my NYT suite

five (click on title to listen)

full of it . . . love, that is

full of it…love that is

starfuckers

starfuckers

The “NYT” in the above title is an acronym for “New York Trilogy.” Paul Auster has already done a far better job with supplying content for that title than I ever will, but I was loathe to give it up. So I appended “My” in the hopes that I was making it clear that this was a personal take on the title alone and not on Auster’s great work. Just to give a little more flow, I abbreviated. These three pieces were the best I could do at expressing my experience(s) in New York City back in 2009. No, I did not grow up in New York. Yes, I wanted to. With all my heart I wanted to grow up in this place. And yet, when presented with the opportunity to move here, I turned it down. Twice. I could’ve gone here for college and I turned it down. I could’ve moved here after college, but I didn’t. I’m still not sure of the exact reasons, but I think what it came down to was that I was scared. Scared of the intensity of this place, scared that it wouldn’t be everything I hoped it would, scared it would embitter me . . . the list goes on forever. In the end, I finally got the chance to move here in 2004. And I moved here when it felt like there was literally nowhere else in the world I could be and have the things I wanted (like: music, my wife, other artists) but here. I am glad I moved here. New York City is far better and far worse than I ever could have imagined and it’s definitely changed me in unanticipated ways. “five,” “full of it . . . love, that is” and “starfuckers” are the emotional ventings of a hypersensitive self and I hope the melodrama of these pieces isn’t overbearing.

 ”five”

“five” is for the 5 boroughs of New York City

“five” is the first digit in the time signature of 5/8 . . . playing in odd-time signatures had been something i’d successfully avoided until I moved to New York and had to grow up

“five” is for the 5 cells in the opening bass clarinet line that are each composed of five notes

“five” has an audible illustration in the ‘B’ section of a game i used to play with prime numbers when i was a child

“five” is a beautiful number because it is so awkwardly prime

“five” is 3 improvised solo statements intersected by 2 composed statements and finished with a small composed epilogue

“five” is a track that took me and the engineer Andrew Felluss a loooong time to stitch together because none of us in the band (& most especially me) were able to get through the tune in a single take

“five” has really epic and awesome improvisations from both Mike Pride and Jonathan Goldberger

“five” is 6 minutes and 24 seconds in length.

“full of it . . . love, that is”

This was my best effort, at the time, to creatively deal with the frustration that comes from feeling overlooked. This is an especially hard feeling to deal with when you’re a New York City transplant because, by definition, you are someone who probably wants to be noticed. In particular, this song is about the feeling I’ve had of being overlooked by the avant-garde community. The avant community is prone to the same fixations, patterns, propensities as any other, and that’s always troubled me. Frankly, because I haven’t fit into this community’s unconscious needs. The particular need I’m speaking of is the one about proving one’s bona fides by filling all available sonic space with shudder-inducing sounds. I can make strangers shudder with the best of them, but I’ve never wanted to exclusively confine myself to that. And I haven’t. The upshot of this is that I’ve felt a palpable sense that I’m not ‘hard’ enough for the avant community. “full of it . . .” is my response to that. My sense is probably totally imagined and my own personal issue, but it’s weighed on me enough to produce this piece of music. But it was really important to me that this piece not simply come from a place of angry frustration. I really did want its foundation to be in a feeling of loving respect for the history of skronk. So it’s most immediate ancestor (that I’ve discerned) is probably this piece.

The form of this piece is very simple: head-solo-head. But the sonic details are worked over a bit more. First of all, I’m playing a ‘prepared’ saxophone. It’s something I experimented with several years. I stuffed a thunder tube into the bell and clapped on top of the bell a small, Chinese gong. I then clamped down 2/3 of the keys on the horn with the aid of these. This freed up one of my hands to raise and lower the gong, but also kept most of the tone holes closed so that the preparations made an audible difference. Essentially, I subverted the horn and created a machine that makes sounds I have no ability to predict. It also vastly limits what I can do on the instrument. And it’s a bitch to mic. So it was perfect for this piece.

In addition, I spent a lot of time moving the sonic textures of the blowing section inside the stereo field when I was mixing. That’s because the last thing I wanted to hear was another, run-of-the mill, “fire-in-the-pet-store.” It’s the single most overused trope in avant-garde music (outside of the start-quiet-get-loud-end-quiet trope) and it was the thing that most worried me about this piece. In a nutshell: once Coltrane recorded Ascension, no one could do that again. I mean, you can do it again, but it’s just not going to convey the shock of that initial happening. That moment is long gone and never to be repeated in that way again. But I wanted to use something like the form of Coltrane’s piece, with some added kineticism. Generally, when one hears a piece like this performed live, there can be all sorts of fascinating spatial interactions happening with the sounds. For example, as one sound gradually grows louder, it can literally emerge from the static field of noise one is observing. This is something that gets completely lost in a recording of this type of event and I wanted to induce this kind of depth in this recording. Frankly, because it’s often the only thing that can keep me interested in this type of music. So Andrew and I spent more time than we should have working this piece over. Me standing behind his shoulder and telling him when to make a particular instrument louder and then quieter, when to move a sound from left-to-right or vice versa and how quickly. It was . . . tough, but I’m really, really glad we did it.

“starfuckers”

A tender ballad with an obscene title. That really was the genesis of this song. Sophomoric? Sure. But it got the job done. That is, it was enough inducement for me to write this thing.

But I think that’s too glib. That’s not really what generated this bit. This piece is me attempting to do the impossible, to forgive. To forgive all the things that gnaw at me every day that i live here: the people who don’t return my calls or emails, the people who don’t come to my gigs, the people who wouldn’t check out this music the first half-dozen times i sent it out into the world, the people who hear me play and just don’t seem to care, the people who are never going to hear me play, the people who don’t give me a chance, the people that gave me a chance, but then gave up, the . . . It’s not what people do to each other that gets me so much as what they don’t do. And I can’t seem to get past that. So I was angry when I wrote this piece. Very angry actually. But I was also trying so damn hard to just let it go and let the anger pass. Even though I know I’m going to get angry again. About the same stupid shit again. And that’s what I figured out from this piece. I am, to the best of my ability, going to forgive things that happen to me every day. No matter if those things are real or imaginary. And then I’m going to go to sleep. And when I wake up, I’ll do it all over again. The forgiveness i mean. It’s going to be a daily, repeated activity. I’m not going to forgive something and then be done with it forever, I’m going to forgive something and that will tide me over until the next time it irritates me. I will forgive, but it doesn’t seem to be in my nature to forget, so I’m just going to have go on forgiving and get on with it . . .

