sunday sessions

Between last Sunday and now, I read A Brief History of Progress by Ronald Wright.  (I also read Crow Lake  by Mary Lawson which was fantastic, but…)

I’m not entirely sure how to stifle my fears that our collective stupidity will indeed destroy us (you can read about his argument in the synopsis of the book).  While driving back from New York saturday I heard that a pack of cigarettes now costs over ten dollars in New York State.  It seems to me that this exceptionally high taxation (while not popular necessarily) is a sensible way to manage a problem.  

There are of course a number of issues, not the least of them being that a fair portion of the money from cigarette sales in New York go to fund Children’s health, but I think it is a step in the right direction.  (A problem because less and less people are buying them, thus getting less money to the children.)  But in some oblique, perhaps accidental way, this is at least beginning to approach the idea of true cost economics.  (see Adbusters for discussion of what that is).  So what does this have to do with Ronald Wright’s thesis?  Well, I would be the first to argue that in order to deal with a growing ecological nightmare (climate change) some heavy economic changes need to be made, before the slobbering drones wake up and do anything about it.  Turn off (and throw out) the fucking television.  Do you know what else I heard on the radio  the other day.  (CBC to be exact).  Women in the 1940′s and ’50′s had more than twice as much sex as women do today.  Why?  Television.  People did not have televisions so they did other things at night after the kids had gone to bed.  (I would add computers, and cell phones, etc… to that list).  So why not charge twenty dollars a gallon for gas?  I would make a woefully unpopular politician I’m afraid.

So what the hell am I writing about?  Improvisation.  There are two today.  The first is an Ami7 (A Minor Seven) chord, the second an Emaj9 (E Major Ninth) chord, appropriately labeled below.  (No reason for those specific chords, or the fact that I did two).  I was away from my guitar for three days, and whenever I return it is a wondrous homecoming.  Not just the sound of course, but the feel.  It feels good to be back.  And so, as I mentioned last week, I play one chord and let it ring.  My god I love the sound of a guitar.

recording # 20     4.05.09 (ami7)

recording #21     4.05.09 (emaj9)

ps.  It snowed here all night friday and much of saturday.

Several years ago, I was paid to perform and “present a paper” at an academic conference on improvised music in Evanston, Illinois at Northwestern University.  Don’t ask.  And don’t get me started talking about the idea or existence of academic conferences.  For the matter of brevity (and other reasons), I will keep my mouth closed. 

There were indeed some transcendent moments at this situation.  Rather than socializing (as I likely should have been) I spent the greatest majority of my time in a Peets Coffee and Tea drinking coffee and tea, and reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk.  (He deserved the Nobel Prize I think.)  There were two performances that moved me.  The first was by a gentleman named Claudio Parodi.  Before his set he told, in his broken English, a story.

“Okay, so I must tell story before I playing.  I sorry about English, it…hard for me.  I think maybe you understand what I tell you.  So two year in the past, I staying in Turkey at friend house.  My emmmm friend, he come.  He writer.  Travel much places all over world.  Many time he come and go come and go.  So this time, he come over to friend house have dinner.  He gone very long time.  So we make a very good dinner, and drink very much vodka and it is late in the night.  So he says to me this:  before I go, I bring gift for you, but there is rule.  I will no tell you what gift is, before I give you.  You can say no, before I give, but if I give you must learn to use.  So as you can think, I am scared. I do not know if I say yes or no.  But this is very, very good friend.  How you say, he is not my brother, but he is., you know?  He tell me I must decide before he go.  So we drink more vodka.  Okay, we drink a lot more vodka, and I say ‘why not me take this adventure?’  So I look him and I say ‘okay.  Give me it.’  My friend he go down the stair and come back with very small thing.  I do not no what it is.  And then he hand me this.”

Claudio held up what I later learned was a Turkish Clarinet.  He then went on:

“So I am very excited, but scared.  I grow up play piano, and I know much music, but not this.  So I decide that because I love noise and experimental music, I will play this like that.  Not like I play the piano.”

Then he performed, and I was utterly mesmerized by his set.  Strange, aquatic, train-like sounds.  Natural and unnatural at the same time.  Moth-like.

The other set that amazed me that weekend, was by the Beirut trumpeter, Mazen Kerbaj.  (linked in sidebar)  While I couldn’t really begin to explain his set, I will say this:  he had that rare magnetism, that only a few musicians I have ever seen in my life develop with their instrument.  I can count them on one hand.  Maybe two.  What struck me about hearing him speak was that he admitted to starting to play his instrument after he discovered experimental music, and so never had any interest in learning how to play it any other way.  It was as if his entire perception was that his trumpet was a device for making sound, not something to play Miles tunes with.

So upon arriving home, I called my father.  I have many memories of his playing “When the Saints go Marching in” on slow, weekend, afternoons, in the family room.  He mailed me his clarinet the next day.  And so, much like Mazen, I decided that I would explore the instrument as a sound-making device, never really bothering to “learn” it in any classical way.  I played it two hours a week for three months or so, then returned my attention to the guitar.  This is the first time I have played it since last April. 

