Michael and Peter Formanek - Dyads OUT NOW

Peter Formanek - tenor, saxophone, clarinet, compositions
Michael Formanek - bass, compositions
Album art by TJ Huff (huffart.com)

Michael and Peter Formanek - Dyads (OOYH 008) is OUT NOW on OOYH Records, and we are so excited to share this music with you! OOYH Records has a very long history with these two incredible musicians (in fact they were both around and participated in the OOYH Collective pretty much from the beginning when we launched that in 2009). It features compositions by both Michael and Peter, and it showcases an incredibly unique bond between father and son (plus they both sound just incredible on it).

Michael and Peter Formanek started making music and improvising together before Peter started school. Regular visits to their home from friends and colleagues like Tim Berne, Jim Black, Marty Ehrlich and many others only served to normalize this as being an essential part of human interaction. During much of their time living in Baltimore and as Peter began to study music formally (first on guitar then on saxophones and woodwinds), it was just part of daily life to have musicians come by to play, rehearse, or just hang out. This eventually turned into regular groups and collaborations that performed in local venues in and around Baltimore. For Peter’s eighteenth birthday they played a night of Michael’s music at the Cornelia Street Cafe with a lineup of Tim Berne and Peter Formanek on saxophones, Jacob Sacks on piano, Jim Black on drums, and Michael Formanek on bass. Peter went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2013 to study with the great Andrew Bishop, and sometime after Peter’s graduation in 2017 he and Michael decided to perform as a duo. They embarked on their first tour together in November 2019 spanning the upper midwest, mid-Atlantic, and northeastern US, and soon after booked a studio date to record the music presented here as Dyads.