About the Music

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About the music

The Incendiary Cycle is music of place, and that place is California. It is music about people, nature, industry and the dynamic relationships between them.

The Incendiary Cycle takes its inspiration from pyrogenic vegetation, native plants that require fire to germinate, The ensemble translates the dynamics of California‘s social, industrial and environmental forces onto a six piece ensemble of saxophones, trombones, drums and keyboard. It is music about conflict, transformation, nostalgia, loss and rebirth.

In California we live in a metastasizing industrial civilization, yet we also celebrate what is left of our dramatic natural endowment. In the California mountains, fire clears out dead wood and germinates the seeds of new growth. Fire once drove steam locomotives and Kaiser Steel. Now the steel mill and the steam engines are gone, along with the orange groves and the aerospace plants, replaced by vineyards and high tech. Our relationship to nature is both adversarial and symbiotic. Our ongoing struggle with fires, floods and earthquakes continues to validate our self-image as pioneers and innovators.

Joan Didion wrote in Where I Was From,

“To be a Californian was to see oneself, … as affected only by ‘nature,’ which in turn was seen to exist simultaneously as a source of inspiration or renewal (‘Born again!’ John Muir noted in the journal of his first trip to Yosemite) and as the ultimate brute reckoning, the force that by guaranteeing destruction gave the place its perilous beauty.”