aaron novik

San Francisco, CA

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About

My name is Aaron Novik. I play the clarinet, bass clarinet and I compose and arrange. I lead a number of extremely varied projects so the idea of this page is to give the listener as comprehensive an idea of what I do as possible. The bands featured on this page include Simulacra, Kipple, Gubbish, Floating World, Crafty Apples, and songs from my "solo" album.

Gubbish is one of my first projects I started in this city. It developed out of the group "Rats with Wings" that lasted for two years and had a good instrumentation (violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, bass and drums) but was all over the place compositionally (i.e. I had no idea what I was doing). I wrote a piece called "vulgarian folk melody" and decided that there was a new style of writing to be explored in that piece and decided to write a dozen or so more pieces just like it. It took many different incantations of this group to find a good instrumentation (a kipple-like instrumentation was used earlier on) but the line-up of bass, tabla by Sameer Gupta, drums by Ches Smith, accordion by Dan Cantrell, guitar by John Finkbeiner, trumpet by Darren Johnston, with myself on bass clarinet seemed to work the best. You can listen to an alternate take of "Crack in Space" on the mp3 player above.

Dissatisfied by the way a electric keyboard heavy band played the Gubbish songbook, but still really into that sound, I decided that a new type of song structure was needed for this band concept. Tired of honplayers complaining about how loud the band was. I decided to take out all horns, switch myself over to conducting duty and thus the band Kipple was formed. We played for a little under a year before we recorded "Flashes of Irrational Happiness" and it took another year to edit, mix and master it. The new concept for group was a Fela Kuti/James Brown meets Steve Reich, where every musician was equally responsible for melody, harmony and rhythm. The band was Graham Connah and Dahveed Behroozi on keyboards, John Finkbeiner on guitar, Lisa Mezzacappa on bass, Ches Smith and Tim Bulkley on drums, and sometimes Mitch Marcus on keyboards and Moe! Staiano on bug.

Around this time I also started leading a group called Cutting Guard that was a vehicle for a more complicated compositional style that began while I was attending UC Berkeley. This group featured three reed players (originallly Colin Stetson and John Ingle, later Patrick Cress and Cornelius Boots) and bass and drums (originally Eric Perney and Ches Smith, later David Arend and Tim Bulkley). I also added Nathan Clevenger on guitar for the band's reformation.

In 2005 I received a commission from St. Joseph Ballet to write music for a dance piece they were working on. I brought my band The Yiddiots to the O.C. to perform with the this company and the music ended up on my "solo" record "The Samuel Suite/Dancing into One" which will be coming out in August 2007. The other half of this record is the lush and beautiful Samuel Suite that I wrote for my grandfather in 2005.

When I got back from the O.C. I decided to form a new group inspired by the writing I did for the aforementioned projects. I felt like I was on to something new so I wanted to start a new band to refect this and take it a step further. This band is Floating World and is my "chamber pop" band. The musicians are Jason Levis on drums, Lisa Mezzacappa on bass, Rob Reich on keyboards, Sarah Jo Zaharako on violin, Henry Hung on trumpet, and myself on bass clarinet. About a month after I formed the band I met the talented soprano Katy Stephan at the piano bar Martuni's. This soprano with a beautiful voice was the missing piece I was looking for and I've spent the last year writing music for her and this band.

This past year also saw the formation of the amplified clarinet metal band Simulacra. This group consists of Cornelius Boots on robot bass clarinet, Matthias Bossi on drums, Jesse Quattro on vocals, and myself on electric clarinet. At the same time an homage to my formative metal years and a serious attempt to write some modern, cutting edge, non ironic metal; this group also has a recently completed record looking for a label.

Another newer addition is my chamber band Crafty Apples. This group started a few years ago and has of late been working on music for an experimental animation with artist Mark Wilson. This group is Sky Chari on flute, Dina Maccabee on viola, Jason Levis on marimba and percussion, and myself on bass clarinet.