And at this point, I have to ask you, the readers, to forgive me, but I simply can’t bring myself to explain any more of this piece. I want to leave a tiny amount of mystery in this album. Writing these essays has been . . . demanding. Primarily because I just never wanted to explain this music to anyone. I wanted to let every listener work things out on their own. But events seemed to ask otherwise.

If you’ve read even a few of these sentences or listened to a few seconds of this music, I want to thank you. You gave me your time and that stuff is more precious than ever these days. I’ll never know if you felt it was time well spent, but what I really hope for is that you remember something from all these . . . missives.

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the m’pingo suite

my clarinet teacher (click on title to play)

i’m still trying:

i’m still trying

dizknee justice abounds (click on title to play)

M’Pingo is a Tanzanian word for a tree that grows in their forests. This tree produces a wood with the rather unromantic name of ‘African Blackwood.’ European (Portugese, actually) clarinet manufacturers rechristened this wood with the romantic moniker of ‘Grenadilla.’ M’Pingo is the wood used to make clarinets. It’s a word that I like and it refers to an instrument that at best I feel ambivalent about.

I never asked to play clarinet. Literally. In sixth grade, after giving up piano and trombone, I decided I wanted to play the saxophone. My parents decided instead that I would play the clarinet. This decision was partly economic (cheaper rental fee) and partly aesthetic (my mom hated the saxophone). I went along with this and pretended the clarinet was a saxophone. I did this so I could stick with clarinet long enough to get a real saxophone (something my parents promised me if I showed some discipline). Consequently, I became pretty good at an instrument that I never really wanted to play. And so my plan backfired. Getting good at an instrument made it harder to convince my parents that I should be allowed to quit so I could instead play a different instrument. But after five years, I finally did get a saxophone. And even though I’ve studied the saxophone diligently, I’ve never developed the natural affinity for it that I have with the clarinet. And even though I’ve tried to quit the clarinet several times, excellent composers like Darcy Argue have stipulated that to be in their band, I need to play (bass) clarinet. So here I am, thirty years later, still playing the clarinet.

This is why I describe my relationship with the clarinet as “ambivalent.”

The M’Pingo suite is written to the three people who believed in me on this instrument and kept me going on it long after I would’ve stopped. They are Joe Vettori, my mother Wendy Sinton and Darcy James Argue. Whatever small ability I have on this instrument is due to their diligent belief.

 ”my clarinet teacher”

Joe Vettori was my clarinet teacher. One of only two I’ve ever had in my life (including bass clarinet). He was the more important of these two teachers, yet he still didn’t teach me what I wanted to learn during the time I was his student. Honestly, that wasn’t his fault. I was an adolescent when I studied with him and I really had no idea how to communicate what I wanted to study. That’s the tragedy/problem with adolescence: you think you’re being so goddamn clear about everything when in fact you make no fucking sense to a sane person. Looking back now, I realize that like any kid, I wanted to play cool music. And even though this cool music didn’t have clarinet (or saxophone, usually), I still wanted to find a way onstage with this band, this guy, this band, this band or even this band. That was the music I wanted to learn to play. Instead I learned to play this and a little bit of this. So “my clarinet teacher” is a piece that I wrote to my younger self. A piece that contains so much of what I wanted play back in the 1980′s. But it also contains bits of what I actually struggling with musically at that time.

Formally, the piece is pretty simple: there’s some written material upfront that Jon Irabagon solos over. When he’s done soloing, he plays the written melody twice and then we move on to the group improvisation. To get out of that, I start playing the phrase I wrote for myself for the ‘B’ section. Eventually we all fall in line with our composed parts, Jon plays his melody twice and we go back to the ‘A’ section which we play once and we’re done. But it’s the details of this piece that I spent the most time on.

My opening line is built on the interval of a ninth. This was my only concession to my present-day self. In 2009 I was on the tail-end of an obsession with ninths and I tried to jam them into whatever context I could. But everything else about this opening bit was from my fevered adolescent imagination: the flanger-effect on the bass clarinet, the quasi-Talking-Heads guitar line, the thumping bass drum (which my adolescent-self equates with rocking out), the bass line. All of these are things my 11-to-13-year-old-self definitely considers cool. I just told Jon to have fun on top of this weird burble-babble. For the group improvisation, I told everyone to play whatever they wanted, but it had to be material from when they first started learning their instruments. So then you get the “Star Wars” quote, the clunky scales, the patriotic tunes, the Casio ‘Samba’ best (still cracks me up), the Bach for beginners, etc. It’s a stupid mess yes, I know that, because that’s what I wanted. I still find it pretty funny.

I wrote this piece for Mr. Vettori because I wanted to thank him. He never pushed me (he would correct me), he encouraged me and he tried really hard to patiently understand me and what I was trying to do. And despite my best efforts to the contrary, he really did teach me how to more-or-less handle a clarinet.

“i’m still trying”

This is the song written to my mother Wendy Sinton. I love my mother and she loves me. We have a very difficult time getting along. Fights break out often when we’re in the same room. Neither of us are happy about this, but sometimes things get into a rut. This was the piece I wrote to her, so it a.) had to be pretty and b.) had to be tough, because that’s who my mother is and that’s what my relationship with her is. And as tough as she is, she always told me how much she liked to hear me play the clarinet.

I locked myself in my study for three days trying to think of the best way I could audibly communicate “i’m sorry” and “i’m not sorry.” [note, I would really not recommend this if you want to stay on good terms with your wife/husband/parmour/housemates. This shit will make you crazy in an extra-special-cranky kind of a way.] I finally came up with this entire melody in one piece. I then crunched together (literally) notes from the melody and from that I came up with the chords that bookend the piece. Formally, I decided to do a simple head-solo-head arrangement. The chords used to introduce the piece were used again by Jon and Jonathan during my solo to let me know that I should wrap things up. I didn’t tell them when they should play the chords, that was up to them and their musical instincts. Sonically, this is the most ECM sounding song on PB and that’s because ECM records were probably among the first instrumental records that both my Mom and I liked. It only made sense.

“dizknee justice abounds”

I really admire and respect Darcy Argue. Admire because of the tenacity of his musical thought and the surety and clarity with which he executes it. Ever since I’ve known him, I’ve always recognized his musical voice. It’s utterly distinctive. Respect because Darcy is incredibly demonstrative about the things and people that he loves. He doesn’t just say that human rights are vitally important, he tries to do something about the lack of human rights in the world as well. He has a compulsion to point out to anyone who will listen, the wrongs of the world and to courageously state over and over again that these wrongs can not stand. To know of a person so fully committed to their musical vision as well to other human beings is a rare and beautiful thing. To actually associate with such a person is an intense kind of luck that I hope never to take for granted. I’ve been really fortunate to meet and work for Darcy and “dizknee justice abounds” is the best way I could thank him.

