no mind, the debut solo album of cellist James Alexander, is a testament to his fruitful relationships with composers from across his musical life. Most of the works on this album originated as gifts from the composers to Alexander, who aided by adapting their ideas for his instrument. The six works here, though distinct in feeling and approach, share an interest in improvisation, either inviting the performer to improvise or requesting that they perform as though improvising. As Alexander describes, the process of assembling this album has brought him far afield from the automatic, solitary mindset that he has sometimes deployed when playing notated music. Here, he is thinking from scratch—“no mind”—devising ways of performance that are uniquely his and his collaborator’s. 

The composer and musician Jane K (Evgeniya Kozhevnikova)’s “I Will Tango” (2021), a cycle for solo cello, has roots in her study of the eponymous form, as well as her own short four-line poem, each line of which lends its name to a different movement (”I will tango with you / Closer than I’ve ever been / Finding a smile in your eyes / Until the night will part us”). The first two movements find the cellist freely carving a path through virtuosic yet songful rhythms and patterns evocative of the dance. The third movement establishes a steady groove from alternately playing and plucking the strings, interspersed with wisps of melody. In the fourth, the cellist quietly recalls the gestures of the opening. 

“Wind in the Woods” (2023), by composer Jiaying Katy Li, finds the cellist enmeshed in bucolic electronics, inspired by a walk in a bamboo forest that the composer took with her sister long ago. Li, who met Alexander at the summer program New Music on the Point, calls for a number of dynamic, textured approaches to the instrument to invoke a woodland adventure. The ending finds us contentedly “sitting on a dock and fishing,” summoned through guttural slides and delicate harmonics. 

Alexander met composer Julio Elvin Quiñones in cellist Nick Photinos’s virtual performer-composer workshop 1:2:1, which Alexander calls a lesson in how “you don’t ever have to [physically] meet the person you’re creating with.” “et in hora mortis nostrae” (“and in the hour of our death”) (2020-21) is taken from a section of the titular poem by Thomas Bernhard, a grim meditation on pain. The work’s sharp dissonance and viscerality, notably in its use of percussive techniques, capture the speaker’s torment, limned still with a sense of hope. 

Another 1:2:1 bestowal, composer Jack Herscowitz’s “Composed Meditation 3” (2024) arose from an earlier collaboration that was a first for both of them—for Herscowitz, using a text score, and for Alexander, overcoming his hesitation with improvisation. For this work, Herscowitz wrote a short prompt that Alexander responded to via recording a new improvisation every week. The result is a dynamic union of James and Herscowitz’s approaches, as much performance as living documentation of their collaboration. 

Alexander’s participation in New Music on the Point yielded an additional relationship with composer Santiago Gutierrez, who dedicated his “21 Inhalations” to the cellist. For Alexander, the work bears some likeness to a game, as it requires the performer to simultaneously play and perform near-continuous vocalizations, such as vocal fry, whistles, and tongue clicks. The artful score frames the cellist’s body as an extension of their instrument, smoothly obscuring the distance between sources of sound. 

To write “Embers in the Snow” (2024), Chase Chandler—the third composer sourced through Alexander’s participation in 1:2:1—contemplated a day in Norway after a dogsledding lesson, where, sitting around the fire, he heard a new acquaintance perform a joik, the traditional singing form of the Sámi people indigenous to parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Chandler’s impressions of that day, the energy and pentatonicism of the joik and sheer contrast of the furnace and the frosty weather outside, yielded this vivacious work for solo cello. 



—Jennifer Gersten 
jennifergersten.com.  

credits

released August 23, 2024 

"no mind" is dedicated to my mother Thủy Thị-Lê Bùi 

composers: 
Jane Kozhevnikova 
Jiaying Katy Li 
Julio E. Quiñones Santiago 
Jack Herscowitz 
Santiago Gutierrez 
Chase Chandler 

liner notes by Jennifer Gersten 
recorded, mixed, and mastered by Rob Lunn 
produced and performed by James Alexander 
at Lake Michigan College on 7/30/24 


make sure to check out composer websites below: 

www.janekmusic.com/about/ 
jiayingkatyli.wixsite.com/website 
julioquinonesmusic.com 
www.jackherscowitz.com 
soundcloud.com/.../bajo-la-sombra-del-tercer-sol-1 
chasechandlermusic.com 

thanks for listening