"Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It's a place where if you can't say "I love you" out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans."
- Robin Wall-Kimmerer
Gardening Music is the newest project from Jake Baxendale, a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based saxophonist and composer known for his work with prog-jazz legends The Jac, trans-Tasman collab Antipodes, New Orleans second-line torchbearers The Richter City Rebels and many others.
Gardening Music was born out of Jake's love of gardening as a tonic for the travails of the working musician. Since the first shows in early 2023, Jake's compositional approach has expanded to encompass ideas borrowed from writers in the environmental humanities such as Wall-Kimmerer, Anna Tsing and Ursula Le Guin. In this approach (called "collage", "composting", or "polyphonic assemblage" depending on the weather), the themes emerge only slowly and partially throughout the performance, mixing initial statements with concluding statements, blurring the notion of "beginning" and "ending" and creating an indeterminate "middle" which is the present that the writers mentioned here argue is the moment in which we must exist, and that must be reflected in the stories we tell.
Supporting Jake is new duo E.T. Guts, comprised of Andy Wright and Isaac Smith
Special thanks to Creative New Zealand for supporting Pyramid Club's programme
