Picture this: you’re driving along some godforsaken desert highway in California, when you come across a sign for a hotel, all pink and blue neon. Curious, you take the turnoff. You can see it shimmering the distance. And when you get there, you find a place that hasn’t changed in half a century. There’s a band out by the pool, dressed in pink tuxedoes, and they’re playing the same music they were playing in 1962. But after all this time, the music has evolved. Now the rhythms are all off-kilter, the harmonies slightly wrong.

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I wrote Party at the Last Resort for Fifth House Ensemble to perform at the 2012 Fresh Inc Festival. It’s based a piece I wrote six years earlier, with the slightly more awkward title of The Last Resort Party Band. The new version has less predictable rhythms and a larger instrumentation, and what had been a long, loud, bangy final section has been reduced to a halting, mysterious coda.