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Amy Denio: Collaboration, Convergence and Clouds by Victoria Jacobs

Eclectic Seattle musician and composer Amy Denio (rhymes with Ohio) forgot I was coming. She had given me directions to her house — “It’s the one you can’t see.” Her old wood-sided house was well hidden behind high bushes, the yard dotted with fallen apples. When I rang her doorbell, she was surprised to see me, but received me with a graceful laugh and invited me in. She offered ginger tea and lunch in her shady, quiet house filled with succulents and musical instruments.

Slight and red-haired, Denio makes clear, open eye contact, sharing stories of different projects from all over the world. Her approach to creating art is rowdy and open, on the radical end of the spectrum called ‘jazz.’ She says, “Jazz came from a revolutionary feeling: slaves making music and singing about freedom, turning into the blues. And it came, in my opinion, really from the earth, from the people. And then what happens? Now there are all these jazz theorists: ‘In order to understand this phenomenon, there must be some kind of theory behind it.’ And for me, that totally contradicts this freedom and anarchy that underlies the foundation.”

She loves to mess with form, using found sound and noise. She loves simple melodies and complicated rhythms. She loves music that is intuitive as opposed to intellectual, and anything that speaks of soul, and not so much proficiency. Her style incorporates off-the-cuff vocalization, harmonies and chanting, and her melodies and rhythms tango with groove-heavy jazz, funk, gypsy folk and African rhythms.

Raised in Detroit, Denio grew up listening to Motown and her parents’ “middle-of-the-road” jazz. She began playing piano as a child and her first composition for class was “a very fun, rhythmic piece.” But by the time she was 12, she quit piano lessons, picked up her older sister’s guitar, and quickly became a singer-songwriter. Halfway through college, she took up saxophone, and at that same time, she met someone who played ‘free’ music — pure on-the-spot improvisation. She was flabbergasted. She recounts thinking, ‘What? You can just play whatever you want? That’s crazy talk.’ And says, “For saxaphone, that’s great, to have that foundation, that liberty to approach the instrument with the concept that there is no wrong note or bad sound.”

Whole new creative worlds opened up, and Denio developed a wildly open mind for different styles and possibilities. Even the name of her record label arose from a musical improvisation.

“It comes from the side of a Band-Aid box that I was reading when we were improvising one time, and I was just saying ‘absorbs wound fluids, wound fluids, wound fluids, wound fluids!’ and everyone in the room started saying ‘wound fluids, wound fluids, wound fluids,’ and there came this silence at a certain point, and someone said, ‘spoot.’” She founded her label Spoot Music in Seattle in 1986 on the tail end of the cassette tape era. Denio was an avid 4-track home taper, and she says the cassette movement was about “an exchange of ideas, not so much of money.” Spoot Music has since released more than 35 collaborative and solo CDs.

Her musical projects have spanned the globe. She has created music with artists in North and South America, Europe and Asia, and shared her work everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the Venice Biennale and on top of three Seattle Metro buses. She has been commissioned by the Berkeley Symphony, Italian National Radio, New York Festival of Song, Die Knodel, and veteran clown Lorenzo Pickle, to name a few. She’s received a Bessie award for her work with David Dorfman Dance. She’s a founding member of the Seattle’s all-female Tiptons Sax Quartet, and has also performed with, again, to name only a few, Kultur Shock, Bill Frisell, Hoppy Kamiyama, Ronin and Chuck D’s Fine Arts Militia.

Amy has made a dance-accordion duet, plays contemporary saxophone pieces (with The Tiptons) set to live painting, scores strange animated films, and creates contemporary 4-part accordion and vocal pieces with her group Hell’s Bellows!. On New Year’s Eve, 2006, her Italian band Quintetto alla Busara accompanied a French circus & artists from Cirque du Soleil in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, Italy with 10,000 in attendance, broadcast internationally. Her résumé is as varied as it is long.

I asked her what she could possibly be interested in doing next, and she spoke of composing for The Tiptons with an orchestra, and working more with painter Danijel Zezelj, and a surreal-sounding project that involves arranging traditional Taiwanese music with Samba drumming in small Taiwanese villages. Amy agreed to attempt the project when no one else could, and what she would love best to do is to teach improvisation in these small towns, where pride is so important and the possibility of looking foolish (the backbone of improvisation) is unacceptable.

