Last Friday Evan Smith played the very first solo recital presented by The Box Is Empty. From that show, here is Nat Evan’s Two Old Ghosts. Be sure to click the links to visit their Artists Page on this site and follow the links to their personal sites as well. These two musicians have fantastic stuff to offer. Also, read below for a note from Nat about the piece.

After the offer from Evan came last fall to write a new work for saxophone, I thought for a while about what I wanted to write, but didn’t come to any solid conclusions for structure. Then, one evening I awoke from a dream at 3am with these insane screeching and endlessly running sax lines reminiscent of Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman. As in, it was so loud and present in my dream that the sound woke me up, and continued running in my head after I’d awoken. I have no idea where these sounds came from, but I tried to get it out of my head and get back to sleep. As sat in bed listening to the rain on the laurels outside my window I could hear a train whistling and rocking in the distance; I eventually fell back to sleep. Exactly one week later I woke up at exactly the same time with the same Ayler/Coleman sax lines running in my head, same type of rain – everything. As I settled back into my slumber, the trains whistled in the distance once again. Two Old Ghosts began to take shape from there…it seemed to be about travel, about these strange ghosts that had woken me up with their screeching sound, and about the eternal sound of our everyday lives.

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