During the summer of 2020, the beginning of the lengthy period of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent a great deal of time on my back deck and in my backyard trying to perfect my grilling chops and feeding and watching birds. Naturally, the latter activity tends to attract wildlife of the rodent variety, especially the pesky and arrogant squirrels, who destroyed so many bird feeders that I had to take out a second mortgage to purchase another thousand.

And then there were the chipmunks, also pesky (like the squirrels) but more shy and humble than arrogant (unlike the squirrels), who were far too light and nimble to weigh down and destroy the birds’ feeders, but helped themselves to the birds’ food anyway. I could continue this description for hours, but the point is that there was this one chipmunk named Zippy who sorta rose to the top of her community and decided that I was a good pathway to the birds’-and-now-chipmunks’ feeders hanging from various poles attached to my deck, so she began to run up my legs and back and shoulders to jump on the railing to the feeders, collect her food, and run to my neighbor’s yard where she lived to store her food.

Eventually, I was able to give the birds a break by collecting food for Zippy so that she could eat from my hand. Some evenings she would perch on my neighbor’s fence and yell (as chipmunks do) until I came out to light the grill with a bunch a seed or corn or nuts in my hat (because I had to carry charcoal and utensils with my hands) when she would come running over and sit in my hat (on my head) to collect her food or play the harmonica.

Things went on like that for weeks and Zippy became a bit of a social media star on my various social media pages, which are, for a large part, populated by musicians who have performed my music, and who have expressed “likes” and other such reactions to selfies and videos of Zippy on my head.

This piece Zippy! is for Zippy-lovin’ musicians everywhere who want to play a four-minute piece requiring the energy and heartbeat of a chipmunk. While the original version is for the all-too-common standard instrumentation of soprano saxophone and English horn, whose repertoire rivals the string quartet, other versions will be made for similar pairs of instruments.

I spent a lot of time during the COVID-19 pandemic writing melancholy and angry music in forced isolation, during the reign of an authoritarian racist urging violence against his own constituents. Zippy! is the opposite of those musics as it is a recollection of the part of this troubling time when I made a friend who lifted my spirits and never once peed on my head while she ate from my hat.

And now she hibernates…

November 23, 2020