thirteen ways

A fabulous three-page story on 8bb appears in the US/Canada section of February’s BBC Music Magazine. Jeremy Pound interviewed the Mac and me after our  The Only Moving Thing show in Liverpool, and his article deals mostly with the history of the group and our upcoming music directorship of the Ojai Music Festival.

The story is not available online, so I encourage you to pick up an issue at Borders or some such place, but here are a couple of excerpts:

They haven’t changed much since 2006 [...] Appearance-wise, violinist Matt Albert’s formerly cropped hair has become a blond, floppy fringe, clarinettist Michael J Maccaferri’s beard has grown impressively bushy, and flautist Tim Munro has cultured his own whiskers and shot up about a foot in height. Actually, it wasn’t Tim Munro in 2006 [...]

“eighth blackbird is music director,” grins Munro. “That alone presents grammatical problems! There has been a lot of fabulous arguing and going back and forth, as there have been very strong personalities each with different views.

On the first page of the article is a photo of a genteel old man, which prompted some discussion among the group:

“Maybe it’s Sam Melville” [the author of a letter, set by Fred Rzewski in Coming Together, which is discussed in the article]

“Nah, this guy looks all high-falutin n educated n stuff”

“Nick, it’s a picture of you that’s been run through an automatic aging maching…”

“Hm.”

“…bloody hell. It’s Wallace Stevens!”

“God, what illiterate slobs we are. How did we not pick that…”