Member Since: 5/25/2006
Band Website: NeonEgypt.com
Band Members: HARRISON GOLDBERG - Tenor, Alto, and Soprano saxophones
STEVEN MILLER - Shendai Ceremonial Drums, gongs, bells, cymbals, and miscellaneous percussion. The Shendai drums are a one-of-a-kind melodic set, a cross between Taiko drums and Timpani, and are played with specially designed percussion mallets.
Influences: World Jazz, African, Middle Eastern and Oriental music, Gagaku, Noh (No) Theatre, Free Jazz, Creative Music, New Music, Mysticism, Taiko.Significant individuals include Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Paul Winter, Paul McCandless, Al Gromer Khan, Hamza el Din, and numerous other great players worldwide.
Sounds Like: Hmm... tough to say. Kind of like Paul McCandless, Oregon, Paul Winter, Ian Bederman, Codona, Pharoah Sanders, Jan Garbarek, and/or Wayne Shorter. But the Shendai drums are a unique instrument, and the fully improvised "intuitive" pieces we play have the flavor of jazz, but are quite non-traditional, yet also not what is usually termed "free jazz". So in the end, we really only sound like ourselves.
Despite this, people frequently compare our music to the artists on our influences list, and also, surprisingly, to Miles Davis. We think it's something about the jazz "feel".
Some of the most valuable musical training we ever undertook was a regimen of intuitive silence and listening exercises with our San Francisco Bay Area improv art collaborative Tabula Rasa. This work was intended to help us begin to escape the traditional jazz framework that we had drilled into ourselves since childhood, and foster more free musical expression. The group was inspired mainly by the experimental 'Intuitive Music' concepts of KarlHeinz Stockhausen, plus the work of several other 20th century musical pioneers including John Cage, Steve Reich, Edgard Varese, and Anthony Braxton.
Tabula Rasa's four musicians (there were also dancers and visual artists) strove to begin to hear music in new ways, outside the usual constraints of key and time signature, familiar chord progressions, melodic forms, etc. The ultimate goal was to free ourselves to create new music spontaneously in the present moment, both while recording and in live performance, without the benefit of any advance planning, or even a conceptual framework. At first extraordinarily difficult, this gradually became not just easier but also enormously liberating, so that we eventually found making intuitive music far more satisfying and stimulating than the best traditional forms, which seemed overly restrictive and two-dimensional to us by comparison. Inspiration had become the order of the day.
Neon Egypt carries this work forward while revisiting our roots in the forms and sensibilities of jazz. Please enjoy the journey with us!
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Record Label: PHENOMALY Records
Type of Label: Indie