Jon Armstrong’s Voluntary Breath
About
Tonight’s performance is the West Coast premiere of Voluntary Breath (More info below.)
Jonathan Armstrong is a musician, composer, and educator serving as the Director of Jazz Studies and Commercial Music at Idaho State University. He moved to Pocatello in 2015 after living and working as a professional musician in Los Angeles for nine years. Jonathan has established a creative and dynamic career as a band-leader, performer, contemporary composer, and innovative educator. He is also an Antigua Winds sponsored artist.
In Los Angeles he performed with musical luminaries Vinny Golia (avant-garde jazz musician), Bennie Maupin (saxophonist who performed and recorded with Miles Davis), Vincent Gallo (indie filmmaker and songwriter), and Mike Barone (arranger and composer for “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson). He co-founded the jazz quartet Slumgum and released three critically acclaimed albums. Jonathan has performed across the United States, in Japan, Austria, and Germany on saxophone, flute, clarinet, bass, guitar, piano, drums, and electronic sampler. He has also performed on countless recording sessions, concerts, and festivals.
“Jon Armstrong’s music is full of life and humanity, and like life and humanity, it is complex, sometimes messy, sometimes dark, sometimes light, always interesting, and unavoidably engaging. It is also indefatigably optimistic. His latest release, Reabsorb, is all those things.”
— Mel Minter, Musically Speaking
A few words about Voluntary Breath by Jon Armstrong:
Voluntary Breath began as a way of exploring a dream I had: A shamanic figure, sitting in a lotus position, is floating over a mountain lake in deep meditation and holding a guitar-like instrument. As he strums his instrument, ripples emanate from him across the lake. He re-tunes his instrument and creates different patterns and frequencies across the water.
The meaning of this dream shifted when my son Breen was born four months premature in January of 2021, weighing only 1lb, 4.8 oz. He spent almost nine months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. My wife Erin and I sat alongside our tiny boy in this prolonged existence of overlapping liminal spaces; he was here before he was ready to be born and yet he was teetering close to the end of life. Due to the brilliance and dedication of our medical team and the love and support from countless people in our lives, he is now 4 years old and doing exceptionally well.
The NICU soundscape was brutal. We were told how sensitive preemies are to stimulation, and we agonized over the invisible damage from these sonic assaults. Inspired by my dream, I attempted to “tune” my son’s room by singing simple melodies and drones in the key and tempo of the sounds of the machines that kept him alive. I tried to soothe the chaos in his environment.
Breen was on a ventilator for the first four months, and the doctors were often concerned that he was “breathing over the vent”. He was trying to breathe on his own, but he wasn’t in rhythm with the programmed breathing rate, causing inefficient ventilation. We watched Breen struggle with the uncompromising and unnatural tempo of the ventilator, and my wife and I wondered if he would ever take a breath on his own.