In “dizknee justice abounds” I attempted to combine two things that Darcy introduced to my musical world: musically expressing moral outrage over the wrongdoings of the U.S. Government and Miles Davis’ music crica 1970 (specifically the album Live Evil). Simply put, the alto/bass clarinet melody is the moral outrage while the pulsing bass line is the Live Evil. Similar to “i’m still trying,” I took the melody and crunched it together to create the chords and notes of the intro. After the intro, the melody is played twice, once in octaves and the second time with a counter-line. This leads into an improvised duo between myself and Jonathan Goldberger. At my signal, we play the last phrase of the opening melody and that launches us into the ‘B’ section. The bass line changes here (it’s in 15/4 instead of 4/4) and Jon has a solo over this. When he’s done soloing, he signals by beginning a line built from the intro line (which in turn was built from the ‘A’ section line) in conjunction with Jonathan. He plays the line three times and it quickly spirals into the abrupt ending. I did try writing a counter line for myself for Jon’s solo section, but I was never able to get it to sound correct, so I axed it in the mixing booth. I also spent a fair amount of time tweaking Jon’s sound so that initially it sounds more like a guitar. Again, what I’ve been attempting to make here is a great recording. To my ears, that means I can use whatever means necessary even if that results in jettisoning a ‘natural’ sound.

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the estuary suite

water for my father (click to listen)

deeper in the woods than you

deeper in the woods than you

the earth for my father

the earth for my father

Water, Earth, and Fire is a textbook that Johns Hopkins University Press published in 1985. It is a book intended for college courses (graduate and undergraduate) in land use planning and environmental studies. It’s subject and source of inspiration is the approximately one million acres of Federal Reserve land located in the heart of southern New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens. It’s a remarkable book: erudite but plainspoken, with a smoothness to the prose that belies the sprawling complexity of its subject matter. But what’s most remarkable about the book is the obvious passions the authors (Jonathan Berger and John Sinton) have for this place. The attempt to communicate the intricacies of a landscape is so obviously fueled by the love the authors feel for this subject. And it’s a real and deep love, one built on celebrating the Pine Barrens, but also on an acknowledgement of the flaws and problems that were present at the time. The authors don’t indulge in nostalgia, because while they recognize the rich history of this strange little rural pocket, they also recognize that there’s a real future for this place as well. It’s rare to find a book suffused with this kind of feeling and I can’t recall reading a textbook  that evinced the authors’ feelings in quite this way.

John Sinton, the coauthor of Water, Earth, and Fire, is my father and I was fourteen years old when this book was published. I hate Water, Earth, and Fire. It’s a talisman of my unhappy childhood.

I didn’t start out hating W, E, & F. Initially, I took it as a convenient source of extra-musical inspiration for the first suite of PB. I knew the first suite should be about the thing that has caused me the greatest amount of distress over the years: the Pine Barrens, the place where I grew up.

I’m still not sure why I feel such antipathy towards the Pine Barrens, but it’s probably best to just say that me growing up in South Jersey in the 1970′s and 80′s was a classic case of wrong person in the wrong place and time. But that preceding sentence gives no indication of the weird kind of emotional scarring that can occur because of such an experience. Suffice to say, I had been picking at these scars for far too long and with the impending birth of my child in the summer of 2009, I decided to grab the closest object at hand that was about the Pine Barrens and use it to generate the first batch of musical material. I decided to read my father’s book from cover to cover

I wasn’t up to the task. It wasn’t because of my lack of interest and background in environmental studies and it wasn’t because I wasn’t enjoying the book. It was because read W, E, & F caused me a rather peculiar kind of psychic distress. As I read it, I recalled my dad working on this book: the +1 year or so of retreating into his home office on the weekends and mornings to type it on our Apple IIe, the 2 years or so of wandering our large front yard with drafts of it in hand, reading and correcting it endlessly, the long phone and dinner conversations with his coauthor about it. And it struck me, my Dad loved working on this book, because he loved the Pine Barrens and loved communicating that passion. And I hated the Pine Barrens, and I wanted to leave that place more than anything in the world and to this day I still get restless because I’m so afraid of becoming bored with where I am and I worry that maybe I’m not where I should be, maybe there’s a better place for me to go live. That’s when I realized that one of the reasons I ended up growing up in a place I hated was because one of my parents loved that place. And there I was, inspecting the object that was a manifestation of that love.

So it all became too much for me. To this date, I’ve read about 2/3 of my father’s book, and maybe someday I’ll finish it, but that has yet to happen. But I did manage to read enough of this textbook to generate three pieces of music. The music roughly corresponds to Chapters 2, 4 and 3 of the book. Chapter 2 “Water” was transmuted into “Water for my Father,” Chapter 4 “Fire” into “Deeper in the Woods Than You” and Chapter 3 “Earth” into “The Earth for my Father.” If this particular suite seems suffused with darkness, I can only hope the preceding explanation sheds light on the reasons why.

“water for my father”

“The Pine Barrens are an undulating, sandy, gravelly cushion of water. Where a stream slowly meanders and where bogs and swamps occur, water is at the surface of the cushion. In the lowlands bordering streams and bogs, water is no deeper than a foot below the surface.” (W, E, & F, p. 27)

These are the first three sentences of Chapter 2. After I read them, I became obsessed with them. Can’t explain why, but I just kept picturing “sandy, gravelly cushion(s) of water.” It made me think about how the seeming solidity of the ground I stood on as a child was just an illusion. I wanted to find a way to depict these cushions sonically.

I heard an image of two musical objects bumping against each other, colliding slowly, but never really integrating. Co-existing just like things in nature always do. And from this I made the decision that there would be a group consisting of me (on baritone), Peter (bass) and Mike (drums) and the other group would be Jon (alto) and Jonathan (guitar). I heard the first group as a slow moving group of underground gravel and wrote a simple 3-note figure phrased in two mildly different ways to be that. The 2nd group would be if not water itself, than the oozier type of black mud I found at the bottom of the Mullica River when the tide got real low at the local beach. For this I wrote an 11-note tone row. It’s in C because C is the one note that never appears in the 11 permutations I created of the row. After writing one version of this row, I just let my ear wander around it and created ten more variations using the same pitches. For the most part, I tried to keep the pitches close together and avoided big intervallic leaps.

