Category: Music

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The barest of minimums

“Walking pier” photographed at Harvey’s beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut on October 20, 2024
:The barest of minimums” composed and performed with guitar and clarinet by Sanford Ross Bender on October 23, 2024

This instrumental may sound plaintive, but the more I listen, start to hear it as the breath of victory that arrives after an exhausting ordeal. It is an “on the road” piece in which the clarinet is only a student rental instrument that I play at a time when coincidentally my recording equipment also happens to not be performing properly. The guitar and clarinet improvise with sympathetic melodies that will never sound the same again; like hearing an invisible owl floating through the mist. SRB

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My father’s beard

“Maine snakes” photographed by Sanford Ross Bender on Labor Day, 2024 at Moxie Falls in northern Maine.
“My father’s beard ” composed and performed with guitar by Sanford Ross Bender (SRB) on September 2, 2024.

My father’s beard

My father,

with sprouting beard,

and dancing eyes,

returning from the Maine woods,

smothered his face,

with creamy lather,

at my mother’s

razor command.

-SRB January 7, 2024