See the video here

Doc Severinsen

Just now, I surfed around to try to identify what train line that would have been (the Chicago & North Western), and discovered, or was reminded, that the West Chicago city logo prominently features a steam locomotive. The original name of the town was Junction, because it was the junction of the St. Charles and Aurora branches with the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad. Personal, political and historical all in one: my family was where it was in the 1970s because the railroad was where it was in the 1850s. And the railroad was where it was for many reasons, including the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.

So, as it happens, this early train memory of mine is a small example of one of the things we want Empire Builder to do – to give a reminder of the way that large political and economic decisions can reach in and shape individual lives.

Another image: a reel of Super 8 movie film, taken by my late dad, of the train on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railway in the Rockies. The little steam engine doggedly pulls the train up through the Cumbres Pass along curves so tight that you can see (or film) the locomotive from your window in the passenger car. The picture shakes because the train is rattling. All kinds of stuff associated with this image. Dad at his sunniest, experiencing a cool old train in action. The lulling boredom of family trips to historical destinations, which we’ve grafted onto Jimmy, the hapless computer programmer in Empire Builder. The dry harsh West, where I grew up. The sensation that trains can serve as time machines.

Many of the things I associate with trains have cropped up in my writing. Characters in a few different scripts manage to convey I am far away and I am telling you something in the same signal, the most extreme example being the killers who speak the monologues in Murderess, who get more alien the more they explain themselves. Both The Donner Gold and “Grasping” have characters so obsessed with family history that they can’t live their own lives; Sky, in Empire Builder, has a similarly hungry past. In Frankenstein Incarnate: The Passions of Mary Shelley, my version of Percy Bysshe Shelley bubbles over at the ingenuity of an electrostatic generator and is, briefly, 100% my dad checking out a steam locomotive. All that said, I never wrote about trains themselves until I started working with George Maurer.

I met George in 2008 at a Composer-Lyricist workshop at Nautilus Music Theater. In the assignment we were given, he first had to write two musical themes, and then I had to write words for them. When we met to discuss the themes George had written, I said that one of them sounded like a train to me. Within minutes, we were exchanging core stories about fathers, grandfathers, trains and the passage of time. We wrote a short piece called “Night Train,” which started with some complicated ideas about time travel within train cars, but got simpler and simpler till it became this: a train passenger is worried about getting to her destination on time. The conductor, collecting her ticket, points out the sights that can be seen through the window. The passenger loses her anxiety in the delight of watching the things and people they pass.

I learned a lot from working on “Night Train” and really liked how it turned out. More than that, I found it cool-to-the-point-of-scary how quickly George and I were able to dive into very emotional subject matter and turn it into a good story. So when I had the opportunity to work with him again, I jumped at it.

Trains have always represented something a little bit different to me.  I remember standing at the gated railroad crossing outside my grandma Mildred’s apartment building in Blue Island, IL; a little kid being prompted by his mom to wave, shyly, to the engineer guiding the Rock Island Express as it rumbled by, several times a day, on its way to the rail yards west of downtown Chicago. Of course, I thought the loud blast of the steam whistle  (originally referred to as a steam trumpet) was sounded just for me (and maybe it was), which only enhanced the excitement of feeling the rumbling of great diesels, of hearing the rhythmic clacking of wheels, and of seeing graffiti-festooned boxcars slide by (I usually lost count after 20 or so had passed).  But then, came the inevitable sadness as the crossing bells fell into silent respect with the passing of that final car, the red caboose  (no longer required to be used by railroads, since the 1980s). Hopefully, mom would let me linger just a little bit longer for the next one to come along.  Our collective cultural imagery also forever reminds us that we, too, all somewhat linger around for that next train, or perhaps that final one.  A powerful image in our American culture: trains.