For the actual performance of this, I tightly restricted the parameters of improvisation for all of us. The 3-note ‘underground’ group was instructed to play their two phrases in a continuous loop. They were to start as quietly as possible and were to crescendo as the piece progressed. By the end of the piece, this group needed to be as loud as they could humanly manage. This long crescendo was meant to be a sped-up snapshot of geological movement. The ‘black mud’ duo was instructed to play through the 11 rows in any order they wished, but they had to play the row as presented. They were to start extremely LOUDLY and extremely SLOWLY. As the piece progressed, they were to get quieter and faster. By the end of the piece, they were meant to be inaudible clicks and pops. I knew setting the piece up this way meant sometimes people would not be heard at all. I was fine with that. I sometimes like the stage picture of seeing someone play but not being able to hear them. That is, I like this when it’s intentional.

For the recording I added one other tweak: as the piece goes on, I start Jon and Jonathan on opposite and extreme ends of the stereo field. As they continue playing (and speeding up and getting quieter), I panned them slowly across the field so that by the end of the piece they end up on opposite sides of the stereo-field from where they started. Again, I was just trying to musically mimic (in a very rapid-human-being-kind-of-way) the forces of motion that happen in geology. I’m not sure how successful I was but this turned out to be a pretty fun piece to play.

 ”deeper in the woods than you”

“Leo and Hazel Landy gather, dry, cure, pack, and sell a wide variety of Pine Barrens plants to wholesale and retail florists. When asked what kind of work he does, Leo says, ‘I’m a gatherer.’” (W, E, & F, p. 123)

“As Janice Sherwood said, ‘A Piney is just a little deeper in the woods than you are.’” (W, E, & F, p. 107)

“deeper in the woods than you” is the simplest song in the Estuary Suite (probably the simplest song on PB). I guess one could chalk that up to my inability to patiently finish things (this was one of the very last things I wrote), but it might also reflect the confusion I felt when I read the fourth chapter of W, E, & F, “Fire.” I wasn’t sure what I was expecting before I started reading this chapter. I suppose a discussion of the way fire had historically shaped the look and use of the Pine Barrens. Chapter four does indeed discuss this, but I wouldn’t say that’s the central focus of the chapter. Rather, the focus is on human beings and the ways that they’ve extracted a living from the Pine Barrens and also directly manipulated the appearance of this place. From that perspective, “Man” or “Humankind” probably would’ve been a better title for this chapter, but I agree that “Water, Earth, and Humankind” doesn’t have quite the poetic resonance of the chosen title.

I was struck by the story of the Landys. I couldn’t quite imagine what their everyday life must’ve been like (writing this 27 years after the publication of W, E, & F, I suspect the Landys are no longer alive). I tried to think what that would be like, to get up early in the morning, walk out into a well-known patch of woods and begin the scan. Scanning for anything, an interesting flower, a piece of bark, a pinecone. One’s eyes never resting on any one item for too long, but at the same time one’s vision being anchored by a calm certitude. Spastic scanning was not going to get the job done, it had to be done quickly, but calmly.

I started experimenting at the piano with two augmented triads separated by a half-step. This gave me the following scale: C-Db-E-F-G#-A. I liked this scale because it was both really awkward and a bit slippery. It seemed to fit what I was looking for. After fiddling around with this scale for a couple of hours, I wrote the little scraps of melody that make up this tune. I decided to do a very straightforward ‘head-solo-head‘ arrangement. But I did tell the soloists (myself, Jon and Jonathan) to keep the solos short and try to play in short bursts. I can’t say my solo was very successful (too spastic), but I rather like Jon and Jonathan’s solos. And I like that the resultant tune is only a little over two minutes long. In the near future, I’ll be investigating how to condense all my recorded statements in a similar way.

“the earth for my father”

I can’t find an appropriate quote from E, W, & F for this section because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in Chapter Three of the book. What I wanted to find was some assurance or discussion of the solidity of the land of the Pine Barrens. Instead, I found descriptions of people scrabbling to “wrest subsistence” from a soil that’s an unforgiving combination of acidic sand, deeply submersed and near-useless gravel. There were interesting stories about families that had made their living farming cranberries or blueberries, stories of German immigrants, stories of the occasional black family. All of them mentioned in this chapter because all of them maintained gardens. So I decided to write a piece of music based on what I wanted this chapter to be, not so much what it actually was.

Like I said, I wanted “earth” to be about the reassuring solidity of the ground. Even if that is a poetic conceit, that’s what I wanted. As such, I listened for things in my mind that made me feel grounded, made me feel calm. The first sound that come to my inner ear was J.S. Bach’s sound-world. Specifically, his cantatas. It’s surprising to think that Sunday’s in our household were given over to J.S. Bach’s intensely Lutheran music. Surprising because I would be generous in describing my household as “agnostic.” But there it is, I grew up listening to god-loving music in a god-questioning household. While I wanted “earth” to partake of Bach’s world, I didn’t want to ape it.  I don’t have the ability to imitate in that way nor would that serve my purposes.

I found what I was looking for in a theory book that I was studying at the time (I’m actually still studying from it). It’s a treatise called The Harmonic Experience written by W.A. Mathieu. At the time I had started working on this piece, I was just getting halfway into Part Two where Mathieu begins to describe how you can use all twelve chromatic notes but still stay firmly in one key. I found his practical suggestions (exercises to be sung and played at a keyboard) to be revelatory. And based on reading this book, I created a long and circuitous chord-progression that while far-ranging, never stepped outside of the key of C (I will admit, these chords fluctuate pretty freely between major and minor). This chord progression somehow reminded me of the progressions I would hear in one of Bach’s pieces (mainly his cello suites), but it clearly was clunkier (and therefore more ‘me’) than one of his. This long chord-progression provided the ground I needed.

Playing this progression over and over again, I came up with a melody that would go on top of it. But I really didn’t want this to be a straightforward reading of what in essence was a pretty simple construction. I decided to reverse the normal order of things and have the saxophones (myself and Jon) play the chords like we were 80′s-era synthesizers while the rhythm section (Peter, Jonathan and Mike) would play the melody. This turned out to be much harder to execute that I anticipated.

What you hear on this track is Jon and I striving mightily to play the entire chord-sequence as freely improvised arpeggios without pausing to take a breath. I tried my best to make it sound like burbling synthesizers, but I didn’t really succeed. Mike quickly enters on drums (I asked him to listen to Tortoise’s TNT to get an idea of what I was looking for) and soon after that, Peter and Jonathan loosely drape the melody on top of the chords. The melody is played through twice while Jon and I tried to ratchet up the intensity (?!) and at the end of it Jon and I play a brief cadenza while Peter, Jonathan and Mike play the last seven chords of the piece underneath us. The whole thing came out much more raggedly than I wanted, but I think that’s because I made the piece more complicated than it needed to be. Someday I’ll get it right.

