Sean Ongley

Category: Improvised

  • OHS Pieces Volume Three

    OHS Pieces Volume Three

    At last, the third volume of Pieces by OHS, the free jazz trio featuring Jerry Soga and Doug Haning with myself. I also produced the recordings. Jerry provided the photos for the cover art.

    I’m not great with design, so I keep it simple. I like how the H symbolically ties Ongley and Soga together. In a weird way, he is the independent voice that makes our wild anti-rhythm section come together.

    You can hear Volume One and Volume Two right here, or just go to ongley.bandcamp.com.

    This is the beginning and end for this project. We never had ambitions, really. It is a good example of just doing what is fun with the people you love. The outcome is unimportant, but you put in the honest effort so long as you’re there.

    Any lover of free jazz can hear that we know what we’re doing even if we are not the best players. We are far from the best players. However, the love of the form is there. It is the formless form. Free music shall never be heard twice, unless it is recorded.

    To reiterate the story, we came together over the course of 2017. It was my final year in Portland. I had a studio space for THRU Media in the basement of Fish Sauce restaurant. I produced it there.

    The sessions sat in my hard drives for years as I adjusted to living in Philadelphia. Finally, in 2021, I got around to it.

    With six sessions total, I combined two sessions per volume, giving a variety of feel to each album. There are twice as many pieces remaining on the editing room floor.

    Please enjoy or learn to enjoy free jazz, and in particular OHS.

  • OHS Pieces Volume Two

    OHS Pieces Volume Two

    This is the second installment of three albums by Ongley Haning and Soga. As previously discussed, this music was a long time coming. The third volume is finished, I’m just staging it with some hope it might get a tiny bit more attention that way.

    My love for free jazz, even though it is often ugly and clumsy, remains steady. This trio is gritty. Jerry never learned music. He couldn’t play traditional music if you asked him to. He only knows how to do what he does. I struggle with music. I always had many interests, like Doug, so this music is more heart that training. There are thousands of hours of playing and listening behind this music. It is definitely art.

    This is anarchy. It is peaceful congregation. It is cooperative. It is better than democracy. It is love. We all get to be truly ourselves here.

    Please listen and consider purchasing a copy. Thanks.

  • OHS Sessions Volume One

    OHS Sessions Volume One

    In 2017, when I had settled into the THRU Media studio, I began to host music sessions of my own for the first time in years. I asked my friends Jerry Soga and Doug Haning to come over and do some good old “free jazz” with me.

    Jerry played acoustic bass. Doug played reed instruments, and a little bit of electric piano. I played drums. We didn’t have a band name, I just wanted to produce some sessions. In the end, I have called it Ongley, Haning, and Soga (OHS).

    Each volume consists of two sessions. Each session was combed through for pieces that could be recognized as having an organic start and end point. Each piece was labeled by sequence: sessions 1-6, cuts 1-xx.

    After isolating those cuts, I mixed and mastered them. Once I had the complete sessions, I listened through all five and a half hours of content to slim it down by half.

    The result is three volumes in diminishing length. The first is out now and the remaining are being staged for monthly release.

    It is interesting to hear how we progress over those sessions. By the end, we have a band with a certain kind of sound. My drumming tightened up, but it’s still sloppy, and difficult because we play outside of time. Sometimes we are united by tempo and rhythm, sometimes we each have a different sense of it, but we’re always listening.

  • Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    We had completed our year at Portland State University as professional music students, in the summer of 2008. Branic was a music composition major, I was a hard working punk just taking classes and refusing to follow the curriculum. In fact, I should have been enrolled for the 2009 school year when this concert happened, but I never went back.

    He invited me to perform something as an opening act for Thollem McDonas, on December 8, at his music studio at the artist loft building known as Boxlift Lofts, so named because it has an historic elevator that was employed to shuttle Ford Model T cars around.

    Branic liked my piano stylings and thought I’d make a good shadow to the mastery of Thollem McDonas. That was smart curating, actually, showing the master and student dichotomy on Branic’s baby grand piano in the intimate setting, for an audience largely comprised of college students.

    I had something different in mind, however. I wrote a piece of music for saxophone quartet and I wanted to have it performed by some of my favorite local players. The recording of that was rough, and we didn’t execute the composition perfectly, so it never was released, until now, as a piece of the archive and memoire. Just stream the audio player immediately below.

    Saxophone Quartet Performance 12-08-08

    On baritone sax, I had Doug Haning, on Tenor, Peter Bryant, on alto sax, I had Ben Kates, on soprano, Jefrey Leighton Brown. I am conducting. At the end, I move to the piano for a simple percussive part.

    If memory serves me, I left the equipment at Branic’s loft and we scheduled a session in the near future. I climbed in through the fire exit and got a solo jam done before he got there. In fact, it is inaudible, but that jam, the first track, basically ends with him climbing through the window. I recorded him solo, and then jammed together. It is all very ambient and stripped down.

    The album streaming at the top of the article via Bandcamp is the result of those sessions. Not too bad.

    The recording equipment, again, if memory serves me, was a Marantz digital field recorder and Audix microphones borrowed from KBOO Community Radio. I would have worked on it in my home Pro Tools 5 rig, and probably mastered it in Adobe Audition 1 at KBOO.

  • New Synth Jam

    New Synth Jam

    HEAR AUDIO IN NEW TAB.

    Please enjoy the dusty electronic noise produced herein. Dusty from sitting inside its case for five years, and performed by a dusty player. I could not remember how to do things I used to readily perform. Additionally, I cut myself off from music during this time that I’ve been writing about lately, moving to Philadelphia and squaring off my financial basis for the first time in my adult life.

    I think this track proves that I haven’t gone soft. I still got the guts of the experimental, improvising musician in me. And it feels so good to just produce something. I don’t care how many mistakes I made in the process — the piece is kind about that.

    At this point, I have a secure home music studio that I can use 24/7. I can afford at least an hour per day on average to work on music. I still have work to do in the studio, to make it a functional studio. This piece is just the maiden voyage. It’s going to get so much better.

    Performed with an ARP Odyssey mk2 vintage, and Logic Studio instruments.