Randy Sandke: Metatonal, Among Other Things

Here is an excerpt from a much longer piece that will soon appear elsewhere. More about that later.

The trumpeter and sometime guitarist Randy Sandke receives neither the critical nor popular attention that goes to fellow trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas—to pick a couple of names out of the air—but everything about his music says that he should. He is a technical and creative virtuoso on the trumpet. Regardless of the style and era of music he chooses for his projects, he seems unrestricted in interpretive power. He arranges and composes for large and small groups with a canny understanding of dynamics, instrumental textures, relative harmonic densities and the importance of space. A lover of challenges, risks, surprises and humor, Sandke is serious about his music but exhibits no evidence of pomposity, pretentiousness or proprietary airs.
Of a piece called “Berlin” on his Subway Ballet CD (Evening Star), Sandke explains in his literate notes, “I decided to release it on the belief that there just aren’t enough atonal guitar solos in the world, and also it may help dispel (or at least further defy) the persistent notion that I am merely a ‘swing’ musician. (Okay—I worked with Benny Goodman, but so did Fats Navarro and Herbie Hancock and nobody refers to them as ‘swing musicians.’) Being thus labeled is somewhat akin to being called a child molester in that the tag never seems to go away, and both can be equally deleterious to one’s career.”