The most recent insight into my own romantic notions about trains is that my artistic imagination is inevitably affected most immediately by the sound of a train, versus the sight of one.  The long, deep, resonant pulse of a train whistle brings me right back to my childhood, yes, but this instinct seems even more primal; what great Neanderthal ancestor of ours, cringing in the dark of a cave at the howling of some great unknown beast filling the night air outside, didn’t appropriate an immediate respect for and fearful attachment to that voice of the wild?  Perhaps this is why train whistles in the night always seem mournful and distant, why the Doppler effect forever entrances yet perplexes, and why the brisk cold wind that suddenly picks up and scatters the trash outside the dark, sinister mouth of a railroad tunnel portends far more than the arrival of an immense midnight train on it’s way from somewhere to anywhere.  Trains, to me, are magical, time-traveling harbingers of what was and what may be.

Between Melancholy and Sweet Nostalgia

Train imagery has been influential for several of my projects over time: from the blues-ballad and indie film sixonefiveseven (2001), on the events surrounding the October, 1926 derailment of a passenger train in Columbus, WI  (more on sixonefiveseven later on in this blog), to my most current project, my first opera, Empire Builder, (lyric by Anne Bertram, www.theatreunbound.com ), the development of which this particular blog will largely be about as we research and prepare the script and score of Empire Builder for it’s first public reading on February 6-7, 2012  (go to See Us on the menu for more details).

And then there is the occasional spontaneous train-related piece.  In December, 2003, Larry Schug, a poet from St. Joseph, MN came up to me at a CD signing at the College of St. Benedict, pulled a wrinkled up piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out on my piano, handed it to me, saying “I woke up from a dream about a train last night, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I wrote this. You should set it to music!”

Between Melancholy and Sweet Nostalgia

I want you to hear this

like you might hear a train in the night

an hour before you see the light

of its great diesel engine

rockin’ through that vast grassland between

Trinidad and La Junta

where the dreams of coyotes

outnumber the dreams of people

I want you to hear this in your sleep

I want it to wake you so you curse it

so it puts a feeling in your stomach

somewhere between melancholy and sweet nostalgia

I want you to think of faces and places

that have come and gone

like a hundred fifty boxcars

loaded with grain from a plowed up prairie

and saw logs ripped from a mountain

I want you to wake from a dream

you can’t quite remember

a dream that lingers

like a humming in steel tracks

leaves you a little bit wobbly

when your feet first touch the floor

that’s how I want you to hear this

c 2003, Larry Schug (used with permission）

I was immediately taken with it.  I had recently begun working on setting some of the selected poetry of the German poet Rilke to music around that time (see my blog “For the Sake of a Single Poem:  Maurer sets Rilke poetry to Music”), and my immediate thoughts with Between Melancholy and Sweet Nostalgia were of mixing organic train sounds with some more ethereal synthesized pads that evoked trains, and to then utilize the voice of long-time theater professor Tom Darnal, of the College of St Benedict, to read the poem over the top of that.  I found a recording of the last run of a steam engine before it’s retirement, manipulated the pitch to make it sound deeper, wider, and, along with manipulating a patch called “Steam Pipes” from my Reaktor software, set these as the bed to Tom reading Larry’s poem with a variety of character voices, tones, and emotions.   I utilized the ones I found useful, and in the end, I think it sounded pretty damn cool.   On the tail end of this recording of the poem, I placed another song I had started writing as far back as 1992, my first year full time on the road, a song I called Freedom’s Dust, which was my musical sketch of what the wide-open road felt like to a 20-something guy on his own for the first time.   Somehow, it seemed right to connect this to Between Melancholy and Sweet Nostalgia.

I hesitated to release Between Melancholy … on a CD project because, as one of my friends said, “it ‘s pretty damn sinister, George”, which, of course, I found fascinating.  Perhaps it was because it tapped that aforementioned ancestral, primal link within him, which meant that I was getting the reaction I wanted.  Besides, there was never a CD project I could put it on (at least not yet), because it was so different from anything I had released before.

Well, if a blog is for viewing ideas and thoughts on things as they develop, then I’ll use this one to publish a few of these rough-hewn, unfinished ideas, so as to show you what goes into putting an idea together.  A blog on trains seems to be the perfect place!

Take a listen: BETWEEN MELANCHOLY/FREEDOM’S DUST

Next installment:  The story behind sixonefiveseven, and more on George Maurer and Anne Bertram’s upcoming new opera, Empire Builder.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MINNEAPOLIS —The members of the George Maurer Group now have publicly acknowledged what their fans have known for years:

They’re a bit twisted — beautifully, refreshingly twisted, like a citrus garnish in a musical martini.

