11/02/2023
Andrew Hadro is a stunning performer on Baritone Saxophone. He specializes in playing in the altissimo register of the instrument. Here is a link to a video of his newest recording "Regarding the Moon." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtb3JJ2pRac
You can check out my interview with Andrew on Episode One Hundred Twenty-Three of THE MUSICAL UNIVERSE OF PROFESSOR HURST. The podcast is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, among others and hosted by Anchor.
My show notes and interview questions from Episode 123 are below:
Hello and welcome to the Tuesday February 7, 2023, episode of THE MUSICAL UNIVERSE OF PROFESSOR HURST. This is Craig W Hurst, Emeritus Professor of Music podcasting from my music bunker along with my faithful canine companion CARAMEL THE WONDER DOG to share with you my latest musical interests and discoveries.
I claim no special inside information about the latest or greatest music, nor do I know everything there is to know about music. What I AM is a lover of music. I enjoy several genres of music and I share with you what has currently caught my interest, old, new, outdated and everything in-between. Even old music is brand new if you have never heard it before.
The universe of music is a vast one to enjoy. From my discussions you might find something new to you and of interest to expand your own musical universe.
I currently receive no compensation or motivation of any kind from any recording label, recording artist or estate of any performer or composer dead and gone to discuss their music and/or recordings.
Now with that out of the way, Welcome to my musical universe!!!!!
My guest today is jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger Andrew Hadro!!
Andrew Hadro is a professional musician, composer, and bandleader in Brooklyn, New York.
Hadro’s primary instrument is baritone saxophone, though he also performs on bass clarinet, Bb clarinet, and flute, and is one of the only working musicians in New York City to play the bass saxophone.
Recently, Hadro has been presenting compositions by current living composers through his ongoing project "For Us, The Living," An effort to honor tradition through innovation. Hadro has performed and recorded two albums for this series, with the most recent released in April 2018, and a single released in December of 2021.
After 15 years in NYC, Hadro can be heard through an expanding discography and frequent live performances. He has played with and led ensembles large and small, featuring historical and modern styles, as well as through-composed and fully improvised music.
Born abroad in Mexico to American parents, Hadro spent most of his childhood in the Chicago area before moving to New York City to study at the New School for Jazz.
In addition to working as a performer, Andrew Hadro is a product specialist for Vandoren, advising fellow musicians on equipment including reeds and mouthpieces. As curator of JazzBariSax.com Hadro provides resources and news to baritone saxophonists all over the world. During summers Hadro serves as a director and faculty member for the Litchfield Jazz Camp in Connecticut.
https://www.andrewhadro.com/bio
It is my pleasure to welcome to my musical universe Andrew Hadro!!!
https://www.andrewhadro.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AndrewHadro
Music video of Andrew Hadro performing “Regarding the Moon” his newest single he commissioned of composer Petros Kampanis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtb3JJ2pRac&list=PLob0VkKb4T-TT-veGVCUuZAtzGyaNdMRs&index=2
Hello Andrew!!!
It is great to talk with you!
Who turned the light on for you? What turned you on to music?
Who or what turned you on to jazz?
Although you are a multiple woodwind artist, what in particular drew you to the baritone and bass saxophones?
How have other artists who play/played the baritone saxophone informed your approach to the instrument?
What are the major challenges of being a musical artist in the 21st century?
Jazz comes in so many different flavors. What is the essence of jazz across all of its various flavors, and how is jazz different from other styles of music?
Music that has been labeled jazz has been around for over a century. Throughout its history, jazz has had its ups and downs and rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Although jazz is not central to American popular music it still exists and lives. Why and how has jazz sustained itself over the past century?
When I taught Jazz History and Appreciation at the University of Wisconsin Waukesha, I would teach Duke Ellington with a reminder to my students that Ellington studied to be a painter before he dove seriously into music, and that IMHO he painted on a canvas of silence with colors of sounds.
