John Mackey: Asphalt Cocktail (2009)

John Mackey (b. 1973)
John Mackey (he/him) has written for orchestras (Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York Youth Symphony), theater (Dallas Theater Center), and extensively for dance (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Parsons Dance Company, New York City Ballet), but the majority of his work for the past decade has been for wind ensembles (the fancy name for concert bands), and his band catalog now receives annual performances numbering in the thousands.

Recent commissions include works for the BBC Singers, the Dallas Wind Symphony, military, high school, middle school, and university bands across America and Japan, and concertos for Joseph Alessi (principal trombone, New York Philharmonic), Christopher Martin (principal trumpet, New York Philharmonic), and Julian Bliss (international clarinet soloist). In 2014, he became the youngest composer ever inducted into the American Bandmasters Association. In 2018, he received the Wladimir & Rhoda Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He resides in San Francisco, California, with his spouse, A. E. Jaques, a philosopher who works on the ethics of artificial intelligence for MIT, and also titles all of his pieces; and their cats, Noodle and Bloop.

Asphalt Cocktail (2009)
Several years ago, when I was living in Manhattan, I was walking down Columbus Avenue with my good friend (and fellow composer) Jonathan Newman. Somehow, the topic of titles for pieces came up, and Newman said a title that stopped me in my tracks there on the sidewalk: “Asphalt Cocktail.”

I begged him to let me use the title. “That title screams Napoleonic Testosterone Music. I was born to write that!” I pleaded. “No,” was his initial response. I asked regularly over the next few years, and the answer was always the same: “No. It’s mine.” In May 2008, I asked him once again, begging more pathetically than I had before, and his answer this time surprised me: “Fine,” he said, “but I’ll be needing your first-born child.” This was easily agreeable to me, as I don’t like kids.

Around this same time, my wife and I were talking to Kevin Sedatole about his upcoming performance at the CBDNA National Convention. It was my wife who suggested to Kevin, after coaxing him with cocktails ourselves, that I write a piece to open his CBDNA concert, and that piece should be “Asphalt Cocktail.” Kevin told his friend Howard J. Gourwitz about the idea for the piece, and Howard generously agreed to personally fund the commission as a gift to Kevin Sedatole and the Michigan State University Wind Symphony. The piece is dedicated to Jonathan Newman, because without his title I’d have written a completely different piece, like “Bandtastic! : A Concert Prelude.”

“Asphalt Cocktail” is a five-minute opener, designed to shout, from the opening measure, “We’re here.” With biting trombones, blaring trumpets, and percussion dominated by cross-rhythms and back beats, it aims to capture the grit and aggression that I associate with the time I lived in New York. Picture the scariest NYC taxi ride you can imagine, with the cab skidding around turns as trucks bear down from all sides. Serve on the rocks.

-Program Note by Composer

Instrumentation
For Wind Ensemble

Performer
Michigan State University Wind Ensemble
Conducted by Kevin L. Sedatole

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