We were lucky to catch up with Amy Denio recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Amy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I developed an appreciation for music early on; my mother told me she enjoyed serenading me by playing upright bass while I was in the womb. Music has always been my favorite language.

At the age of 12, after six years of piano lessons and playing in Orff ensembles in elementary school, I quit lessons and decided that I would let music guide my path. I’d go wherever it took me. I have been on that path ever since.

Amy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST & VOCALIST

I was born into a musical family, which gave me a strong ear for music. My parents met playing upright bass in the local orchestra and both loved playing jazz. As I grew up, my mother played bass in a jazz quartet and in the orchestra, and music filled our home.

When I decided to let music choose my path, I picked up my sister’s guitar and figured out how to play chords from a Beatles songbook. Soon I began exploring the instrument and writing my own songs with new chords and unusual rhythms.

SINGER SONGWRITER

During high school I taught myself dozens of songs by listening to the radio. I joked that my ear had become my most powerful organ. At the age of 16, I went to school in Dublin and studied Irish culture and language and researched songs of the Irish revolution. I went to concerts and the theater, snuck into bars with friends to sip Guiness, sometimes skipped school to explore the city, and met all kinds of colorful characters, young and old.

After Ireland, my friends invited me to play rhythm guitar in their rock band Elysian Fields and I played my first festival as a junior in high school. By the time I graduated, I was a full-on singer songwriter, fibbing about my age to play in bars and cafes.

AUTO-DIDACT (SELF TAUGHT)

I attended Hampshire College and Colorado College. I studied some theory, but the composition teacher I wanted to study with was on leave of absence. I continued to teach myself by composing and arranging my songs by ear.

I was active in both schools’ Electronic Music Labs, sang in choirs and rock bands, and formed my own chamber music ensemble and prepared guitar orchestra. At home I made recordings on my reel-to-reel tape recorder with a sound-on-sound adaptor.

I volunteered as a DJ at KRCC-FM in Colorado Springs, became Production Director, and eventually became Sponsorship Director. I spent hours exploring the vast music library. A TV station took me on as an intern, and a professional recording studio invited me to record a couple of songs. I taught myself saxophone by playing along with records and recording sax trios on my reel-to-reel. My home studio was named Spoot Studios.

IMPROVISER

Shortly after I started playing sax, my friend Bob Tudor introduced me to the world of improvised music. I knew about solos in jazz, but it came as a huge relief to know that following my ear and intuition was just as legitimate as reading music.

The word Spoot came from a vocal improvisation at Bob’s cabin in Colorado and developed into my philosophy of creating music. Spooting involves active listening, empathy, and avoiding expectations or rigid plans. The history of evolution and the survival of the fittest proves that improvisation can be a very useful skill.

CONCERT PRODUCER

Innovative musician Fred Frith became one of my mentors. When I meekly asked when he might play in my town, he replied ‘When you produce the concert’. It wasn’t too difficult to organize, and the concert sold out.

I started producing concerts at age 23 and haven’t stopped since. This work introduced me to many creative artists who take their own initiative to get things done. This network has grown into an extraordinary tribe of innovators.

RECORD LABEL AND PUBLISHING COMPANY

Through the years my home studio equipment evolved from a reel-to-reel tape recorder to a TASCAM 244 four-track cassette recorder, then the TASCAM 644 MIDI studio connected to floppy disc-driven Atari Computer. Now my favorite DAWs are Reaper and Ableton. Of course, it’s easier when someone else is pushing the buttons and I just have to play, but recording at home puts me in my favorite mental state ~ meditative child play.

Before long, soundtrack commissions and requests for overdubs started rolling in from modern choreographers, film makers, theater companies and musicians from all over the world. I named my record label and publishing company Spoot Music.

COLLABORATOR

I quickly figured out that playing music with others was an excellent way to learn music. My ‘four-legged’ band Lao Tse and The Entropics moved to Seattle in 1985, and I began to collaborate with a plethora of creative folks. In 1986, I joined Matt Cameron and Chip Doring in the Couch of Sound. I founded a bass duo called the Tone Dogs in 1987, and we played festivals all over North America and Europe. Our first album made the first round of Grammy nominations for Best New Recording. In 1988 I was one of the founding members of the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, and we’ve been going strong ever since.  In 1999 I joined Balkan punk metal folk band Kultur Shock

PROGRAMMING OFFICE COORDINATOR / OTHER WORK

Shortly after moving to Seattle in 1985, I met someone who worked for YESCO Foreground Music. He helped me land an interview in the Programming Department, and I was hired as office coordinator. For the next five years I wore many hats; licensing reports, label printing, custom programming supervision, taking notes at managers meetings, even winning the ‘who really runs the company award’.  Many of the musicians in the budding grunge music scene worked across the hall, and we had a merry time. YESCO merged with MUZAK, and I kept working there until my band Tone Dogs started touring too often. I retired in 1990.

