Racer Session #566 | Haley Freedlund | Sunday June 4th, 2023 at 7pm

Hey, Racer Community!

Haley here - I typically edit and post the Racer website / blog, writing the intro for the presenting artist’s blog post. But this Sunday, I’m the presenting artist, and it feels a little silly to write myself an intro. I’m going to skip that part - if you want to get to know me better, my website and my Instagram are a great place to start, but I’d also just love to chat in person at the session on Sunday :-)

And just a reminder that this is the last session before we take the summer off! We’ll be doing other cool stuff in the community, such as New Music Gathering in Portland on June 22, and probably an outdoor Racer Session / Community Meeting in July, but come get some of this community gathering and improvising while you can!

XO, HF - read on for my words on this Sunday’s music:

—

In the spring of 2021, the world was nearly a year into the pandemic and I was oscillating between all of the different moods that societal isolation had been putting me in. I’d decided to take a sabbatical from playing trombone in late 2020, feeling unsatisfied with the headspace that so much solo play and practice had put me in. I was longing for some sort of creative outlet when Crush / Repeat came across my social media radar. In so many ways this was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time: a monthlong, queer-focused community art show where the only prompt was to pick something and do it everyday, whether that meant completing one large piece day by day, or contributing a small work to a larger collection by the end of March. I could manage to do something like that, and I felt like writing might propel me back towards working on music in a way that felt good. Somewhat arbitrarily, I decided I would limit myself to 31 words per piece, because there were 31 days in the month of March.

I’ve now completed three cycles of this project - a new collection of 31 micropoems by the end of March each year. Every poem is different: a moment from the day of writing, a diary, a memory from years before, a portrait of a lover, a vent for a tough feeling, a letter to someone I cannot send. After writing the first round in semi-isolation while working a desk job, I took Crush / Repeat with me on tour twice once the world reopened.

I turn 30 tomorrow, a child of 1993 with 93 works in my pocket, and with a bit of auspiciousness, I feel ready to take what I have and turn it into something new. With a lot of encouragement from friends and strangers, I’m exploring how these poems behave as songs. What I’m finding is something just as invigorating as the initial writing felt.

For this Racer Session, I’m presenting five micropoems as work-in-progress songs. I won’t play any trombone, and instead will sing on all five, with accompaniment from Heather Bentley (cello), Kayce Guthmiller (viola), and Evan Woodle (drums). Below are the five micropoems I’ve used for the songs:

I’ve struggled a lot with composition for two key reasons. The first is follow-through. Like most trombonists I come from a lifelong background in playing jazz, and so I’ve spent a life feeling like I’m supposed to be composing jazz tunes. There’s a part of me that identifies with being a jazz musician and loves playing that music, but it doesn’t feel like my voice. And it’s taken me a long time to figure that out. So it goes. I might write one or two pieces for a band and play one or two gigs, but I lose interest because it doesn’t feel quite right. If I get real with myself about what my voice is, my voice is, literally, my voice (what a sentence). The trombone is an extension of that, and I love it so much because it is so very much like the human voice in the ways that it can express. But giving myself permission to ditch jazz and trombone and be true to myself in a way that feels terrifying and invigorating feels insane in the best way.

The second reason I struggle with composition is feeling the need to write something long. The limitation of setting a micropoem to music means that the song is likely going to be short. I don’t have to push it to become anything more than it already is. Four of the songs I’ll present are 2-3 minutes long, with one being closer to 8 minutes. Limiting my duration has given me five double bar lines in two months - my first in maybe two or three years.

There are a lot of ways to approach the jam session that all feel right to me:

implementing limits on length
sharing a musical voice that feels true to your spirit
singing
groups of four, three, or two musicians

Mostly, as we approach a summer sabbatical from playing at Racer Sessions, I would encourage you to follow a path you’ve been curious about, or something new that excites you and invigorates you creatively.

That feels like plenty. I hope to see you at Racer Sessions on Sunday! I’ll be there, probably incredibly nervous, but nonetheless excited.

XO, HF