New Track: NYE Party (Of One)!

NEW TRACK: NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY (OF ONE)

FROM THE FORTHCOMING ALBUM WORDS & SILENCES
 

We have all been wrestling with the urge to be social and the need to stay apart, especially over the holidays. So, I am sharing this new track featuring monk and writer Thomas Merton celebrating New Year's Eve in solitude, with humor and wonder and joy. 

Over the past few years, I've been working on a new album based on archival recordings of Merton. This track features one Merton made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in his hermitage on New Year's Eve, 1967. Here he references pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, and music from Kansas City. 

“This will be a sort of a New Year's Eve party, I guess, from now on. I’m up late. It’s seven o’clock, and instead of going to bed I’m going to sit around and play some records."

The album, called Words & Silences, is a musical portrait of Merton, and brings together sampled recordings of his voice with my own group of wonderful musicians. The recordings he made are intimate, ranging from thoughts on Samuel Beckett, to Sufi mystics, to the 1967 Louisville race riots, to Michel Foucault. Words & Silences often feels like a play, with an exchange between Merton and the ensemble, and subtle references to the music he loved throughout his life, including sacred, folk, John Coltrane, and Kansas City jazz.

Merton also managed to immediately use the tape recorder both as a contemplative tool and a medium for self-discovery. And Merton’s words still feel relevant today, both in terms of the solitude and reflection experienced during the pandemic, and of the demand for racial justice happening across the country. His work shows how the movement and tension between contemplation and action are not opposed; they complement one another.

Jeremy Woodruff: Flute/Bari Sax
Katie Porter Maxwell: Bass Clarinet
Phil Rodriguez: Trumpet
William Lang: Trombone
Brian Harnetty: Piano

I'm excited to share the rest of the project with you soon, but for now I hope you enjoy this track -- and Happy New Year!
-- Brian
 

(P.S. The archival recording is used with permission from the Thomas Merton Trust, New Directions Publishing Corp., and Now You Know Media.)