New Album Out: The Kitchen Sink’s In A Silent Way

I’m on this new album from Nick Di Maria – a new performance of Miles Davis’ “In A Silent Way,” recorded live last Sunday.


It was a fun performance – I was one of two keyboardists on stage, which is a set up I enjoy (as long as the other keyboardist is the right kind of player, which Andrew Kosiba definitely is).  Nick Di Maria and Steve Asetta on horns, Mike Dick on drums and Andrew Zwart on bass.

Performing these long, “open”/”freeform” jazz classics is always interesting – there’s so much left unwritten in the classic version that the best-known documented version song is really just an expression of the performers’ musical personalities.  But we listen to that classic recording so much that we perceive every note as being a fixed part of the document – almost as if it were notated like a Bach piece or something.  But then when we play it live, just as unscripted as the original version was, the song takes on a different character because it’s being played in a different place in a different time by different people.

Or even by some of the same people – compare the album version of It’s About that Time to a live version:

Album:



Live:

I like that these challenging, experimental pieces continue the rite and ritual of playing traditional “straight ahead” jazz: playing the melody, then improvising and listening to each other…

Anyway, that’s enough coffee-fueled philosophizing on a Saturday morning; I’ve got a grad-school application to get ready.

If you enjoy the freeform Miles music, you might also want to check out this recording of Steve Asetta’s Dog Hunch – I played organ on this too:

Stop Making Symphonies, Start Making Albums

“I think that the quicker young classical musicians stop writing chamber music and symphonies, and instead start making albums, the better.”

Thus says Owen Pallett in an interesting article (with a terrible title): “Awesome Music.”  It starts as a discussion on why classical music is perceived as “old person” music, and then the round-tablers go to some interesting places on the role and nature of “classical” music now.

I like Pallett’s train of thought, but come to think of it, almost all the composers I know here in New Haven are cranking out albums as a matter of course.  Then again, my tastes run to the free improv/avante garde crowd.

But I would imagine that the number of composers releasing small-run albums vastly outnumber the composers vying for a symphony commission…probably, right?

Shout-out from Jeffrey Agrell Himself!

Improv Games for One Player Cover
Clicky clicky

How cool to receive a shout-out from the creator of my some of favorite improv exercises!  Jeffrey Agrell, author of Improv Games for One: A Very Voncise Collection of Musical Games for One Classical Musician, linked to recent post of mine on an improv session with David Elkin-Ginetti.

 

(This book’s suggestion to practice your scales in irregular rhythms has been a staple of my warm-up routine for a couple of months now – I’ve been doing all major and minor scales and arpeggios in 5/4)

 

I’ve been a reader of Agrell’s blog, Improv Insights, for a while – it’s really motivating to hear from a music educator who is so passionate about the power of improvisation and creativity – check it out!

(I love the internet!)

Improv Session – The Mysterious Tenuto

Picking up where we left off with my “avante garde jam session” writeups, when we last left our heroes, they were about to tackle a new piece.  A piece steeped in mystery, hauled from the darkest dredges of the internet.  A piece whose name is whispered in the most hushed of tones…a piece named…”Tenuto.“

Seriously, this piece is something of a mystery.  I found it a long time ago while Googling “graphic scores” and ended up at a cool website called “Scores/Improvisations/Texts” (with a name and mission statement like that, how could I not love it?)

I didn’t want to get too deep into the graphic scores, so I found this nice, brief “prose” piece:

Tenuto

And that’s it all there is to it!  Cool, no?  Who is the composer?

I Googled, I posted on the internet — but I could find no source for this piece.  Which is a shame, because we got a lot of mileage out of it.

Instead of approaching the piece linearly (top to bottom and we’re done), we decided to read it three times and thus give it three iterations:

  • Once from top to bottom (starting with tenuto and making our way to ppp)
  • From bottom to top (from ppp to tenuto)
  • Then once again from top to bottom

Ternary form, baby!

We also expanded on our Agrell improv and decided to use different intervals for each section: for the first section, the A section, we  again used 7ths and augmented fourths; the B section was again perfect fourths and fifths; and back to 7ths and augmented fifths in the last section.

We lacked a clear consensus on how to interpret the markings (++) and (–) in the score, so we left them unexplained, to be interpreted individually and perhaps in the moment.  Personally, I took them to mean “magnify” and “lessen” whatever I was doing, respectively, along a pretty much exponential curve.  If I was played loud, (++) became a big, quick crescendo.  If I had long gaps between notes, (–) lessened the space between notes.  Leaving these two directions as uninterpreted added some nice spontaneity.

Personally, I also got some mileage out of “cross-fading” between the instructions.  For example, if I took the repeat sign as cueing an ostinato, in moving on to the next direction, I would slowly “mute” the ostinato (whatever that could mean) and slowly make my way to the next direction in the piece.

All in all, the piece fueled two lengthy improvs – enjoy!

 

I’ve been YouTubbled

Well, this is pretty nice. I put my piece WEOW up on the Internet Music Score Library Project, partly to see how the whole thing worked, partly to help get up more scores involving tape and improvisation.

Someone was cool enough to make a YouTube video out of it:

And also cool enough to credit my talented performers.

Check out the poster’s other videos, featuring improvisations on Messiaen’s modes of limited transpositions, among other things (and golf swings).

Herbie Hancock, aka “Thumbsishi”

I love Herbie Hancock. He’s one of my top 5 favorite musicians. He’s done amazing work in multiple genres, he’s a melodic and funky player, and he writes great tunes (Dolphin Dance is freaking beautiful).

So I am digging this live performance of Chameleon (not coincidentally because my high school jazz band students are working on this tune right now).  But watch the close-ups.

I have to say it…could there be another pianist out there of his caliber with SMALLER fingers?! He looks like he couldn’t reach more than an octave! And yet he makes such great music with those little stumps!

Improv Session – Agrell’s Interval Game and Ternary Form

In our last improv, we talked about how constraints drive creativity – but too many constraints, or constraints that never change, can get a little dull. To remedy that, in this improv we intorduced a little tonal variety by taking the next logical next step and added a B section that introduced different intervals.

I personally *love* trying to structure free improv into ABA form, because it requires the performers to create a coherent idea, decide as a group when to leave that idea, and then remember that idea so they can return it later (the average free improv only hits the first of those three, frankly).

We were working out of Jeffrey Agrell’s “Improv Games for One Musician,” specifically with his “interval improvisations,” in which the player(s) limits his notes to certain intervals.  In his list of suggested intervals, Agrell described the use of fourth and fifths as “heroic,” which greatly amused us, so we decided to go with that for our B section.  We tied on our super capes and created the following ternary form:

A – 7ths, augmented fouths
B – perfect fourths and fifths
A – 7ths, augmented fouths




The switch to the B-section fourths and fifths creates a nice change in the landscape, to my ears.  I remember that this time through I found it easier to listen to David’s intervals and wait for the sound of his fourths and fifths to indicate that I should join him in the B section.  It created a nice little warm-up exercise.

Enjoy!  Next week we’ll tackle a couple of iterations on a mysterious and author-less prose score.

“Say Yes to Any Opportunity”

“Say yes to any opportunity to do anything even close to what you dream of doing. This will sometimes get you in over your head, but that will just make you swim harder. It’s the best way to meet other people who love to do what you love to do. You will learn from and comfort each other.”

– Stephen Colbert

From The Best Advice I Ever Got.