Composer Wayne Horvitz pays musical tribute to poet Richard Hugo

Wayne Horvitz turned 60 this fall, and he’s celebrating the way any jazz musician worth his salt would—by playing an epic ton of gigs. The illustrious composer, pianist, and local jazz booster (he opened The Royal Room in 2011) released a new album in July, called Some Places Are Forever Afternoon.

It features 12 cleanly modern compositions for septet—some gently lilting like a waltzing couple, some slinking around corners like a Siamese cat, some barging in like a drunk. Each of the pieces was inspired by a poem by Richard Hugo, the White Center-born writer known for his tightly evocative descriptions of rundown Northwest towns. Horvitz is touring the album across the Northwest this month, including a stop at the Cornish College concert hall (710 East Roy Street, on Capitol Hill) as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival (10/10). In an email exchange, I spoke with Horvitz about this and other fall concerts.

B.D. In addition to touring your new album this month, you are playing a live score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (10/26 at the Moore Theatre) and premiering a newly commissioned world-premiere piece with the Seattle Symphony (10/29 at Benaroya Hall). Was there a creative explosion that led you to make all this new work, or did some of the pieces come together long ago?

W.H. Well the Caligari thing I have had, in one form or another, since, believe or not, the very early ’80s, when I did a score for a theater version of the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The main Hugo project was commissioned almost two years ago, and I wrote most of it last summer. The orchestra piece I have been thinking about for a while, and then I went to Wyoming for a month in April and holed up in a cabin and wrote most of it.

B.D. What do you most relate to, personally or artistically, when it comes to Richard Hugo’s writing?

W.H. Really the language. I relate to his sense of the land, the small towns, the post-industrialized landscape of semi-rural and urban America. But I can also see how people—not me, but plenty of people—might see him as another middle aged white guy who over romanticizes drinking and diners and driving and decaying landscapes. I can’t imagine not loving the language, however. There are lines I can read over and over again, and they come more alive each time.

B.D. Between the new album, the Caligari score and Seattle Symphony commission, which one was the most challenging for you and why?

W.H. That’s easy: the orchestra piece. An orchestra piece, particularly if you do all of it yourself, which I am, including the copying and laying out the parts etc., is like project managing a huge project of any sort. Creativity aside, it is literally hundreds of thousands of tiny details, all of which are inter-dependent on each other.

B.D. How will people be able to tell “it’s a Horvitz”? Is there a common thread we can sense running through all your work?

W.H. When it comes to how people perceive my work, there are basically two types. The first group always comments on how wildly different my projects are from each other. I see this as a fairly superficial observation. The other group comments on how all my music has a commonality to it, harmonically especially, but also in other ways. This is certainly the way I feel. I like to joke that I have been recycling the same three licks since I was 17. But then again, you can, in a broad sense, say the same thing about Mozart or Thelonious Monk, so I can’t be accused of being modest…. I may, in fact, be keeping very good company.

B.D. How do you plan to stay sane during this intense performance period? Coffee? Isolation tank? A good mystery novel?

W.H. Man, it’s the getting it all together that is the hard part, the doing it is the easy part. I can’t wait til the performance period, I just have to get up and get to the next gig. It’s the writing, the copying, the emailing, the planning of logistics, the everything else except the gig that makes you crazy.

Follow Wayne Horvitz’s performance schedule at waynehorvitz.net