Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome! Welcome to another in an unending series of performances by the Disaster Opera Theatre.
Genius that we are, and greying, it is with a mixture of pleasure and gentle sorrow---bitterness even---that we find ourselves yet again in the comfortable and confining confines of the Hotel Utah. Why do we love this melancholy space? I do not venture to guess. It is alarming. Why is it that we wish to be elsewhere just now? The answers are rooted in the incessant chatter emanating from the bar. The inhabitants of this ecosystem have found unique torments for the nerve-jangled performer. At the same time, we must remember the infinite pleasures of silence and repose; that is, we regret having arisen from our collective beds, lured by promises of two free drinks at the bar.
Tonight, therefore, we will ask the question: "what does it take to get a bit of the quiet and contemplative life, so romanticized by poets over the years?" Our studies conclude in inconclusive maunderings. Our applications for additional funding are returned with the words "Ha Ha!" written in what appears to be human blood. Sullen and destitute, we come before you, imagination and bank-books equally empty and exhausted.
Nonetheless, the giant wheels of science turn on, crushing those too small or too slow to move out of its path. Tonight we will be conducting a sequence of simultaneously flawed and fraudulent experiments. Arbitrarily, the evening's unfoldment in sound continues with a tenor saxophone solo performance.
[Sax Solo]
And now, let us move to Act 2, Scene 2, of tonight's premiere performance of "Biting the Hand..." an opera about anything and nothing, sound and silence, etcetera; redefining music shamelessly to suit itself, and bulldozing the opposition into a quick retreat from its great crushing jaws of vengeance. What I mean to say is that this is a powerful and---quite possibly---moving piece which repositions itself historically backward in time, all the way to the birth of life on Earth 3.9 billion years ago. Given the momentum generated by such an unwieldy transition, there can be little doubt that one of several failure-mode operatives must be employed by each and every one of you. I.E., drinking is tonight a wise course of action.
And now, let us get the dub thing happening. You know, what I know, which is this: "Nice Music for Nice People" equals excellent entertainment value. Unplanned, unrehearsed, thoroughly unjustifiable as I think you will find tonight's performance, it is what we have; and what we have we will give to you. Ours is a pure generosity of the heart. And let me say that I want it to be otherwise. I want costumes and sets and curtains and all the trappings associated with grand opera. Most notoriously, the diamonds which are worn to opening night. Tonight is opening night. Imagine my distress. Now give me a minute to get this thing going...
"Amy's Part" begins here
Every year the recording industry convenes a solemn occasion to perpetuate a serious misrepresentation. Consider the following. This year, as it always happens, the recording industry blows it's smokestacks off, the men come sliding down the dinosaurs of the corridors of Warner Brothers, Sony, RCA, and others, in order that dark suits and nice shoes be worn to a big deal event where a deadly serious event occurs in which arrests are made and innocent people beaten. Have you seen the photographs? It happens at this time every year, when the noon whistle blows and the garbage pails are filled to the brim nationally with sonic refuse, all the noise of the world being gathered into a sort of virtual ball to be tossed in the general direction of an overflowing toilet which brims with executive figures in tuxedos and gowns. The jails too are overcrowded, and although we can't seem to afford to build more, we can always find a few dollars for the latest recording of independent music by last week's star animal act and next week's unknown lounge crooner: I speak, no doubt, of the very performers who fill this very room with music. People get socked in the nose all over the world, and garbage flows in raw streams into the oceans, and we drink it up like we don't know any better. It is a mania which grips us.
Consider the following. This Hotel Utah business is a growth industry. Every Tuesday improvised music is produced by the workers for the bosses. Unabsorbed by the masses, it settles into a giant pool beneath this floor. The bosses pay the workers, give them a couple drinks each. The workers get sloshed, can't play the music, get lost in the middle of what they were doing, and pretty soon everyone's suing everyone else for excess damages. You get the picture. It's a field day for the lawyers.
Tonight we hope to rectify the situation. The model of constitutional democracy has recently been disposed of by the American people. A new form of government is being trotted in from the bullpen. If we act quickly, we can jump aboard, act like we know what we're doing, make a few bucks along the way. Otherwise, it's just me here telling you here that we're foolish for being here... and what sense does that make? See, there's no narrative structure anymore. The good guys never even show up. Traditional drama is thus obsolete.
And so... a word about Disaster Opera Theatre. Conceived of as a name and a frame for improvisation within arbitrary restrictions, and as a soap-dish (if not box) for those certain and un-certain types of snail-shell-sized-homegrown stories of resistence---and as a refuge for the dying art of the saxophone, this is Disaster Opera Theatre.
It is with great pleasure, and a notable lack of queasiness that I now introduce you to my distinguished colleague, Professor L. Kopelovitch, who is one of the world's foremost experts in the filed of raw sound. Music is no more and no less than the physical sensation of the passage of time. Or, in terms that we encounter in our study of mathematics, music is equal to the set of all possible transitions from any one point A to any other point B, as distinguished from among the multiplicity of stasis non-events in the expanding universe. In lay terms: if it's happening, then it's got to be music. If it ain't happening, then by George it's a rubber boot you got on your fishing line; throw it back, fer the love of Pete.
During the previous acts of tonight's opera, Ms K has been making a detailed study of the musical substance of this so-called Hotel Utah Dark Circle Lounge "jazz scene," understanding in her French way as we do in our American-English vernacular that jazz is an oppressive word which denigrates what we do. And so I take great pleasure in concluding my introduction of Ms Kopelovitch with her actual appearance, to share some of her observations, right now, in Act 3, Scene 3.