Pneuma takes its name from the ancient Stoic meaning of the word as the vital energy or creative spirit and life force of a person.

With my works for this group (a quartet or quintet of trumpet, guitar and/or piano, bass and drums) I’m interested in exploring the relationship between composition as a considered process, manifesting over a broad arc of time, and composition as a responsive process manifesting solely in the instant of the present moment.

Formally this music owes as much to the potentials of western classical forms such as sonata, fugue, rondo, variation and so on as it does to the open, free, blues, modal and cyclical based forms of jazz.