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through the trees . . .

part i: through the trees I saw stone caves on a beach i

part ii: through the trees I saw stone caves on a beach ii

There’s a point where memory dissipates and becomes a dream, an imaginated figment. Then there’s the point where a dream ossifies, becomes unbearably real. Somewhere in between these two places is where I found “through the trees i saw stone caves on a beach.”

Here’s the dream: sometime during a 1970′s summer visit to the Bay Area of California, my older half-brothers (I have 3 of them) were visiting my parents and I. My parents took the 5 of us (I have a younger full-brother) out to a beach. It was one of those melodramatic days where for five minutes the sky looks like it’s about to release an end-times deluge and for the next five minutes the sun bathes everything in warm sepia tones. Back and forth. The kind of day that’s incredibly appealing to a child and exhausting for an adult.

It was late afternoon when we got to the beach. The tide had finished rolling out and was beginning its long creep back towards the shore. Since it was late summer, the Pacific was also cold, so it wasn’t the best weather for swimming. We walked along the beach for a short distance and the we came across a jumble of porous, almost rust-colored rocks. They looked like a set of homemade, wooden marbles a giant had left there. My older brothers immediately started climbing the heap of rocks and I followed behind them as quickly as I could. I could hear my parents behind me yelling out thtat we could run around these rocks for 10 or 15 minutes, but then we had to come back because the tide would be returning soon. Sweet. This could be dangerous. Once on top of the rocks, it didn’t take long for one of us (I think it was Jonathan, the oldest) to find an opening in the rocks. He wriggled inside and we all followed him. Inside the jumble was even better than I could have imagined: a disorienting maze of crevices and warrens where ingress was limited only by how much squeezing my body could withstand from the boulders. We ran around inside the jumble, losing track of each other, shattering the occasional shaft of light that peeked inside our secret hiding spaces. From a great distance, I heard my parents’ voices calling to us, saying we had to go. We clambered out as quickly as we could (I almost got lost inside there) and ran as fast as we could across the sand to go home.

Here’s the memory: my parents are inveterate travelers. To this day, it is normal for them to take 2-3 vacations a year. Each one is about 2-4 weeks in length and each one consists of lots of movement; whether on foot, by car or bicycle or canoe. The vacations are just as much, if not more, about the time spent getting there as they are about being there. Growing up with them, I have regular memories of the long drives home to South Jersey. Given that these drives usually started at 9 or 10 a.m. and that they were often 6-8 hours in length, the drives almost always culminated in quietly observing the sun set behind the pine and cedar trees from the vantage oint of my back seat. As we raced along, time would hover above a standstill, sunlight would strobe from the dense forest wall and I would slowly drift off. At that moment I was finally free of my anxiety over when we’d finally get home and I could finally get out of the car. But even after I got out of the car, raced inside and finished my day, every time I blinked or shut my eyes, the sunlight would still be flickering there. My own private fireworks show.

After contemplating this dream and this memory, I decided that the musical version of it would be an improvisation using elements of Steve Reich’s sound world. My father’s been listening to Reich since the early 1980′s, so I have pretty strong memories of hearing “Clapping Music,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Desert Music” (which for some unknown reason still terrifies me to this day). Reich’s music is definitely part of my sonic background and for some reason it felt like the right fit for the dream and the memory.

I wrote 5 short phrases that would all be played at the same tempo. But I left it up to the performers to start these phrases whenever they wished and to repeat them as often as they liked. For rhythmic/textural variety, I rewrote these phrase twice as fast (1 of them), 1/2 as fast (4 of them) and 3/4 as fast (1 of them). Players were left to pick and choose from this field of 11 phrase as they saw fit.

I heard the piece continuing, so I decided to write a ‘B’ section. I opted for the same performance procedures, but in order to keep myself interested, I decided to observe traits in my ‘A’ section phrases and write the opposite of them for the ‘B’ section phrases. In ‘A”, almost all the phrases were even-metered and there were very few rests in the phrases. So for ‘B’ I decided to write 5 phrases again, but this time the phrases would be odd-metered (most are in 7) and every phrase had to have noticeable phrases in them. In order to focus on these silences, 4 of the 5 variations of the original ‘B’ phrases were written at 1/2 the speed of the originals.

The only thing left was to figure out how to get from ‘A’ to ‘B.’ For that, I wrote a single phrase that harmonically could be placed in either of the sections. I told all the players that anyone could, at any time,  start playing this phrase and that this would be the signal for the group to coalesce around the phrase and then make the jump to the next section (from ‘A’ to ‘B’ or ‘B’ to ‘A’) It was really important to me that any member of the group could take over leadership of the piece at any point. It was equally important that this piece have a Ouroboros-like structure.

We recorded the entire thing in one take. After some clean-up editing (I cacked some of the phrases), I took the entire 11-minute piece and cut it in half. I then put the 1st half (‘A’) at the beginning of PB and the 2nd half (‘B’) at the end. During the mastering, I did make sure to set everything so that if your audio-player is set to shuffle, and if you happen to get these tracks consecutively (in either order), it will sound as one long, uninterrupted track.

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Pine Barren Trailer: Pine Barren Preview

I: [Jan. 2012]

I made a record. With my band holus-Bolus. And I called the record Pine Barren. The bulk of the time spent on this project was in a recording studio. Why? Because what I really cared about, what I really wanted to do, was to make a great record. And making a great record means making something to be played on stereo speakers or headphones. It’s not the same thing as constructing music for a live concert. I know the difference because growing up,  all I had were recordings. And the first time I got to hear live music, it made me feel differently. So with Pine Barren (hereafter referred to as PB), I went for the feel of a great record. PB is about my childhood and as such, it has to be a record.

II: [june, 2009]

so. . .this is for real. . .this is really happening. i knew it was, but now i can actually imagine it. . .i think. . . jesus, how am i going to get anything done? i thought i had no time to write and practice before, but how am i going to manage this? i really, really can not fuck this up. i’ve got to get this right. the last thing i need to do is screw up another person’s life. . .but how can i prevent that if i’m blundering around miserably? how do i stay productive? how do i keep making things? i am so scared of becoming a dad. . .

