On Wednesday, January 21, 2015, we spent the day in the Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser studio in St. Paul, Minnesota recording music and interviews for America Public Media’s Performance Today (PT) radio show. The PT crew was simply amazing to work with. A big thank you to Fred Child, Suzanne Schaffer, and the recording crew for making the day a smooth and stress-free process!
We arrived in the studio with plenty of time to warm-up and do some sound checking with the recording engineer. As soon as we began our first set of interviews, all four of us could not stop smiling as we knew that our time on the show was really beginning! Fred Child, as we all know, is an amazing interviewer. He had clearly done is homework on our repertoire and our group, and it was amazing to be able to chat with him. Eventually, it began to feel like we weren’t in a studio anymore, and that we were just chatting with a friend.
As many of you may know, studio recordings can be really stressful experiences. For us, the most difficult part of being in the recording studio is the restriction of our movements. One slight turn to the right can change how the group sounds all together! For Kenari, movement and communication is such an integral part of our aesthetic that we didn’t realize how much focus it could take for us to play with the same energy and excitement without motion. By the end of the day, we felt like we had become old pros with those microphones, and we were extremely excited about the end product.
While we did work hard, we also got to relax a bit as well! The PT crew treated us to lunch at the Black Sheep Pizza Shop in St. Paul, which was such a pleasant surprise. We won’t make any comparisons to Mother Bear’s Pizza back in Bloomington, but we heard that Black Sheep and Mo’ Bear’s were both among the top 10 pizza places in the nation! After the recording session, we had the pleasure of sharing a happy hour with the senior producer for PT, Suzanne Schaffer at Pazzaluna Urban Italian Restaurant. Suzanne has been a great help to us in preparing for the show all along and we’re extremely thankful for all of her work! Also, if you’re ever passing through St. Paul, try Pazzaluna’s Hemmingway Daiquiri!!
It was truly an honor to be able to represent Indiana University, Dr. Otis Murphy, and the classical saxophone community on this national show. We hope that we can spark a love of classical saxophone in the minds of everyone that hears the show. Please stay tuned to your local NPR or APM station! Our show will be airing from February 11-13, so please listen and spread the word!
We can’t neglect to mention that this is our very first trip with our new alto saxophonist, Kyle Baldwin! Everything about the transition has just been wonderfully smooth. We like to call him our good luck charm, since we have been having such great fortune with travel and performance thus far. We’re looking forward to a bright future for the Kenari Quartet with Kyle walking with us every step of the way!
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