Notes by PEK

I’ve been thinking a bit about early times in my music career recently, so I dug through my hard drives and found the one that has the digitized files of my early work from 84 to 92. Most of it is not well recorded, but there are some studio sessions and some things better recorded by Space on a 4-channel Reel to Reel recorder.

After moving from California to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music in 1989, my most important mentor in free improvisation was Masashi Harada. Masashi is a gifted improvisor who used piano, percussion, voice, dance, and visual imagery in his art making. For a few years we played music constantly in different settings and Masashi recorded everything. Some of the sets were at his loft apartment with a whole bunch of different players from the scene, but we also had several bands. Masashi was the leader of this scene, but I was his helper and a constant participant.

In Santa Cruz, before I moved east, I worked at a store called Western Mountaineering that sold camping, climbing, skiing, canoeing and kayaking equipment to “fun hogs” for about 6 years running their receiving department. I went on a lot of trips with the serious rock climbers I knew there to climbing spots in California with my Tenor Sax – we would hike in to where the climbing was which nearly always also had amazing outdoor acoustics including natural echoes. The climbers would climb all day and I would play my horn.

For 5 or 6 years in a row, we did a huge weeklong trip for New Years to Joshua Tree National Park which is east of Los Angeles and south of the Mojave in the high desert (about a 10-hour drive from Santa Cruz). We rented a huge group campsite, and most years had 25 or 30 people there for a big New Year’s Eve party, with many of us arriving early and/or staying afterwards.

I don’t remember if I went for 1989, since I had already moved to Boston but was in California for the holidays. In 1990, I went, and Masashi also came. He flew from Boston to LA and I drove several hours from Joshua Tree to the Airport to get him. He had a gigantic road case with a drum set and some additional percussion in it that he flew with. We loaded it in the car and returned to the Park.

The case had wheels on it, but the trails were dirt and rock, so we had to find spots that were fairly close to the road, but there were plenty of options and we spent 2 days playing in the Park and had a short concert at the New Year’s party at the campsite. Yesterday while I was working, I listened to the whole set, and I was kind of impressed… It is a huge marathon session with a very focused palate – just tenor sax and percussion. It’s mostly high energy – so it is very different than what we do today where my goal is to vary both the energy level and the sonority over the duration of each performance to create development. Masashi and I played together an enormous amount during 1990, and these improvisations performed in the wilderness really show how connected we were.

PEK – 11/12/2026