Their new live CD, aptly named “Twisted,” shows them at their kinetic best as they stir things up with their jazz-infused, polished yet rambunctious twist on music that spans eras and styles. The track list includes everything from blues and jazz standards (the title track is a version of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross classic later done by Joni Mitchell) to the Beatles.

The CD will be released Saturday, Aug. 20, and the group celebrates with a sold-out show that night on their home stage at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant in Minneapolis.

The release of “Twisted” celebrates the 25^th anniversary of Maurer’s recording label, Pine Curtain Records, and marks the label’s 20^th release.

It’s also the George Maurer Group’s fourth CD and first non-holiday release since 2000. Yes, it’s time, and the sassy CD art is a perfect representation of the high-octane music inside. The cover, featuring vocalist Ann Michels, has a retro theme that represents both the group’s respect for history and somewhat irreverent take on classic concepts.

This is the George Maurer Group’s most energetic, sophisticated recording of its 13-year career, capturing the deep talent, seat-of-the-pants style and humorous character of their live performance. It was recorded March 5 at the Dakota during the same show PBS affiliate Pioneer Public Television recorded for a segment of its “Pioneer Presents” series.

In addition to George Maurer Group trademarks like Maurer’s virtuoso piano, Rich Manik’s dynamic saxes and Scott Chabot’s finessed drums, “Twisted” features five vocalists, all of whom perform in such harmonic perfection on “Drive My Car” that you might almost wish there had been a fifth Beatle.

Other highlights include Richard Witteman’s vocals on “I Can’t Get Started,” which include some alternative lyrics – a shout-out to Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer, for example – that he snuck in á la Ira Gershwin, much to the band’s and audience’s amusement.

Guitarist Muggsy Lauer scats himself a storm on “Caldonia” while Witteman tears up the trumpet solo. Rachel Holder sings a version of “Killing Me Softly” that could make Roberta Flack cry, and bassist Jeff Engholm cranks up the attitude for the bluesy “Your Mind is on Vacation.”

The incomparable Michels delivers a show-stopping performance in the only song that was not recorded at the March 5 Dakota show. The version of “Wallflower,” a Latin-tinged original written by Witteman, was recorded in 2003 for the Minnesota Public Radio Morning Show.

“It’s the best recording we’ve ever done of that song and it’s a nod to our past, when the group was only five years old,” Maurer says.

“Twisted” will be available on iTunes and georgemaurer.com and at the Electric Fetus in St. Cloud and Minneapolis and the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University bookstores.

The Pioneer Public Television piece on the George Maurer Group is still airing on its Minnesota PBS affiliates and also can be viewed online at http://video.pioneer.org/video/2024012739

July 7, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

George Maurer Group featured in public television series about regional artists who have made an impact

MINNEAPOLIS —The stars of the Minnesota jazz stage are now being featured in all their improv glory on the small (or medium, or big) screen.

PBS affiliate Pioneer Public Television is featuring the George Maurer Group in a segment of its “Pioneer Presents” series about performers who have made an impact on local and regional music in a variety of genres.

The George Maurer Group’s 30-minute segment first aired June 25, and the series will be rebroadcast Saturday evenings throughout July on Pioneer, the PBS television affiliate serving 40 counties in western and southern Minnesota. It also is available online at http://video.pioneer.org/video/2024012739

Pioneer filmed the bulk of the video March 5 at Minneapolis hotspot the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant, where the George Maurer Group regularly packs the house. The segment features interviews with Maurer interspersed with footage from the live performance. Highlights include Richard Witteman’s trumpet magic on “I Got Rhythm,” Ann Michels’ silken vocals accompanied by Rich Manik’s beautiful flute on the group’s original “Wallflower,” guitarist Muggsy Lauer, drummer Scott Chabot and bassist/vocalist Jeff Engholm at their bluesy best on “Your Mind is on Vacation,” and Maurer’s virtuoso piano throughout the red-hot set.

