New Haven Improvisers Collective ran through a suite of Stockhausen pieces for the January workshop. The forms were taken from the composition “Auf den seben Tagen” (From the seven days). The pieces are very open to interpretation, thankfully, and the group really dug in and did some fine work. Jeff Cedrone, Paul McGuire, Peter Riccio, Bob Gorry, Nate Trier, Me, and Bill Beckett on “infinite nothingness”.
After composing the previous post I opened up a Cecil Taylor CD (Trance), lent to me by my friend Peter Riccio. I read the liner notes, written by Erik Wiedemann in 1963… As I got to the end I could not help but laugh:
“If a man plays for a certain amount of time – scales, licks, what have you – eventually a kind of order asserts itself. Whether he chooses to notate that personal order or engage in polemics about it, it’s there. That is, if he is saying anything in his music. There is no music without order – if that music comes from a man’s innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion of what order should be as imposed by the outside. Whether that criterion is the song form or what some critic thinks jazz should be. This is not a question, then, of” freedom” as opposed to “non-freedom” but is rather a question of recognizing different ideas and expressions of order” – Cecil Taylor to Nat Hentoff, Downbeat magazine, February 25, 1965
After something like 40 years of aspiring to play music, the push/pull of improvisation and tight structure is still the primary source of tension in my musical endeavors. Right up front I think it is important to say that I don’t believe any performance is ever completely one way or the other. Improvisation requires structure to be developed more dynamically, but it is never truly unstructured. Likewise when you are playing a written part, it still requires the performer to adapt dynamically to the performance (even a solo performance).
While I can read music, albeit slowly, I mostly learn parts by ear and my charts are diagrammatic as opposed to using standard musical notation. It has never really been in question: I am firmly in the improvisors camp, and have been as long as I can remember. So when I go to a festival like Rochefort en Accords, and I am relying on my ears to get me through multiple sets with multiple leaders in multiple styles, it can get ugly. It GOT ugly. I picked up some useful techniques for enhancing my schematic approach to song structure while at that festival. But the central problem is that I play improvised and minimally notated music all the time, and when I have to play “inside”, what to me seemed like vast expanses of “inside”… where there are set parts and sight reading skills would make it an easy gig… I’m pretty much fucked.
On the other hand, I ended up playing bass in two groups in the same night, back to back sets last December (see previous post for a summary) with minimal rehearsal, and I knew that I would be fine. I trusted my bandmates in Rochefort, but the circumstances were completely different. The band drilled on set compositions with a lot of synchronized stops, starts, and changes… When I am playing with New Haven Improvisors Collective I trust my NHIC bandmates to work as a unit, and improvise as a unit, and they reward that trust magnificently. A comparison might be the difference between trusting drill-team partners to know their spots, and trusting your fellow birds to make wheeling turns as a group.
As a musician and listener, some of the music that I love would not have been possible without standard notation. It might be fair to say that the majority of it is rooted in conventional concepts of notation for ensemble performance. It is a good way to communicate musical ideas, it transcends spoken language, and it allows musicians who read to perform parts as an ensemble with a lot less of a learning curve. If you are trying to get a horn section to play as a unit, write the parts, or at least write the harmonies. If you need the bass to play specific parts, write them. But when the issue is improvised music, free music, instant-composition… you don’t expect or tolerate any less skill on the bandstand. Improvisation has everything to do with communication, and rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic knowledge is essential to communication.
The one thing the two approaches have in common is that you can’t help but develop skills if you do either of them long enough with enough focus. You might develop some whacky shortcuts to reading charts, but you will develop chart reading skills after years of effort. And the same is true with improvisation. The idea is to build a skillset that allows you to function in your intended area(s) of performance.
And example that is dear to me is ear-training: My ears, they have been schooled to hear implied harmony and rhythm, counter lines, tensions, pedals, etc… very well, though I might not be able to call out the pitch. That is a skill developed from years of making my instruments work in a dynamic and improvisational manner. If I had spent the past 40 years reading charts, my ears and overall skill set would be totally different. I imagine that I would hear true pitches better (maybe…) and not get thrown as bad when I hear the harmonics stronger than the actual notes.
For me, playing “in” is harder than playing “out”. And it would be easier to say “of course” and yes, reading hard-ass written parts is an art and very few people do it well. But the other truth is that improvisation takes the same dedication, the same level of practice and commitment, but it doesn’t hold up to the european-classic concept of “skill”. And that’s fine with me, but it took a long time for me to get there.
Everything is running a bit late this year, so my recap of the NHIC gig is also late. Short of it: it was a very cool night of music.
nhic:atlas (Bob Gorry pronounces “NHIC” as “NICK”… go figure) was a blast to play with, and was in the odd position of having a CD release show with 50% new lineup and 80% new material. But hey, this isn’t a commercial thing, so no worries. We had Mike Paolucci (Sandy knows him as “octopus boy” due to his fluid style behind the kit) on drums and he was a swingin’ rock of funky rhythm. Gabriel Kastelle is always a joy to play with as well. I love an in-tune violin or viola, and he has great pitch. The Gorry-Asetta-Matlock front end from the original Atlas lineup was intact, and sounded great. The swingin’ new rhythm section, and new blood in the violin-family chair brough a totally different feel to the group. Where the original nhic:atlas was leaning toward a formal chamber-jass feel, the new lineup was more funky and leaning more toward a propulsive feel. On my end, I was playing my Tacoma acoustic bass guitar in place of the original upright bass, and it filled that role like a champ. No feedback issues, and the deep, resonant sound fit the arrangements like a glove.
