without an agenda in the sense of career plans, vying for awards, or measuring himself within his profession. His sole aim is to keep developing as an artist. "For me, being a growing artist means that I'm going to have to abandon some safe zones—in performance and in composition. Thinking about my own composition for clarinet, there are certain expectations people have based on certain other pieces of mine that were perhaps successful, and it would be relatively easy to stick with those. In order to grow, I've got to break with those as my growth forces from time to time. It's a challenge.

"And with regard to New Music and its future, that's a big challenge that it's really difficult now for people who want to 'be successful.' They have to be able to find something that people are going to be able to identify and label and stick with. It's too bad, but there are just certain pockets that people get stuck in."

Which brings us once again to the observation of Mandat's energy, his ability to derive it from the world he observes, and to generate ideas and music from the heat to which he's so sensitive in the world.

But energy is also required for endurance: to tolerate uncertainty and to generate new growth. HIs music ripples with brilliance. wit, and joy. But  it is fueled by the strength few can summon: to be where he is, listening and watching with every pore open, them compressing himself into each idea and note as it comes. His energy is in his willingness to be present.

Reedmaking on the workbench

Toys on the funbench