Amy’s greatest wisdom, in my opinion, comes from working with so many and varied people. Collaboration, she says, causes you to create things you wouldn’t otherwise. She calls it “hugely rewarding, and very frustrating and very difficult. You have to develop a common language with whoever you’re collaborating with. ... It can be really hard to communicate with someone else who doesn’t really know about music when they say ‘can you make this more ... yellow?’ Or just, ‘No, that’s not working,’ but they can’t articulate what’s missing. ... So, collaborating develops your telepathic skills, and it keeps things really fresh.”

I was lucky to see Amy’s recent collaboration with Seattle dance icon Pat Graney, called “House of Mind.” The multimedia installation was set in Seattle’s old City Light building, before beginning its tour to Texas, Florida and New York. It is a sound and sculpture and dance experience in winsome ode to memory, mind and the deterioration of both. Denio’s soundscape was made to order, and was still in a state of constant flux when I spoke to her — after the show had already opened. She collaged clips of interviews with Graney and Graney’s mother (who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, the inspiration for the piece), songs from Graney’s youth, and Denio’s original compositions for accordion and glockenspiel and baritone guitar, which evoked sea shanties and fireside melodies. Before the show, Denio’s fiery red hair caught my eye as she stood by the rickety fire escape, speaking animatedly to a friend in Italian. Then she warned my friend not to drink from the sink, which was merely a set piece.

Several years ago, Denio left America for Italy and told all her friends she wasn’t coming back. She loved it in Umbria and happily traveled with Il Parto delle Nuvole Pesanti, a music project drawn from Italian musica populare. She marched home to the U.S. in 2004 to attempt to vote George W. out of office. During her visit, Amy was reminded of her roots, and she felt called back here, so she decided to stay. She says that in American culture, there’s great potential to make beautiful things, though for the most part, she finds it empty, “unless you really make an effort ... I felt this cultural responsibility to try and contribute what I can to this culture, which is mine. I can’t escape it. I’m American. ... So I decided in the end, I want to try to make it a better place here, try to make beautiful things, try to create beauty in this crazy world.”

Now she loves life here, living entirely as a working musician, and that can be a hand-to-mouth lifestyle as, she says, “It’s hard, because you have to find the work or create work that will actually pay. So meanwhile, you still have work that you’re doing while trying to find new work, so it’s double-time double-tasking to make the future more rosy.”

In the meantime, she’s certain she’s meant to be exactly where she is: “Ever since I’ve moved to Seattle, I’m crossing paths will all these people in the most absurd ways — what you could call ‘coincidence’ but I think of as ‘convergence’ ... when you think of all these paths crossing around the world, it is creating this web. All our lives are really interwoven in a way and when our paths are crossing, it’s strengthening this web of interconnectivity. I don’t know who said it: ‘In this crazy world, musicians with their traveling and their music weave the web that holds this world together.’”

She loves Seattle’s mountains and clouds, and we spoke rapturously of the previous night’s sunset. “I had been so stressed out all day, and then I got on the West Seattle Bridge, and there was Mt. Rainier looking like it was in another age, and the clouds were doing things I had never seen them do before. Amazing colors: pink and orange and blue and purple, and my friend said she saw this lime green at a certain point. ... Clouds are my religion, since I live in Seattle. I just look at the sky, and almost every time I go, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful it is’.”

Denio is about to embark on a European tour, and then she’s off to New York to work on a haunting new dance piece. But look out for The Tiptons next time they’re playing around town. It’s inspiring to hear the work of a woman like Amy Denio, whose truths are simple and inspiring: the love of creating new art, collaboration, convergences and clouds.

Check out Amy’s music online at myspace.com/deniomusic, amydenio.com, and thetiptonssaxquartet.com. Her albums are available for purchase at cdbaby.com.

Victoria Jacobs is a freelance writer, teacher of all ages, dancer of many forms, collaborator of all styles and lover of clouds. She lives and creates in Seattle.

©2009 Caliope Publishing Company