So where is this record? Nowhere. That is, there is no physical record, no talisman. After spending ten months mixing¹ and mastering² PB, I sent it to to record labels (twenty-one of them to be exact) and fellow musicians. For the most part, I got no response. Occasionally I was fortunate enough to get a “no” (there’s something to be said for closure). And once in a while I got a “I like this.” Why did I send it to so many people and companies? Why didn’t I just go ahead and release it myself? Why didn’t I just start up my own label? What on earth did I have to gain from all this? To this I have two simple answers: 1.) I don’t want to run a record label, my own or anyone else’s and 2.) I want to be on a record label. Why? Here are a few things a label can offer:

o.k., so if i’m gonna be stuck at home, there’s gotta be something i can do to keep myself occupied. something that’ll make me feel like i’m still a productive human being. maybe i should just start documenting everything i’m involved with. . .then while i’m home, i can pester labels about releasing the stuff. ideal bread shouldn’t be so hard. we seem to have enough material for a new CD and the jazz mausoleum seems to appreciate a good repertory band. but what about holus-Bolus? i’ve just got some odds and ends laying around, but nothing that coheres into a record. maybe now’s the time to write a whole new bunch of material. . .but what do i have to say?

1. Physical Production: A label can (and often does) lend money to cover the costs of making CD’s or LP’s. The bet (and it is gambling) is that enough of these will be sold to recoup costs. After spending money on tracking, mixing and mastering, I’m now low on funds (read: broke) and could use help making physical copies.
2. Publicity: A label is a business. A business premised on selling sounds. I am a business too. My business is making sounds. Yes, these two businesses intersect, but they are not the same. Time spent publicizing the sounds I make is time that could be spent making sounds. I need a label to help publicize the sounds I make so I can be freed to up to keep making sounds. I will publicize my own work (witness: this essay), but I have to draw boundaries on this part of my life, otherwise the music I turn out is crap.
3. Validation: Do I need to feel accepted in my profession? Yes. Do I need to feel like people are interested in my work? Absolutely. I need an audience. Being validated by a record company (no matter their size) means being included in a community of artists. It means being perceived as part of a gorup. And I’m a firm believer in the power of numbers. If my CD carries the same moniker as other disparate artists, that means I’ve passed a litmus test of interestingness. It goes something like:
   “I like band ‘X.’ They have a record out on label ‘Y.’ hmm, holus-Bolus is also on label ‘Y,’ but i’ve never heard of  them. Well that’s interesting. I wonder what holus-Bolus sounds like? It’s gotta be pretty good if they’re on the same label as band ‘X.’”
   Everyone goest through this thought process; everyday people, critics, concert promoters, bookers, musicians, everyone.

I’m not agains people self-releasing and starting their own labels. It’s just that’s not the route for me at this juncture.

i really don’t want to screw up this child. my child. often i find myself stunned into angry silence over the absurd shit i can’t shake off from my childhood in nj. the last thing i need to be doing is lashing out at my kid because of this. . .maybe that’s what i should write about. . .the memories themselves. maybe if use this grist, then i’ll finally be rid of it. then i won’t have worry so much about disappearing into lockers of disappointment and paranoia. and maybe i’ll make something worthwhile from this mound of psychic bullshit. . .perform a kind of spiritual alchemy where dross of memories is spun into a kind of gold (or at least something shiny and interesting). . .maybe this way i’ll finally exorcise these demons.

So after all this, I’ve decided to release PB with my good friends at Prom Night Records. It will be an internet-only release. Currently there are no plans to make physcial copies. In addition, there will be no “CD-Release Party.” There will just be this: music to be listened to (or purchased) online, artwork (by Elizabeth Daggar) to be looked at (or purchased) and essays (by me) to be read. Why no release party? Because I broke up the band. Why? Because of internal and external pressures. Or rather the lack thereof. Externally, I couldn’t get us any shows (one of the many side-effects of not being associated with a label). Internally I couldn’t get the band to rehearse (one of the many side-effects of not having gigs). At the end of this long process, I can only offer these sounds and words.

but which memories do i use? there’s too many of them and most of them are too personal, too subjective to have much resonance with anyone else. maybe instead i can write about the memory of the emotions. . .the specific kinds of fear i felt (of being beaten up, of being alone, of never escaping), the specific kinds of anger (at my father and mother, at other kids, at other people), specific kinds of disappointment (in myself, in my family, in humans). but maybe i can also find moments of forgiveness or at least ‘not-anger.’ a recording of only my fear and anger is so. . .boring. because it wasn’t just that. i did try to find ways to wake up each day, to make sense of it all. that’s got to be in there too.

Starting next week and for the next four weeks, I will release two to three tracks from PB with accompanying essays. The music will be streamable in its entirety but can also be purchased. The essays can be read as listening guides, but I wrote them more as ‘parallel displays.’ There is the music and then there’s the story of the creation of the music. Each comments on the other, but they are by no means identical. At the end of four weeks, all eleven tracks will be available for download via the internt. In addition, I’ve worked with Ms. Daggar to create 4 images for the album. These will be released in conjunction with the music. A good friend of mine is also working on a movie that will incorporate some of the music from PB. As more info on that becomes available, I’ll let folks know. At the top of this essay, you can listen to a preview track I constructed from the elements of PB as well as view some artwork. Enjoy.

there will be 3 suites. bcause. . .i have to find a way to structure all this stuff. . .and i like the number 3. the first suite will be about my father, so the 2nd suite will be about my mother, and the 3rd. . .me (what on earth am i going to write about myself?)? and there will be a bookend piece, a portal for letting listeners into and out of the record. . .but who listens to a record all the way through these days? o.k, i gotta break this thing up into bite-size piece, into chunks that will work on shuffle setting as well as a full listen. and what about shows? how are we going to play this as a band when i can barely gett all 5 of us into the same room? maybe i need to make the pieces modular in the same way that the musical structure is modular. make the pieces so they can be played with any number of us present. could be just me, a trio, a duo, the full quintet. maybe. . .

But I’ll make a deal with all of you reading this: if enough people buy the music (via downloads from Prom Night), then I will use that money for making CD’s and/or vinyl LP’s. And if more money comes in after that, I’ll use that to make more…stuff; more sounds, more words, more experiences. And if anyone out there wants to hear live versions of these songs (a very different experience from the recorded versions), contact me about the particulars and I’ll work hard to put together an inspiring live show. But the sounds are free to listen to (provided you have a solid internet connection). You can listen here, here or here. Spending money on this music isn’t necessary if you want to listen to it. Spending money is necessary if you want me to keep making music. Think of it as an investment: in return for buying the music, I promise repayment in the form of more awesome (or at least interesting) music and art.

this has to be a record for listening. the kind of record i would pull from my father’s giant wall of records when i was searching for companionship. the kind of record that sounds as good as ll the other records up there on his long-past shelf. something that i’d dub onto a tape cassette and carry out into the woods with me when i’d go to smoke.

