The music on this record is a drawing, a photograph, a map, a scribble, a film, a collage. It is also one ensemble’s love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area creative music community – a place where a duo of modest means can commission a composer friend with the promise of a burrito and a performance of the work. Where improvisers and composers comingle, collaborations across disciplines are commonplace, and where so many musicians have deep connections to visual art and film. Though graphic notation has a long history in contemporary music, on the West Coast and in the Bay Area in particular, a handful of composer/improvisers have been developing highly personalized visual languages for sound for some time. Here, a beautiful collage, a crayon city map, a fragmented photo or a scribbled and scratched line drawing can evoke and proscribe rhythmic relationships, layers of density, counterpoint, texture, dynamics.

start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers is the result of duo B.’s idiosyncratic, slightly obsessive processing, rehearsing, de- and re-constructing of compositions by some of their favorite San Francisco Bay Area composers working with visual scores. Some of the music was composed especially for the ensemble (Bennett, Greenlief, Frasch); other pieces they requested access to (Raskin) after hearing inspiring versions by other ensembles. The record’s title is drawn from the instructions on Phillip Greenlief’s map-based score Tokyo.

The composers represent a wide spectrum of Bay Area improviser/composers:

saxophonist Jon Raskin of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, who has an incredible portfolio of varied graphic works, often performed by his own superlative quartet

multi-reedist, composer, bandleader, label master and educator Phillip Greenlief, who began creating a series of map-based scores several years ago for his favorite musicians

saxophonist, composer, bandleader and musical straw whiz Aaron Bennett, whose deceptively ragtag scores, scratched onto recycled dot-matrix printer paper, belie his keen compositional intuition

flutist, composer and electronic musician Heather Frasch, whose music revels in the possibilities of small sounds and textures