BoneBox

In the fall of 2000, Bryan Hooten and I sat next to each other in first-year music theory class at the University of Southern Mississippi. He was an 18-year-old Jazz Major and I a 26-year-old returning to academia, and soon to transfer into the Jazz department.

“Pesci,” he said to me one day in his lazy drawl, out loud, in the middle of a big band rehearsal, “you’re so old and in college.”

We started talking early about a band he wanted to form. I told him I’d only do it if we booked gigs and either 1) refused to play them or 2) came dressed as our own security detail.  He went forward with it anyway, asking Larry Panella, the Director of Jazz Studies, to sanction it as our chamber music credit. Thus, Astrolab was born (Mr. Panella wanted to call it “Hooten-anny,” over my dead body). We recorded extensively and toured from Atlanta to New Orleans for several years, quickly creating a lasting impression on the sleepy little college town of Hattiesburg with our mash ups of modern Jazz, funk, and hip hop (Bryan had bars).

The son of a band director, young Bryan was, even then, a prolific composer and arranger. A voracious listener and reader, he possessed an ability to synthesize various forms of music and mold it into a genre seamlessly.  I hated him for that, and I still do.  His harmonic palette and orchestration chops were far more mature than his training suggested and he wielded it with force that still maintained a sense of wry, Ivy-league-brains-stuck-in-the-ignorant-South humor that deliberately went over people’s heads. Also, he was a good trombone player.  After Astrolab broke up (bands always do) and we graduated and left Southern, Bryan went on to grad school at VCU, teaching and playing, writing and recording, arranging and experimenting, got married and became a dad. All of these things gave us lots more besides music to talk about, and he became a fixture on my Board of Directors.

After the opera, looking externally for projects and finding none, I called Bryan and asked if he’d be hip to doing a trans-Atlantic duo meetup.  I’d write for his trombone and me on guitar, we’d record audio and video, splice them together and release online. He said cool.  The writing was easy. I wrote the trombone parts with his exact voice in mind - I knew it well - and I wrote the guitar parts on the guitar, with the idea that they had to be playable. Time passed, Bryan’s son was born, and time got tight. 

It got even tighter when I started practicing my parts, the truth that they were beyond the state of my technique becoming bitterly more clear with each practice session.  I had always been a competent guitarist but, like most of my career, I got by on guitar mostly by showing up, my technique on the instrument plateauing during school.  Quietly, I started letting the piece slide. 

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The pit for THE STRANGERS was an embarrassment of riches, filled with fabulous players from the Gürzenich Orchestra and filled out by local monsters. One such monster was guitarist Ian Griffiths, who I had put up for the job specifically. I’m going to feel really old writing this, but I got to know Ian through his parents, a musical couple who my wife and I got to know through church. (I was right, I do feel really old for writing that). Being a guitarist, I knew that I wanted the guitar parts to be featured in the score, and I knew that he would be able to make them shine, and he did.

Playing the Trombone book in the STRANGERS pit was Carsten Luz, the associate Principal Trombone for Gürzenich, who also played on a brass and percussion piece I wrote for the orchestra during COVID. I learned so much from having him play that book, the biggest lesson being: writing Jazz styles idiomatically while writing idiomatically for classically trained players is a matter of notation. 

Once I broke the bonds of the classical/Jazz, oil/water, conceptual/technical dichotomy, I found that I could honestly communicate to any player what I wanted and how, and that lesson - learned from players like Carsten - in and of itself cracked the code of how to integrate the various sides of my musical upbringing to say what I want to say in any given project.  (This also requires a fuck-off attitude which came later, after the opera, and with a dose of realism.)   

The aforementioned brass and percussion piece was commissioned as part of a project to give said brass and percussion players in Gürzenich something to do as most reduced-forces works the orchestra could find were for strings and winds (If you recall, ensembles had to play reduced works in order to abide with distancing mandates). Guerzenich commissioned a slew of Brass and percussion works with the restrictions being instrumentation and time (under 5 minutes). My take was New Orleans street bands; the resulting piece - PARADE - was fun, and the players liked it (double score).

I don't put any credence in reviews. I understand their existence in the ecosystem, I see what the state of music criticism has become, and I use blurbs from them when they are useful. One review of PARADE, however, stuck with me because it brushed off the piece as it contained “...heaped portions of syncopation and jazz idioms that seem to be de rigueur for contemporary pieces of this kind.” Being, at that time, quite self-conscious about the combination of my various musical heritages, having been trained that they should remain separate-but-equal, and with the experience that Jazz players and classical players alike had been skeptical of the endeavor, the comment stuck in my craw.

I think now, however, that the comment was correct. I have heard so many works that try to incorporate Jazz into concert performance. Beyond clichè, or de rigueur - or any other French - what I notice about these works (and I’m painting with a wide brush here) is that most of them do a very poor job of doing so.  I’m here to tell you - it’s fucking difficult to incorporate these two musics in a way that doesn’t water down either. Rather than everybody doing it, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it well.

Anyway, after Carsten performed on PARADE, I was really glad to see him in the pit for the opera. And this is where notation comes in. There are specific things that flummox classical players - orchestra players in particular, those from German orchestras in particular particular. Rather than avoid them, or grit my teeth and bear whatever came out, I relied on the most specific notation - both rhythmic and stylistic - to show my players what to do to make the feel come across. Composers are blessed with a dictionary of notational options at our disposal, and players are trained to understand them.  Finding the exact notation that can also be uncomplicated enough to decipher in a limited rehearsal sphere is far more difficult and rewarding than writing “Swing!” over some eighth notes, putting a ding-dinga-ding on a ride cymbal, and expecting it to come out the way your MIDI playback suggested it would. That would be de rigueur.

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I had only written for guitar in a concert setting on two occasions - a short solo suite and THE STRANGERS. Its unamplified presence in an orchestra has to be handled very delicately (again, I turn to Zimmermann’s DIE SOLDATEN) and the historic poop-in the-punch-bowl quality of an electric in an orchestral setting is unfortunately well documented (even in Zappa’s orchestral works with a rock band attached can one hear the wall between the ensembles). What I’m talking about is integration - how to add guitar (or any other non-traditional concert instrument) into a concert setting in a way that utilizes its specific contributions while folding it into an ensemble that welcomes the addition. 

The Trombone/Guitar piece was a starting off point. I was writing for two players (at least in spirit) who knew each other through the context of the multi-genre mash up, two players who had watched each other through not just career ups and downs, CV rewrites, interview prep, invention and reinvention, but also marriage, children, the loss of parents, middle fucking age. Talk about a mash up. 

Also, it had to kick ass. I deliberately started integrating my rock and metal experience along with the jazz, fusion, and concert writing.  

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I still had the piece in the back of my mind when I was at Oper Köln’s 2025-26 season kick off event, Theaterfest. We had just come out of a season preview concert and my daughter was at the craft table decorating a mask when Carsten appeared before me. He had been playing the concert and had paused to talk to someone on the way to the orchestra green room. Carsten’s a big dude and is hard to miss, but he was literally arms length away from me, so I reached out. Sure he’d be interested in something new; Ian was too. Within two months we had a read through, then another rehearsal and an audio/video recording session after the holidays.  They absolutely nailed it.

And as for the title - it was a throw away (Bone = Trombone; Box = gitbox, guitar). I flimflammed into the first rehearsal thinking about a more permanent title, but Carsten and Ian disagreed.  It should stay, they said, so it did. 

Neither Bryan nor I played on the world premiere recording, but were both in that piece - finding grooves, talking smack, trading off.  

Listen to BONEBOX for Trombone and Electric Guitar here.