My new album is out now
My new album, New Addresses, is out now on Better Company Records. It features my friends in Hub New Music, and it’s the follow-up to my Grammy-winning album Don’t Look Down. We made it with Mike Tierney and the team at Better Company, and the whole thing has been a real labor of love. I’m so glad it exists.
Paris-Move gave it their highest mark, “Indispensable,” and Cultural Attaché writes, “New Addresses is so compelling that I’ve listened to it four times.”
It Started Over Dumplings
The whole project began when Michael Avitabile, Hub’s artistic director and flutist, and I met for coffee, then indulged a mutual predilection: dumplings in Chinatown. We figured out pretty quickly that we were both Italian-Americans from the New York suburbs with a lot of opinions. That friendship grew to include the rest of the group, Jesse, Gleb, and Magnolia, and it’s the basis of everything on this record.
More and more, I’ve come to feel that the politics of being a decent person start close to home: making your community better, and finding time to pay attention to what’s right in front of you. David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water gets at this, imagining that even a crowded, maddening supermarket could feel “on fire with the same force that made the stars.”
The first piece on the album, New Addresses, is named for a book by Kenneth Koch, a poet with a similar way of noticing. I love how he observes the world: he writes odes to breath, to his heart, to the word “yes,” quotidian things that suddenly open onto something larger. It’s one of my most performed pieces, and for me this recording is the ideal version of it.
South Catalina wasn’t written for Hub, but their wonderful performance of it revealed something new in it to me, so I asked them to record it. They’re joined by dear friends and ongoing collaborators Adam Tendler and Ian Rosenbaum. The idea is to take the imperfect, slightly out-of-tune sound of clarinet multiphonics and make something beautiful of it, a way of finding meaning when life feels out of balance.
Barnes Dances
The last piece, Barnes Dances, is built around something we usually ignore: crosswalk signals, the sounds designed to help blind pedestrians cross the street. I recorded them everywhere I went, from Reykjavík to my own corner in Jersey City, and tried to turn them into something strange and musical. It was co-commissioned by Rocket City New Music, who helped create this new video:
Daniel Stephen Johnson’s full liner note is on my Substack, along with score videos for New Addresses and South Catalina.
Release Show
Hub makes its Miller Theatre debut with music from the album, on a program with works by Elijah Daniel Smith and Dai Wei. Admission is free, and doors open at 5:30.
Tue, Nov 10 · 6 PM · Miller Theatre
Altalena New Music Days
I’m co-curating this festival, which brings Hungarian and New York composers and performers together in a loft for two evenings of concerts and conversations. On the first night, the Sixth Degree Sextet plays New Addresses and Why Was I Born Between Mirrors; on the second, flutist Anna Pintér plays Liminal Highway.
Dec 3 & 4 · Clara Aich Studio, Manhattan
Full season details, tickets, and program notes: christophercerrone.com/events