Would you talk about your various approaches to the elements of music as a jazz performer and composer that you may take to create different colors and forms of musical expression. Specifically, would you discuss your concepts regarding musical timbre and texture as well as melodic and harmonic constructions.
When you recall the last original piece you wrote did you start with a melodic idea, a rhythmic idea, or a particular set of chord changes? Or do you start with lyrics (if any) or a particular mood?
What motivates you to write?
Do you keep a sketchbook with ideas of heads, or vamps or other musical ideas that you might draw upon later?
What advice do you give students who are aspiring toward a career in music?
Would you please talk about other musicians you gig and/or record with frequently and what have you learned from your association with other musicians in New York City and elsewhere?
The most recent recording I can find you have released is a single entitled “When All The Killers Are Gone.” Would you please talk about this music? What was the inspiration and what are expressing with this work?
I am also intrigued by your recording “Contraband Clarinet Bass” released in 2021. The ONLY other recording I am particularly familiar that uses contrabass clarinet is Anthony Braxton’s “Ornithology.” Please feel free to open up my head and ears about the instrument and its use in jazz and other improvised music.
Would you also please talk about your wonderful release “Regarding the Moon,” a composition you commissioned of bassist Petros Kampanis? You utilize the upper register of the baritone saxophone, and your playing is absolutely gorgeous. Why did you choose to use baritone, then choose to use the high register of the instrument rather than, for example, use alto or soprano saxophone? Other than it is your main horn, was there in your ear a significantly different timbre than you would have achieved using alto or soprano?
What can you share about other new recording projects you have planned, in the works or recently completed?
If I were to come to New York in the next few weeks where might I be able to hear you play live?
Andrew, is there anything else you would like to add or tell my audience?
Andrew, THANK YOU for taking time to talk with me today. All the best with what I am sure will be a continued successful musical future!
My discovery composer of the week is Egon Wellesz born in Vienna 1885, died at Oxford 1974.
His importance as a composer rests chiefly on his stage works and symphonies. His musical style was unpredictable, showing his affection for beautiful melody often with wide leaps and angular in profile. As a musicologist, he did pioneer work on Byzantine chant.
Wellesz was born into comfortable circumstances in the Schottengasse. He inherited his musical inclinations from his mother, who had once studied the piano. Even so, his parents had expected him to study law and follow in his father's business; however, on his 13th birthday he heard Mahler conduct Der Freischütz at the Hofoper, and his decision to become a composer was galvanized.
In 1905 he registered for instruction in harmony and counterpoint under Schoenberg at Eugenie Schwarzwald's school, which became an important focus for him in his young years. He conducted a small choir there and gained acquaintance with a progressive circle. Rigorous training in the fundamentals of music took place with Schoenberg and left him with a lifetime of respect for his master's teaching ability.
His compositional heritage was so grounded in Viennese tonality that only on occasion did he adopt 12-note technique, principally in his later symphonies. But his Drei Skizzen for piano (1911) strikingly reflect the atonality of Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke. He also wrote enthusiastically about Schoenberg, and devoted himself in the summer of 1920 to the first Schoenberg biography.
He left off private study with Schoenberg after beginning serious work with Guido Adler at the University of Vienna. He made Baroque opera the center of his earliest musicological studies; he earned his degree summa cm laude in 1908, and his dissertation was published the next year. In 1913, he was appointed lecturer in music history at the university.
His interests now turned to the common elements in Eastern and Western chant. The lengthy process of collecting photographs of Byzantine manuscripts and transcribing them eventually became the work of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, founded in Copenhagen under the auspices of the Royal Danish Academy in 1932 by Tillyard, Wellesz and Carster Høeg. The same year Wellesz established the Byzantine Research Institute at the Austrian National Library and began training students.
