The ProfessionAlly AlmaTeur Music of Mike Heffley
by Yul Agee Manu...
All of the virtual CDs for free and for sale here comprise a body of work begun in the 1990s, when Mike Heffley was a graduate student at Antioch and Wesleyan Universities, working with Anthony Braxton. Through both institutions, he had free or subsidized access to state-of-the-art recording studios and professional engineers to work on his projects; he was also working as a bandleader and trombonist in the bands of others, most regularly Braxton. He stopped working as a public professional musician around 1997, but (Glenn Gouldishly) kept up a steady trickle of studio projects---some his own, homegrown, others at different professional recording facilities after he left Wesleyan, in 2000.
He pro/con-fesses them all as fiercely amateur (or, to honor his neological and soul-injecting whimsy, "almateur") gestures, by choice and design, for reasons best unfolded in my glosses of them. The recording dates are approximate, if given at all; the cover art is also his.
The music and images are for download only, for two reasons:
1. the artist has liked the feel and sound of all of his music in headphones far better than speakers long before the advent of the iPod. Its mix of personal intimacy and impersonal complexity and nuance just works best, he feels, when piped directly into the thinking, feeling brain, without swimming around in the air of the world first; and
2. he likes both the price (for you) and the cost (to him) of the downloads more than those of the physical CDs (not to mention the real environmental considerations of unbiodegradable plastic). The current value of his music past, present, and future (which is to say NOW) lies largely, for him, in its lowest possible overhead and maintenance.
Heffley has granted my request to add my running narrative about his body of recorded work as a whole to his own brief blurbs on each CD. (Read his account of our first meeting and subsequent relationship.) My desire to do so is threefold:
1. literary; it stems from the personal involvement with his music that has crept up on and overtaken me since we met. I want to explore what making the music here meant to him, and what hearing it meant to me, treating us both as subjects of literary character studies;
2. musical; I want to trace the evolution into what I see as an emerging voice in the jazz-piano tradition of one who had been a schooled and professional trombonist for some three decades, and who took on his new instrument as a total autodidact;
3. ethnomusicological; from my interest in the more public issues of intellectual property rights and controls his recordings raise.
On to the HR music catalogue...
Recordings with Anthony Braxton and free stuff (Bach Cello Suites 1-5 on solo trombone, early/folk Christmas music, original songs)
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Mike Heffley @35, 45, 55...the only three existing photos of him. Not so funny, how time slips away...but something of a framing concept for the music presented here, which was produced roughly from the time of the first to the time of the third photo...Time ReMembered
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