After using your hands for so long, it is amazing to make sound with your lungs.  And the portability is a wondrous thing.  But there is a problem:  I sit with the guitar somewhere around 2-3 hours a day.  Though I feel like a complete hack most of the time, I certainly have come to develop some facility with the instrument over the years.  When you spend time with an instrument every day, your relationship said instrument is hard to quantify.  I expands and diminishes simultaneously.  I no longer really think about “progress,” but growth.  (there is a long winded discussion here).  Anyway, without blathering on, my point here is this:  I have lost ALL facility, however minute it may have been, with the clarinet.  I couldn’t really do anything that I was able to do a year past.  None of the techniques.  Zero.

This alone, should remind me that my time spent with the guitar each day is valid, for it is so easy to lose our language.  (All the more reason to read poetry).

Two tracks here.  I took a second pass thinking that I might be warmed up, but discovered that my mouth was so exhausted, I could hardly make a sound.  I thought they sounded better together than alone.  My intent was to make long, fog-horn like tones, but I would frequently lose control.  This is far from that.

This weekend, out walking, I hear the geese flying overhead returning home for the summer. 

recording # 18   3.15.09

While walking the dog this evening, I was pleasantly reminded by another dog walker (and friend) that it often continues snowing well into May here.  Fuck.  Having just returned from California (southern) where it was seventy-something and sunny, this is hard to swallow.  It is somehow more tolerable when I can attempt, however feebly, to believe that everyone is stuck in this mess.  Twenty below zero tonight.  Fahrenheit.  It’s not even funny or romantically odd anymore.

 So that, combined with the fact that I and my baby have some sinus flu, and my wife a stomach variety, I made the sound you hear.  Guitar (Creston Electric Custom) direct to amp (Victoria 20112), two paintbrushes, wirecutters, and a handful of alligator clips.

I apologize for writing about the weather yet again.  Hard not to, when it is so cold that one stupid idea outdoors could lead to your death.

recording #16   3.01.09

I have learned one very important thing about my taste in free improvisation (without looping):  I prefer the minimal.  This could be primarily with my own playing, though I generally feel this way about others as well.  Of my own recordings (and live performances) I seem to only be happy with those where I exercise a good deal of restraint.  Less is more indeed.  Of course, this idea of the minimal, outside the definition of sixties “minimalism,” is a bit slippery.  I like Derek Bailey’s playing quite a bit and he is anything but minimal.  But then in some way, he is minimal.  Like I said, tricky to define or explain.  Perhaps the more difficult thing to explore is what makes something with very little happening interesting, while other things of the same ilk are boring.  Therein lies the mystery. 

 So this week, I was thinking about restraint and space and Rothko ( I spent some time staring at a painting in a magazine over the weekend as my son was napping, wishing to make time to paint again) and memory, and my longing to walk in the woods.  I was interested in making some sound, that would feel something like events taking place and then passing.  Disparate, yet connected, not unlike walking in the woods.  Of course I didn’t intend for this to be literal in any way, just a point of reference for myself.  I have become increasingly interested in the way that memory functions, and would like to explore that somehow musically.  I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s not.  Trust me.  I’m not even sure I know what I mean by that, but just that sometimes memory can seem odd in the way that dreams are odd.     

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until late at night, after a good deal of guitar playing that I found anything resembling what I was after.  I began with electric guitar and trashed everything within a minute, for I couldn’t seem to find the balance I wanted.  Then, sometime when my eyes began to droop, and the mug of peppermint tea was empty, I was recording something for an old song (recall the musical closet cleaning) and decided to use the acoustic. 

I rather like the way things come and go on this.  I’m not sure if it resembles memory in any way, but I am intrigued by the idea.  It makes me think that I would like to play write some music in this way.  Short little thoughts all strung together.  Only somewhat cohesive.  

Or maybe it was just that I read The Old Man and the Sea last week.  If I could make music like that.  My god.

recording # 14   2.08.09 

Sometimes, my guitar (s) and I do not get along all that well.  I’m not sure why this is (though I do have a great number of theories) but suffice it to say, that now and then we just don’t like each other.  I shouldn’t say that.  I don’t know if my guitars like me, and I always like them.  It is the sound that I do not like.  This isn’t very eloquent is it?  I am pressed for time; bear with me.  

I have been quite discouraged by my guitar playing lately.  It seems as though no amount of practice or time spent with the instrument has any effect on my facility whatsoever.  I have come to feel that I may never remember all of these damn chords and voicings, and that a real understanding of music will always remain an elusive mystery.  I know that there are a number of ways that one can “understand” music, but I mean this in the sense of a “traditional” understanding of theory, etc.  These last weeks, it seems as though the notes are a blur, that I simply cannot make sense of what I do and do not want to play.  Anyway, it all feels like a mess.  This sentiment applies not only to free improvisation, but just as acutely to composed music.  I was in Washington DC last week for a gig, and felt incredibly feeble; almost as if my brain just wasn’t working.  Perhaps it is the lack of sun and the cold air.  Hard to suck California out of this boy.

Anyway, what it all amounts to is that I missed last week because in was in the car for fifteen hours driving home on Sunday, and yesterday was a sea of frustration at best.  I tried many things, including playing the electric on a table with a nylon string in my lap.  Nylon string alone, a chaotic mess of notes.  Nylon string with long spaces of silence.  And nothing was working.  I kept stopping a minute in.  So we are left with this one.  A screwdriver, and a lot of controlled frustration.

I ordered a “learn music theory software program” yesterday.  Who knows?

recording # 12  1.25.09