Wild Up - Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?

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Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?

Release date: June 16, 2023 | Cover photo: Chris Rusiniak

On June 16, 2023, GRAMMY-nominated musical collective Wild Up releases Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?, the follow-up to 2021’s Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine, “a masterpiece” (The New York Times), and Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy, which contains the GRAMMY-nominated closing track, “Stay On It.” Arriving once more on New Amsterdam Records, Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? is the third entry in Wild Up’s multi-volume anthology celebrating Eastman, the late composer whose musical vision was repeatedly dismissed during its day, but is now being unearthed to critical acclaim.

“Since we first learned about Julius Eastman in 2010, we’ve had an increasing affinity for the way that he set out to make music,” says Chris Rountree, artistic director for Wild Up. “Eastman’s process and approach feel like an ever-present teacher, embedded in the works. The composer has been an inspiration, larger than life, changing the way we want to work, how we want to make, what we want to make, and what we want it to mean.”
Accompanying the album announcement, Wild Up share Joy Boy album closer “Stay On It,” which constructs foreboding timbres around an insistent and joyful motif.
Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene as he built an exhilarating and thoroughly original body of work. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.
Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy delves deep into Eastman’s oeuvre, as Wild Up explores his inimitable compositions and idiosyncratic ways of communicating musical ideas. Eastman’s ideas about notation were notoriously loose and, as such, Wild Up’s performances are informed both by knowledge passed down from Eastman’s colleagues and collaborators as well as an adventurous, constantly seeking spirit.
More than anything, Joy Boy finds Wild Up reveling in the freedom afforded by Eastman’s work. Whether it’s Wild Up guitarist Jiji veering from placid minimalism to metallic drone across two radically different versions of Eastman’s “Touch Him When” or the Wild Up ensemble’s ebulliently discordant performance of “Joy Boy,” there’s a palpable sense of possibility throughout Volume 2. Says Rountree: “We want listeners to find themselves in these pieces. And in their multiple iterations. We want this work to be quintessentially queer. Every moment full of choice.”
On June 19, 2022, Wild Up will be celebrating the release of Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy with a special dawn-until-dusk performance of “Buddha,” Eastman’s egg-shaped open-score epic, at 2220 Art & Archives. Full details on that performance here.
Wild Up’s Eastman anthology represents a departure for New Amsterdam Records, which, until this series, had exclusively released new music by active, living composers. But Eastman is a special case, a composer whose work shines like a beacon to today’s musicians. Any term used to characterize the modern musical landscape —“genre-fluid” or the like — was anticipated by Eastman decades before; yet, he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from, and through, his myriad influences and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. It makes sense, then, for the anthology to arrive on New Amsterdam Records — a sort of loving backward embrace of a musical forefather to 21st-century composers.
“Wild Up feels changed when we play this music,” says Chris Rountree. “We’ve found that Eastman’s pieces are an ideal way to create the space we see for classical music going forward. We want listeners to find something joyous and raucous, something everchanging, and yet somehow also repeated over and over. To us, Eastman’s music feels like a perfect mirror in the search for self.”

1. If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?
2. The Moon’s Silent Modulation
3. Evil Nigger
Wild Up
Devonté Hynes
Adam Tendler
Wild Up
Andrew Tholl, violin
Adrianne Pope, violin
Mona Tian, violin
Rachel Iba, violin
Andrew McIntosh, viola
Linnea Powell, viola
Derek Stein, cello
Mia Barcia Colombo, cello
Jonathan Richards, bass
Marlon Martinez, bass
Erin McKibben, flute
Michael Matsuno, flute
Breana Gilcher, oboe
Archie Carey, bassoon
Brian Walsh, saxophones / clarinets
M.A. Tiesenga, saxophones
Shelley Washington, saxophones
Pat Posey, saxophones
Patrick Shiroishi, saxophones
Amy Sanchez, horn
Danielle Ondarza, horn
Drew Ninmer, trumpet
Jonah Levy, trumpet
Mattie Barbier, trombone
William Roper, tuba / animal bones
richard valitutto, piano
Matt Cook, percussion
Sidney Hopson, percussion
Jodie Landau, percussion / voice
Anna Schubert, voice
Laurel Irene, voice
Molly Pease, voice
Chloe Vought, voice
Eliza Bagg, voice
Catherine Brookman, voice
Odeya Nini, voice
Sharon Chohi Kim, voice
Fahad Saidat, voice
Saunder Choi, voice
James Hayden, voice
Scott Graf, voice
Devonté Hynes, piano / leader
Adam Tendler, piano / leader
Christopher Rountree, conductor / artistic director
Produced, recorded, and mixed by Lewis Pesacov
Engineered by Lewis Pesacov, Clint Welander
Assisted by Harriett Tam
Recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders and United Recording
Mixed at Ahata Sound
Mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, Los Angeles, CA
Designer: Andrea Hyde
Cover Photo: Christine Rusiniak
Session Photos: Glen Hahn
Executive Producer: Elizabeth Cline
Production Associate: Glenna Adkins