Recorded at the University of Oregon. Funded by a Meet-the-Composer.grant to Pacific Rim Players. The great Vinny Golia generously gave me permission to post on my Bandcamp site a concert of his compositions I and my Northwest Creative Orchestra put on with him and some of his fellow core musicians from his LA big band in Eugene, Oregon, sometime in the late-‘80s/early-‘90s. It was one of several we did back then—with Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Andrew Hill and a couple of other such luminaries—only one of which (with Braxton) was released as a commercial CD. That one got a 5-star review from Down Beat; this one and those with Hill and Lake likewise brought out the very best playing all of us had in us.

Those years were an interesting time for California-based big bands of all-stars playing adventurous and ambitiously-composed music for improvisers. Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra-cum-Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension had set the tone earlier; Charles Mingus had come up in LA, which influence I could always feel in his music in various ways long after it had grown on to his heights. John Carter’s “Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music,” was then-recently realized and released in five albums focused on African Americans and their history (we were slated to do a concert with him and his core players too, but he passed away before it could happen).

Hill had become California-acculturated after a longish residence there (our project with him included his friend Lawson Fusao Inada, the eminent Japanese-American poet who served as my state’s fifth poet laureate, to help promote Hill’s piece for our band, “American Nikkei Symphony”—also streaming from my Soundcloud site—when the movement for redress and reparations for Japanese Americans interred in WWII was still pressing to its full rewards. The great composer/pianist Jon Jang and saxophonist/composer Francis Wong were doing the central and seminal musical work along such lines from their San Francisco-based Asian Improv Records (AIR) label then, and its all-star Pan-Asian Arkestra.

But back to Vinny’s golden egg. His LA-based group was right in the thick of all the above network of giants with shoulders for younger heads to stand tall upon. This recording is a prime example of his singular sensibility and voice among them all. He’s a visual artist, and to my ears that shows in his music. It calls up inner visions through downright majestic (Mad-Jestique) musicking both laid back and burning, like the bunch of lucky old sunzabeaches we were, rolling round heaven all day…