When Glen Whitehead goes trekking he carries a microphone, sometimes his trumpet, and always ears set wide open. Every trip is a chance to dwell upon potential musical structures inherent in a particular place and coax them into sensible form. Pale Blue – named after the planet we inhabit – is no ordinary audio postcard home. It documents Whitehead’s grand quest to fuse music exploration, improvisation, and environmental immersion. He digs up sonic materials from a vast swath of locations, through the musical syntax of the earth, participation in its natural theater, and the intertwining of geophonic, anthrophonic, and biophonic (earth-, human-, and life-) ensembles.
Making stories that take their cue from our sounding world – parables of the anthrophony, you might say – brings new awareness to our living systems and how we relate to them (or don’t, sometimes at our peril). Whitehead’s practice and discipline brings together earth music, trumpet, and sound processing, with field recordings from Colorado, France, Greece, Hawaii, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and Wyoming. You might hear the headwaters of the Rio Grande River, drafty garages in France, the first dinosaur in space, coyotes, cicadas, or a hotel rooftop in Istanbul. It all feels dreamily connected and real.
As a trumpet artist and composer, Glen Whitehead explores improvisational phenomena, interactive communication and environmental collaboration between living cultures, technologies and the natural world. Whitehead’s background includes international appearances as a solo artist along with theEcoSono Ensemble, The New Zealand Māori ensemble Wai, Psychoangelo, the Bottesini Ensemble, Nexus Brass and more. He has composed for theatre and dance, commissioned works from composers including concertos by Matthew Burtner, Cuong Vu, and Dr. George Lewis. His recording, “the Living Daylights” (2018) on pfMENTUM remained on the top 10 of experimental and jazz radio playlists across the U.S. for over a year. With Michael Theodore, Psychoangelo’s release panauromni was listed on the top ten albums by Chicago Time Out. He recorded two albums with O’Keefe / Stanyek / Walton / Whitehead – Tunnel and Unbalancing Acts on Circumvention and 9Winds Records, performed solo trumpet on Tania by Anthony Davis, and was principal trumpet on the soundtrack for Everquest. He teaches at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
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Dawn of the Din
A solo tour around Europe in Spring, 2019; weather, birds, horse & carriage in Cork and the Gap of Dunhow, Ireland; a fierce storm in Millau, France on the edge of a steep hill, sheltered in a drafty garage, the violent gusts whipping through tiny cracks.