Eric Olson directs the “Pioneer Presents” series, funded through a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Olson and Maurer first met when Olson was co-host of KARE-11’s Morning Show, on which Maurer has performed many times beginning in 1995. When Olson received Legacy funding for the series, he immediately thought of Maurer and his group’s contributions to Minnesota’s jazz heritage.

The public television segment caps a stellar year for Maurer as he celebrates the 25^th anniversary of his recording label, Pine Curtain Records. He recently received an $8,300 grant from Minnesota State Arts Board to fund the first reading of his first opera, “Empire Builder,” about trains and U.S. immigration from 1885 to present.

His second collaboration with Saint Paul City Ballet took the stage March 25-27 at the Ordway McKnight Theatre in St. Paul and featured Maurer playing his own compositions performed live to choreography by Saint Paul City Ballet.

He made his first appearance with the Minnesota Orchestra in May when he co-arranged four songs, performed in the shows and directed the band and vocalists for the world-renowned 85-piece orchestra’s “’80s Rewind!” concerts at Orchestra Hall.

“My Dear Lewis,” a show for which he wrote an original score, this year made its New York City premiere and has shown in Seattle, Amsterdam and Taiwan. Last July, Maurer had the unique honor of arranging four songs for the Glacier Symphony’s concert to mark Glacier National Park’s 100^th anniversary.

Next up: The George Maurer Group is completing its next live CD, “Twisted,” recorded during the second set of its March 5 show at The Dakota.

]]> 0 http://www.georgemaurer.com/2011/05/george-maurer-group-video/ http://www.georgemaurer.com/2011/05/george-maurer-group-video/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 23:31:47 +0000 admin http://www.georgemaurer.com/?p=467

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Backstage with Maurer

MINNEAPOLIS —Sweet dreams are made of this, at least for George Maurer and Ken Vork.

Both make major contributions to the Minnesota Orchestra’s May 6 and 7 “’80s Rewind!” concerts.

The show features a few firsts for Maurer, who serves as bandleader, vocal director and piano/keyboard player:

• His first performance with the 85-piece Minnesota Orchestra.
• His first mash of Yes and the Eurythmics.
• The first time in a long time he gets to wear his black leather pants.

Arranger, composer and pianist Maurer collaborated with Vork, Paynesville High School band director and St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra trombone player, to co-arrange four songs for the show: Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” and a mash of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

“It’s arranging rock music for pops orchestra, which I haven’t done before,” Maurer said.

Eighties music certainly had no shortage of synthesizer, which makes Maurer’s stage talent — and a keyboard on loan from Fabulous Armadillo Greg Armstrong — a perfect fit. He plays piano and keyboards and leads the four-piece rock band and six vocalists who accompany the orchestra as it revisits the decade that brought us mullets, “Cheers” and acid-washed jeans.

Although he and the George Maurer Group have graced the stage in Orchestra Hall, Maurer has never before had the opportunity to play with the orchestra. “This will be the largest number of musicians I’ve performed with on stage before,” he said.

Maurer showcases some cool tricks on his keyboard, like the wind, wolf howls, slamming door and Vincent Price laugh in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” on which he will play two different keyboards. He gets to play the legendary opening to Van Halen’s “Jump” and the classic “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which comes with directions to play it “overly dramatic.”

Oh, and he gets to rock his trés ’80s leather pants.

It all adds up to a new musical adventure for both Maurer and Vork as they work with one of the country’s most respected orchestras, conducted by Sarah Hicks, who will conduct Sting’s Symphonicity tour this summer.  Next up: The band and vocalists, under Maurer’s direction, bring “’80s Rewind!” to the Florida Symphony.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MINNEAPOLIS — Buckle up and get ready for an auditory adventure.

Minneapolis-based composer and performer George Maurer displays his diverse array of musical styles on his new compilation of 12 original compositions, “Songs from the Wayward Journey: The Nicollet Island Compositions Volume 1.”

It’s a journey in that Maurer traverses a myriad of musical landscapes, from bebop to ballet, across Twin Cities stages and through some heavy-duty subject matter. It’s wayward, well, because George is at the helm, and he’s had his fingers in all kinds of interesting projects over the past five years. The new CD presents some sides of Maurer’s sound you might not have heard yet – pop songs, poetry set to music, an industrial rock college football anthem, even a hint of Pink Floyd.