Why am I going through all this trouble? Why write so many words and release an album that labels don’t want by a band that no longer exists? A.) Once I release this, I can get on with my life and get to work manifesting all the other stuff in my head. B.) This album fucking rocks. It’s the best thing I’ve made so far and I wouldn’t ask for ears or money if I didn’t think it was worth it. I want you to listen to it.

I’d like to thank the people who helped me make this album: Peter Bitenc, Mike Pride, Jonathan Goldberger and Jon Irabagon all played beautifully under difficult circumstances. Andrew Felluss was extremely patient with my tardy ass and endless requests during the mixing stages. Randy Merrill made the mysteries of mastering just a little bit clearer. Aaron Siegel very kindly let Mike Pride play his vibraphone for the opening and closing tracks of PB. Elizabeth Daggar did a great job translating my endless ramblings into coherent (and beautiful) images. And the guys at Prom Night Records (Owen, Brad & Nathaniel) helped preserve my sanity (seriously). Thank you all.

You might not like this albume. You might find it boring or stupid. That’s fine. I just ask that you listen. Just Once.

Next week: I release the bookend(s) of PB: “through the trees i saw stone caves on a beach parts i & ii”

1. mixing – the process of setting volume levels for all individual sounds, placing them in the the stereo field (left, right or center) and coloring their timbres (making an instrument sound ‘brighter’ or ‘darker,’ etc). It’s also the part of the record-making process where a song is edited, literally the part where you cut-and-paste a song to make a final product.
2. mastering – deciding which songs go where, setting the volume levels and silences between the songs and imparting a particular ‘feel’ or ‘sound’ to an overall recording. A mastering engineer who knows what she’s doing can make your record sound harsh and brittle or warm and dark. It’s a bit mysterious, but if you care about the sound of your record, it’s essential to the creative process.

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Their description: “Spontaneous Construction, a new series at the Blue Note courtesy of Search & Restore, every Friday a group artists who have never performed together before, improvising. The veil of a bandleader is gone, and the music remains”

$10 at the door.  come out!

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sorry to have disappeared.  can take me a little while to generate material sometimes (well, most times actually).

anyway, i tried to give more personal responses to the previous two essays.

and coming soon: a 5-part series about an album project i’ve been working on for two years and am finally ready to release.  that should be in the next 2-4 weeks (promise!) and when it comes out, it’ll be a combined posting of words + music every week for 4 weeks (another promise!).

the album is called “Pine Barren” and it’s…different.

The post New Stuff appeared first on Josh Sinton.

But I feel I should elaborate, if only slightly, on my original topic.

When I stated, “I am not a jazz musician” this was a statement of societal non-identity.  That is, at the heart of it, I don’t care about marketing rubric (not painstakingly so) nor about the interesting, but academic, question of  “what is jazz?”  What I care about is having a group identity and being able to work.  The essay I wrote is the simplest way I could find to say that identifying as a jazz musician fulfills neither of those desires.*

The most important part of my essay (to me) was, “I just don’t feel welcome here.  I don’t feel wanted, needed or necessary to jazz, its traditions or its current culture.”  Certainly while this statement says more about me than jazz culture, it also points to the fact I’m pursuing a fundamentally different path as an Ellington, Mingus, Threadgill or Braxton (never mind the fact that I don’t have a fraction of any of their abilities).  Many (not all) musicians who have abjured the title “jazz” have done so after being accepted or nominated into the community.  I can’t say I’ve felt either of those things.  Yes, I have played with jazz musicians, yes I’ve hired them, yes I’ve studied with them.  So yes, I have been knocking on the jazz door for going on 20 years now.  But no, I’ve never felt admitted to the room.  So at this point, I’m trying to get on with my life.  Call me slow to catch a hint, but I get it now.  Moving on.

And “being able to work?”  That’s why I brought up the whole marketing angle, but I apologize for not being clear enough or succinct enough.  Here’s my straight up opinion on this:  despite what some of my esteemed colleagues believe, I think the Marsalis family, Crouch, et al. won the jazz war.  Jazz is now busily being enshrined and canonized with lots of concomitant onstage demonstrations by some practicioners.  And honesetly?  I don’t care.  The gentlemen I have named have worked very, very hard to win these lexical rights and they care deeply about this word ‘jazz.’  Great.  They can have that word.  I don’t need it.  What I need is work.  I need to be able to quit my day job.  I need to be able to play music for a living. That’s what I care about.  And while your job title can impact your living wage, during these desperate times (and please, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s really quite, quite bleak for many of us right now) clarity of purpose is demanded.  So when push comes to shove, I’m much more invested in actually working than in my job title.

The current version of jazz’s definition that gets any financial support is not

a.  a definition that includes me or many of my heroes.

b.  looks like any fun.

Because when it comes down to it, I still remember what it felt like the first time I came in contact with music that made me want to play, and that music filled me with me immense amounts of joy, passion and life.  It was fun.  And frankly, the music of the recreationists, despite the skill and artistry of its practicioners, does not make me feel the same way.  And most of all, it doesn’t look fun.  I always thought that ‘jazz’ could be a larger umbrella term.  I thought that the generation of people I went to school with could help expand it.  That we could build a bigger room that included the recreationists and …well, myself.  I don’t think that anymore.  So I leave it up to anyone interested to find a label for what I’m doing.  Again, if folks want to call it ‘jazz,’ so be it.  This is all to say that it doesn’t matter to me now.

As one final note, while I’ve been gratified by the response the original posting got, it’s troublesome and sad to me that so many of the musicians who responded essentially said the equivalent of “You tell ‘em!”  What does this say about jazz culture?  We’re so busy trying to bring in an “audience” and to “educate” people, but meanwhile, we seem to be neglecting and ignoring our literal own?  If I’m not the only one having these feelings, then that means there’s a worrisome number of artists who aesthetically feel homeless.  And while the fancy words make this seem like not such a big deal, having so much self-identity tied into aesthetics can lead to some truly self-destructive behavior under these circumstances.  I am both disappointed in and worried about my colleagues.

*[N.B. -  I fully recognize that both of these unfulfilled desires might be completely my fault.  If that’s how you feel, I completely understand.  But I am writing and publishing all these words on the off-hand chance that I don’t share 100% culpability.  Because if that’s the case, my issues are definitely indicative of systemic unhealthiness.]

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Assume that I’m no different from most jazz musicians.  This is an easy assumption to make.  I’m white, middle-class, male and spent several years studying jazz-based improvisation.  That is, improvisation based on what other self-avowed jazz musicians have produced.  I’ve studied both outside of the academy (in my twenties) and in the academy (my late-twenties and early-thirties).  So I’ve seen both sides of that fence.  And oh yeah, I play saxophone.  Even used to own a black leather jacket till someone stole it.  Got earrings left over in my left ear from my teenage years.  So yes, according to the average person on the street in most parts of this planet, I fit the description of a “jazz” musician.

