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An Odd Duo: The Fretful Porcupine

Courtesy photo
Courtesy photo

http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/Fretful_Porcupine.mp3

The Fretful Porcupine performs tonight in Elk Rapids, and the duo's music is as unusual as their name. They perform tonight in Elk Rapids at the Seed Studio Gallery at 8:00.

The sounds of a violin and saxophone: it's not the kind of instrumentation you'd expect from a pair of professional  musicians. But Violinist Jake Armerding says, that's just the point.

"I love, in a sense, kind of spreading the Gospel of this idea of an inappropriate instrument sounding great," he says.

Armerding also plays guitar and is a singer-songwriter. But he's well-aware how many ofthose there are in the music business. So, he began looking for a musician to make unique music with him and his violin.

He met saxophonist Kevin Gosa while the two were playing in a band at a wedding in New York. Kevin suggested that some of the band members get together and jam. Armerding agreed, even though he had always made it clear exactly what he thought of the saxophone.

"I just never liked saxophone before I met Kevin," he says. "It just always kind of sounded 'loungy' to me. I immediately associated it with corporate events of the eighties. I was ready to throw the whole instrument out which is a terrible attitude."

But that attitude changed when Gosa began playing his soprano saxophone with Armerding.

"Then, all of a sudden, the violin became this perfectly viable instrument for me to play with," he says. "There was this incredible discovery of how his saxophone, especially the soprano saxophone, sounded in tandem with my violin."

Most of us are used to music that is in distinct categories; classical, rock, etc. You can thank the record industry for that. So, when duos like The Fretful Porcupine come along, we tend to think they're trying to be new and different.

But saxophonist Gosa says trying to be new and different is historically more normal and that putting music into easy-to-identify categories is a pretty new concept.

"I don't think that's the norm of what the creation of music has been like in history," he says. "Most people have been trying to push the boundaries to find a new sound. This is why the saxophone exists, because somebody said, 'There needs to be a new sound.'"

Gosa is classically-trained and used to being surrounded by groups of other musicians. So, you might assume that Gosa might feel uncomfortable without so many other musicians to lean on.

"In some ways I feel more free because I'm able to borrow instantaneously sounds from the violin part that are very similar to what I'm doing," he says.

And if you're wondering where the name of the duo comes from, look no further than Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet's father's ghost says: "And each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porcupine."