After World War I he and Edward Dent joined Rudolf Réti to found the ISCM, and through Wellesz's efforts Vaughan Williams, Bliss, Holst and other English composers were heard for the first time on the Continent. He was, too, a leader in the musical cross-pollination with France. He encouraged performances of Milhaud, Poulenc and Ravel in Vienna. Many French and English musicians were guests at his Kaasgraben home in the 1920s.
As a composer he had begun chiefly with songs and piano music. He then went on to write five operas and four ballets.
The arrival of the N***s, and the subsequent closing of Germany's stage to Wellesz's work, roughly coincided with a spiritual change. An outward reflection came in the cantata Mitte des Lebens (1931), which he dedicated to Oxford University in thanks for the honorary doctorate he received in May 1932.
His major work after this was Prosperos Beschwörungen (1934–6), a set of five motivically unified pieces descriptive of characters from The Tempest, which he had originally intended to make into an opera. In March 1938, English friends warned him by telegram not to return to Vienna, and he proceeded immediately to England. A decade was to pass before he set foot on Austrian soil again. With help from his English friends he settled into life in Oxford, where he became a fellow of Lincoln College in 1939.
Separation from Austria, though, was far from easy. Wellesz had broken his creative silence with his important Fifth Quartet (1943–4), and in 1944 a new era had opened with his setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, one of the loveliest and most often performed of his English compositions, remarkable not only for its fine handling of a complex text but also as a metaphor for the struggles of the composer's bifurcated career.
The seal was set on this new period with his First Symphony (1945), which had its first performance by the Berlin PO in 1948. The symphonies, along with the symphonic Prosperos Beschwörungen, have been well received in Austria, Germany and England, though ignored in the USA. Important too among Wellesz's English works are the Octet and his last opera, Incognita.
Besides his other activities, he also wrote for the BBC, served the New Oxford History of Music as editorial board member and contributor, helped revive the IMS, and took part in symposia and research projects. He had officially retired from his Oxford readership in 1956, but did not stop composing until after the stroke he suffered in 1972.
(The Grove Online)
The All-Music Guide lists one recording of Wellesz’s ballet Persisches, eight recordings of his chamber works, five recordings of his choral works, three recordings of his concerti, nineteen recordings of his compositions for keyboard, one recording of his opera Bakchantinnen, four recordings of non-symphonic works for orchestra, eight recordings of his symphonies, and twelve recordings of his works for voice with accompaniment.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/egon-wellesz-mn0002188017/compositions
In my show notes is a link to a YouTube performance of Wellesz’s String Quartet no. 4 op. 28 performed by the Artis Quartet-Vienna.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnFOkebfz4I
https://artis-quartett.at/e/main.html
That wraps Episode #123. My show notes along with links to artist websites, recording label websites, YouTube videos of artists’ performances are all posted on my page, THE MUSICAL UNIVERSE OF PROFESSOR HURST
(https://www.facebook.com/The-Musical-Universe-of-Professor-Hurst-113248910539633)
Next week I will be following up with an interview with another great Baritone Saxophonist, Carl Maraghi! Carl performs regularly with several groups in New York City including the Christian McBride Big Band! Carl also performs on saxophone in the classical tradition and by straddling styles on his instrument has many great insights into the Baritone Saxophone and it’s music. Other upcoming interviews include Milwaukee’s own Jeff Schroedl and Jeff Taylor of the Altered Five Blues Band, Hollywood (and now Frisco, Texas based) Blues Singer/Songwriter The Reverend Sean Amos, Knoxville based Country Singer/Songwriter Rachel McIntyre Smith, and Los Angeles based Jazz Drummer and Educator Mark Ferber.
SO, DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!!
If you have questions, comments or a suggestion of an artist, composer or musical style for me to consider, you may email me at [email protected]. So, until next time this is Professor Craig W. Hurst and CARAMEL THE WONDER DOG signing off from THE MUSICAL UNIVERSE OF PROFESSOR HURST.
Have a great day!
Artis-Quartet Vienna
