Recorded practically live at Tenri Cultural Insitute, Crank sounds like a madman set loose in a cathedral at midnight, an unquiet mind trying to bring order to a recondite chaos, a stranger insisting on discoursing in an unknown tongue while trapped in a vast cavern. Using nothing but drones, buzzes and a penchant for the obscure, this record brings the eavesdropper on a one-way journey with no presumption of safety. But for those who peregrinate by its rope bridges and mountain gondolas uncanny beauty awaits.
Crank is for solo hurdy-gurdy with early reflections and later epiphanies. It’s five strings, a wheel, and the truth.
Releases September 17, 2022.
The long-awaited Volume 2 in the Chamber Prog series is almost here. Ephemera shares with its predecessor, detritus, a commitment to idiosyncracy in all its capriciousness. Taking inspiration from disparate sources - a 19th century aqueduct, an old tool bag, the moon - this record creates new instrumental combinations with equal promiscuity. Hurdy-gurdies fraternize with mountain dulcimers and concertinas, saxophones with marimbas and vibraphones, it’s frankly disturbing. Featuring Jordan Perlson with effortless brilliance on the skins of LaGuardia Gardens and the mellifluous narration of Oliver Hughes on Magnificent Desolation, mixed with sincerity and precision by Brett William Kull, ephemera promises to continue the chamber prog tradition or break it all to pieces.
Releases September 17, 2022.
When I think of progressive rock, I don’t think of shifting time signatures, weird harmonies, or mythological stories; I just think of music that tries to tell a story in a fresh way. But in the interest of full disclosure I should say that this piece I’m calling progressive rock tells the story of a mythological figure, i.e. Theseus, and does it with weird harmonies and shifting time signatures. But no dry ice; that is right out.
It’s an intimate story about a son trying to find his way in his father’s world. It’s also a political story about how one generation’s solutions are often the next generation’s problems. But most importantly, it has odd instruments: waterphone, hurdy-gurdy, shruti box.
I’d like to thank my incomparable narrators, Bobby Michaelides and Michael Lofton, and the brilliant Amy Kohn who sings the Ariadne songs, and the masterful Brett Kull who mixed and mastered the whole thing. Also to Thomas B. Slate for the dry ice.
When I was 14, I bought a used copy of Jackson Browne's For Everyman on vinyl at a flea market, and it changed my life. There have been twists and turns since then, but I've finally made a singer-songwriter album. A songwriter at a piano, or a guitar, or, in this case, a banjo, or a mountain dulcimer, or an English concertina, trying to figure out the times he's come in a series of personal songs.
I hope you enjoy it, but I made it for that teenager: the one wandering around a flea market on a hot Sunday afternoon waiting for his parents to take him back to his turntable, where he'll know whether this new record will blow his mind or if it had gotten too warped in the sun.
I hope he likes it.
In the spring of 1932, a group of WWI veterans set out from Portland, Oregon to march on Washington D.C. They were hoping to influence Congress to pass a bill authorizing a bonus promised in 1924. Dispersal had been set for 1945, but now at the depth of the Great Depression, many of these vets feared they would not make it till then.
Former soldiers joined them from all over the U.S. Their bivouac on the Anacostia Flats – disciplined, integrated, and non-violent – captured the American imagination. In spite of this, the bill failed, Hoover ordered MacArthur to clear them out, and his men set fire to the camps. But they had changed the public sentiment and a similar bill was passed four years later.
Hailed as "a masterpiece" (Brad Lee Stoller, The Stollers) when it was first released, Chamber Prog: detritus has now been re-released. Not just remastered, not just re-mixed, but completely re-recorded with new arrangements. And drums played by the preternatural Jordan Perlson (echolyn, Adrian Belew, Becca Stevens), and mastered by the legendary Brett William Kull, this is chamber prog (whatever that is) at its best.
These ten tracks - nine instrumentals and one with lyrics - run the gamut from driving and gritty to intimate and ethereal and sound a bit like John Coltrane and Igor Stravinsky in a garage band. (I said a bit.)
Jerry Hughes is an independent musician with one foot in popular music, one in music-theater, and one in contemporary classical music. Where he puts his other foot is his own damn business. His chamber opera, The Wood Dancer, with libretto by Richard Schotter, was described as being "like Copland but pushed further." Playbill online called his cabaret theater piece Puppies "quirky, comic and ruminative." Donald Sinta praised his saxophone quartet, saying "Bravo, I was immediately engaged with the piece."
He got his B.A. and M.A. in Music Composition from Queens College (CUNY) where he studied with Thea Musgrave, Joel Mandelbaum, Bruce Saylor & Henry Weinberg and won the Karol Rathaus Award. He has been a composer/lyricist member of the Lehman Engel BMI Musical Theater Workshop, a composer with the Nautilus/New Dramatists Composer-Librettists Studio, and an artist-in-residence at HERE.
He was also artist-in-residence at the Next Stage Company, an interdisciplinary arts ensemble in NY. He has worked as a composer with Columbia University's Playwriting MFA program's lyricist lab. His chamber music has been performed in NY and elsewhere and been honored with three Composers Guild awards. His musical theater work has been seen at Don't Tell Mama's, Collective Unconscious, Tenri Cultural Center, among other venues. He also plays the hurdy gurdy.
jerry (at) jerryhughesmusic (dot) com
