More than 10 years have passed since Rebecca Gates put out her solo debut, Ruby Series. The former member of the Spinanes mostly shifted her energy to other projects: coordinating and managing exhibitions for museums, lecturing at arts centers, composing music for dance and film, participating in performance pieces and stylizing photos for magazines. She also did some bookkeeping, retreated to Rhode Island and helped friends build a movie theater. But as time and money allowed, she also popped back into studios to put together her follow-up, The Float (12XU). Gates will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.
Gates: “My favorite things” of music is too hard; there’s too much. After four years without my records, I’ve recently had access to them again, and it’s as if an elephant or giraffe, nay a rhinoceros, moved into the house. There are too many favorites. I could fill up gigabytes, petabytes with song, music, band and show recs. I will cop to Jimmy Giuffre though. Western Suite is a top-10 desert island disc. I can listen to it endlessly for hours. He was my entry into liking clarinet, which I had condemned to a vocabulary of squanks and squeaks a la grade-school band or energetic hijinx stepping-out show music. Subtle, lyrical, he was often in the company of Jim Hall, one of my favourite guitarists.
See also: The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Music For People, Birds, Butterflies And Mosquitos, The Life Of A Trio.
Video after the jump.