So what does that imply about me that I don’t consider myself a jazz musician?  Well, I must be dissatisfied, possibly disaffected and quite probably suffering from a case of sour grapes.  I won’t argue with any of these implications.  They’re all true to varying degrees.  But again, if I fit the description of an “average jazz musician,” then there must be other people feeling the same way as me.  And if there are other people feeling the same way as me, even a minority, what does this imply about the culture of jazz?

It implies that jazz culture is not what could be termed a nurturing culture.  Yeah, I know any musicians reading this are giggling uproariously right now, but that’s because it’s true.  More importantly, it implies that jazz culture is something that I don’t want to be a part of.  That as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to be gained by being called a jazz musician.  At least in my case there’s nothing to be gained.  For a member of the Marsalis family, there’s a decent amount of money at stake.  So I understand it’s different for everyone.

And I’m not asking for this “something-that-is-nothing” to be a six-figure salary, or fame or an enormous house or even much of a living wage.  When I started in this racket I just wanted a chance to play.  And now I’ve been fortunate enough to have several chances to play and I’ve realized I really only want the playing to lead to one of three things.

Either:

1. emotional/spiritual compensation

or

2. another opportunity to play

or

3. financial compensation

And occasionally the playing has led to one of these three requisites being fulfilled.  But sparingly so.  Most importantly to me, numbers one and two, the more ephemeral demands, have of late never been fulfilled.  And of late has been when I’ve been the most committed to being a “jazz”* musician., the most committed to saying, “I’m a member of the jazz community” (such as it is).  So if I can’t count on any of these requirements being met, what’s the point of being part of this dysfunctional community?  If there are zero benefits presently, and zero benefits accruing, then it looks like a change of perspective is in order. These are the selfish reasons for not wanting to be a jazz musician.

But there are the practical and obvious reasons too.  The ones that for all the talk, rarely get addressed head-on in a common-sense way.  Reasons like: jazz isn’t cool, that is, it’s not popular with people under the age of forty.  Not really.  Now do I think the music is uncool?  Absolutely not.  Do I think the brand, the label, the name is uncool?  Absolutely.  Medeski, Martin & Wood.  Great band and guess what?  They’re just as often (if not more often) classifed as a jam band than a jazz trio.  And they’re certainly not called a piano jazz trio.  Colin Stetson, incredible saxophonist.  One of the few people playing the instrument that rock snobs don’t call “annoying.”  Guess what?  He doesn’t refer to himself as a jazz saxophonist.  Nor does he tour with self-proclaimed jazz bands.  But I wax anecdotal.  Typing words like “jazz” and “annoying,” “sucks,” “boring” or “stupid” isn’t going to accomplish anything new.  Jazz musicians know this and some revel in being unpopular.  I don’t.

Now I harbor few illusions about this.  I know I have several aesthetic strikes against me in this current time and place:  I don’t sing, I play an unpopular instrument, I like to make up some of this stuff as I go along and I like dissonance/noise/skronk.  So yes, Grammy material I am not.  But fuck it, I never liked much of what the U.S. considers popular.  I still think there are enough “weirdos” out there like me who like what I like that they can help support me in creating a modest life for me and my family.  I just don’t want to be aesthetically ghettoized any more than necessary.  And this is for me the real proof of “jazz’s” unpopularity:  the big U.S. music festivals like South by Southwest, CMJ, Bumbershoot, Coachella, shit, even the New Orleans Jazz Festival, all those festivals will always relegate self-proclaimed “jazz” to side stages.  To hard to find “alternate” venues, to “off” nights.  Now maybe I’ll never make it to the mainstage (ain’t holding my breath), but I at least want a fighting chance.  And being called a jazz musician just handicaps those chances.

Those are the marketing reasons for not wanting to be a jazz musician.  But really when it comes down to it, I just don’t feel welcome here.  I don’t feel wanted, needed or necessary to jazz, its traditions or its current culture.  I’ve met some lovely people and played with some astounding musicians, but none of that stems from being called a “jazz” musician.  That’s just getting lucky.  So hopefully I’ll still find some luck in the future.

So call me a jazz musician if you want.  That’s fine, I can’t and won’t stop you.  Just know that I don’t consider myself a jazz musician.  But unless you’re over the age of 60, don’t call me “cat.”  Seriously, I hate that shit.  The 1950’s happened sixty years ago and even using the term then I suspect would leave one open to being labeled a “square.”

* — Yes, my constant use of quotation marks around the word ‘jazz’ is obnoxious.  But there’s a good reason for this.  I have no idea anymore what a jazz musician is.  I’ve heard lots of definitions, but none of them make rational sense to me.  At this point in my life, all I can figure is that a jazz musician is someone who spends most of their time around other musicians who call themselves jazz musicians.  I promise at this point to stop using quotations around the ‘j’ word.

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So what have I been doing with this preparation time?  Reading Walt Whitman and Samuel Beckett.  And listening to pre-WWII blues and gospel.  Reading back those sentences, I can see how these activities appear escapist.  That’s all right, because I know that’s not what this is.  I’ve found myself reading Whitman (the unabridged Leaves of Grass) and Beckett (the Complete Plays starting from the final ones) in an attempt to find some balance between two competing desires I’ve always had.  On the one hand, there’s the need to ecstatically immerse myself in some kind of flow of life.  To be in a place where things are in constant motion and always changing.  I find this to be a pretty American-centered desire, a need for newness and abundance.  But I also hear this same dynamic in German Baroque music.  As formal as that music can be, it is a music that is always going somewhere.

On the other hand, I have a deep-seated need to just make the world stop. And to focus on and contemplate only the most essential.  This act of distillation has become seductively comforting of late and I’ve even found myself reading small amounts of predicate calculus.  Somehow the overuse of rationality keeps emotional demons at bay.  Or at least reigns them in.  It has a curious distancing effect that makes it easier to get through the day.

And the blues and gospel?  Pure sonic comfort food.  I’ve never understood it nor questioned it.  I am not given over to nostalgia in the least, but for some odd reason this music (of Leadbelly, of Blind Willie Johnson, of Mahalia Jackson, of Sister Rosetta Tharpe) has always felt like ‘home’ to me.  Like the place I came from.

What will happen tonight?  I don’t have a clue.  I wish I did because I often like to have something prepared for solo shows.  I know that the show will have something to do with how I am ‘in’ this world and also ‘of’ this world.  Some fundamentals of existence I suppose.  Or maybe it will be a boring sequence of tones.  I am nervously expectant.

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