I have been President of the Tiptons Sax Quartet for the last twenty years, in 2015 I was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame, and I became Vice President of the Seattle Composers Alliance in 2016. For further details, check out my Curriculum Vitae. 

GRANT WRITER

My first successful grant was to produce concerts of Russian Jazz musicians at the Goodwill Arts Festival in Seattle in 1990. Since then, I’ve written numerous grants for creative collaborations and multi-media work all over the world and have received many awards and artistic fellowships. For further details, check out my Curriculum Vitae. 

TOURING MUSICIAN

I first toured the East Coast in 1987 and have been on tour in Europe and the US roughly three times a year since then, sometimes up to 9 months in a year. I’ve performed and recorded music throughout North and South America, from London to Moscow, Tallinn to Athens, Bordeaux to Sarajevo, as well as working on projects in Japan, Taiwan and in Mumbai, India.

TEACHER

Teaching has become one of my greatest passions. I learn from each student, no matter how great or small. Along with teaching how to understand rhythms and to read music, I love encouraging my students to create melodies, memorize songs, and to play by ear. I teach voice, piano, accordion, guitar, bass, saxophone, clarinet and theremin ~ online and in person.

PRODUCER

I have been mixing and producing music recordings with and for other musicians for over thirty years. Notable examples are Tone Dogs, Tiptons Sax Quartet, OU, the Danubians. You can find many of my audio productions on my Bandcamp site.

Almost two years ago, my fiancé and I moved to Kitsap County, west of Seattle. At age 62, I still work regularly as a producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, improviser, music transcriber, audio engineer, teacher, publisher and concert producer.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I love the surprising results from trying out unusual or unexpected ideas. What we think of as mistakes are often cosmic corrections that improve what’s going on. Through the years I’ve become a hybrid composer; my work often features a combination of instruments mixed with noises of nature and industry. My duet with a run-down dishwasher was included at the John Cage exhibit at the 1992 Venice Biennale. A month of randomly transcribing the train whistles of Seattle turned into a rousing sax quartet. Slapping water in a bathtub became a major section of a modern dance soundtrack, as did my field recording of the Waste Transfer Station as the foundation for the sound of a perfect storm.

Music is an international language with the potential to create community out of strangers. Blue-haired punks sit next to grey-haired octogenarians. Despite major differences in age and culture, people at my concerts generally attend for the same reason, to share beauty.

Music fires up the brain. We are always wondering how the human brain can reach its full potential. Improvisation involves and excites the brain’s entire neural network in a way that ‘normal’ or quotidian actions do not. In the documentary Act of God, laboratory scientists affix MRI sensors to the head of musician Fred Frith. When he plays a song, the MRI shows that the ‘musical’ portion of his brain is active. But when the scientists invite him to improvise, the MRI shows his entire brain lighting up, all synapses firing and neural networks glowing. Athletes call this being ‘in the zone’. Musicians call it creativity.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When I released my first cassette tape No Bones in 1986, I entered the analog social network powered by the postal services of the world. At that time, the cassette underground scene was exploding, and independent musicians from all over the world exchanged cassettes by mail.

Al Margolis ran a cassette label called Sound of Pig, and with my permission, began to send my music to his contacts in far corners of the world. This created the foundation for my creative and fan network, long before the internet.

A fan helped build my first website in the early days of the Internet. This helped generate new nodes in the network. These days I maintain multiple accounts on Facebook, as well as on Meetup, Patreon, Bandcamp, LinkedIn and X. My Instagram account was hacked recently, so I’ll start a new one, one of these days. To be honest, I prefer meeting real people in real time and bumping into friends in unexpected places.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://[email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amydenio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.denio/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydenio
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmyDenio
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxEgWXrpqhH8-sF6Ko4TKA
• Other: Bandcamp: https://amydenio.bandcamp.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/amydenio Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/deniaural/ Kultur Shock: https://kulturshock.com/ Tiptons Sax Quartet: https://thetiptonssaxquartet.com/ Email: [email protected]

Image Credits
Amy Denio Chris Stromquist Robert Kainar Kai Strandskov Krk Nordenstrom