First and foremost, it’s a dramatic journey.

“Overall, the entire album is theatrical,” Maurer says. “Each song is connected to a commission for a stage, and connected to a story of life.”

For example, two songs were written as part of “Enticed,” a commission for Saint Paul City Ballet, and two come from “Stations of the Heart,” a song cycle commissioned by Nautilus Music-Theater that Maurer wrote with lyricist Jim Payne. It premiered in March 2009 on Theater Latte De’s Latte Dark series at the Southern Theater featuring vocalist Ann Michels and directed by Jef Hall-Flavin.

Acclaimed Twin Cities theater vocalist Dieter Bierbrauer is featured on two numbers based on the work of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Leslie Ball of Ball’s Cabaret makes an appearance. Maurer also accompanies two up-and-coming vocal talents, jazz singer Rachel Holder and the soulful Ben Bakken (Children’s Theatre Company’s “High School Musical,” and Chanhassen Dinner Theaters’ “Altar Boyz”).

“Half of this CD wouldn’t exist without arts organizations like Saint Paul City Ballet and Nautilus Music-Theater,” Maurer says. “And those organizations wouldn’t be able to commission new music or theatrical works without the private donors who support them. To me, this release is as much a celebration of Minnesota’s thriving arts community as it is a compilation of my work.”

Maurer is no stranger to the stage, having music directed three shows in the past two years at the Chanhassen: “Respect,” “Swing” and “Altar Boyz.” He also wrote for two Ivy Award-winning shows, Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company’s “Woman Before a Glass” featuring Sally Wingert and directed by Peter Rothstein, and Nautilus Music-Theater’s “Sister Stories,” starring Christina and Jennifer Baldwin and directed by Ben Krywosz.

At the heart of much of the CD’s drama is human interaction as the “Wayward Journey” winds through a variety of relationships, both of the spirit and of the flesh. Several of the pieces focus on relationships, be it the unrequited love on “You Don’t See Me,” the sad farewell on “When You Said Goodbye” or the spiritual questioning of “What Will You Do, God, When I Die.”

In addition, half of the CD was recorded live, so listeners can witness that dynamic relationship between the musicians. A highlight is “Drop Dead Bop,” packed with 15 — count ’em, 15 — musicians, a bop-load of notes and energy galore. Rich Manik’s manic alto sax solo alone serves up a compelling argument for the song’s title.

Many of the tracks also speak to the relationship between Maurer the composer, the music itself, the lyrics and the performers or musicians he is writing the music for, be it a lyricist and vocalist as is the case in the compositions from his “Stations of the Heart” song cycle, or a jazz group, ballet troupe — or a football team.

“As a composer, I really have to have a lot of insight into the organization I am writing for,” he explains.

Case in point: “The World in Which We Live,” written as part of Maurer’s “Enticed” commission for Saint Paul City Ballet, relates closely to what was happening in the world in 2006. “The choreographer riffed off of that,” Maurer explains. “There were a lot of short moves to the feel of the piece, too. I’d say it was our sort of way of liberating the human spirit from feeling trapped and contained in a world that seemed dark.”

He also has to understand the musicians who will be performing each piece, whether it’s Paul “Stretch” Diethelm’s raucous guitar solo on the Saint John’s football anthem or the two very different vocalists, Bakken and Holder, who perform the two very different versions of “When You Said Goodbye” that appear on the CD.

“I can honestly say I have relationships with all of the 40-plus musicians who play on the CD, and the fact that I know them and their music, and know them well, allows me to compose music that takes advantage of the strengths of the incredibly deep talent pool we have in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud areas,” Maurer says.

On “Songs from the Wayward Journey,” Maurer firmly establishes his talent for transcending his jazz and solo piano roots and traveling on a multi-textured musical path that redefines the tapestry of his trademark Pine Curtain sound.

“Songs from the Wayward Journey” is available at the Electric Fetus Minneapolis location, on http://www.georgemaurer.com and will be released on iTunes Nov. 1.