NHIC Electric was the new kid in town, bringing a familiar two-guitar NHIC setup to the stage, but we had Peter Riccio on drums. One thig is for sure, among his many talents, he has a very deep knowledge of jazz, and especially free jazz and hard bop. I know, because most of the stuff I heard as a kid, I heard out of the record collection at his house. That one factor gave the group a feel that I haven’t heard in the past. Not that Peter doesn’t know world music, or prog, or polyrhythmic complexity, but he brought some strong jazz drumming to the party. My rig was fretless Zon Sonus 5, Line6 M5, and Radial Tonebone handling the switching and fx loop for the M5. I also ran loops off my iPhone to handle some synthy noises. It has been a while since I have run effects at a show… and it was a weird feeling, but it was a reminder that I *can* do it if I want to deal with it. The simplicity of playing bass-cable-amp (and often not running an amp) can be seductive. I did enjoy blasting some delay and some phaser action in small doses. I can’t wait to hear some rough mixes of this band. Should be a hoot.
Thanks to NHIC, firehouse12, and the folks who came out to support the gig. It was very cool. I hope to be sharing soem audio and video in the coming months.
nhic:atlas is bob gorry, guitar; steve asetta, saxes; adam matlock, clarinet, accordion; gabriel kastelle, viola, erhu; michael paolucci, drum kit; pete brunelli, acoustic bass guitar
NHIC Electric is: bob gorry, guitar; jeff cedrone, guitar; paul mcguire, soprano sax; peter riccio, drum kit; pete brunelli, fretless electric bass
Quick update before I get back to blogging again…
The Halloween Storm did a number on things here at the ranch. A few trees down, a week without power, and a general setback for musical, photographic, and otherwise enjoyable productivity. If productivity involved a rake or a chainsaw, then yes, it has been a productive period.
Got a gig coming up with two NHIC groups at Firehouse12 on December 3rd. 8:30pm and 10:00pm. The first is nhic:atlas, a six-piece mostly acoustic affair. I am playing my Tacoma CB10F fretlsss ABG and it sounds really nice with this group. The second is NHIC Electric, a noisy electric affair. That is a job for the Zon Sonus. I am in hog-heaven as a bass player because Atlas will have Mike Paolucci on drums, and he played in my short-lived jazzy Soul Cryptographers band. I really enjoy playing with Mike and it is good to be working with him again. NHIC Electric will have Peter Riccio on drums, and that is VERY badass. I had been hoping that we would have this opportunity, and it is sounding very nice in rehearsal.
If there is any bright side to this “winter” it is that we are still getting warm temps. Last weekend I put on about 20 miles on the bike, in short sleeves! getting that opportunity after Thanksgiving in New England is rare. I am definitely not complaining. My friend Chris James calls it Global Weirding… Well, let’s keep it weird! Oh… rising sea level and food chain disruption? P’shaw!
Just a few tidbits about how “Washington” and “Wall Steet” are fucking this country, and but good.
Job Creators: this is as cynical and retrograde as “Clear Skies Initiative”. The actual problem with the economy is hidden directly behind this crystalline piece of “douche-speak”. Actually, these captains of industry are laying people off, and avoiding hiring here in America, because they first and foremost need to keep the profit-wheel turning. Not just normal profits. Profits that increase every quarter. The irrational ever-expanding economy concept at the granular level. So when (as mentioned here in a previous post) a company that relies heavily on American military spending, like Sikorsky, needs to keep the profit margin rolling, so they can continue to “perform” and their executives can continue to reap performance-based bonuses… they lay off thousands and move them onto the American Unemployment System! Uncle Sucker provides a backdoor “entitlement” to Sikorsky, as opposed to the “front door” they were using* back in the “aughts”. Meanwhile, those unemployed people can no longer participate in the economy at large to the same degree, causing other businesses to slow down, layoff, and you have the makings of a true economic Domino Theory clusterfuck. This is happening on a national basis, and thousands of businesses are complicit, but I am just using Sikorksky because they are so transparent in their efforts. In Conclusion: Thanks, “Job Creating” Doublespeak Assholes!
When Occupy Whatnot has the time to figure out what is really going on… maybe they will connect a few dots and make some concrete points. So far I see a lot of vague generalities about the economy, but nothing that you can really hang your hat on. My feelings are: keep it simple, keep it direct, don’t pull punches, and don’t let yourself get co-opted by a group that is part of the problem (Move On, I’m looking at you)
* What Changed? Back in the heady days of say… George W. Bush… it was easier to just divert the money from multiple war efforts directly to the bottom line, knowing that the GAO would never have the time or resources to figure out if you actually delivered on a contract. You had a neutered Accountability arm of the Executive Branch, and a lot of open graft, wink, nod, repeat. We now find out, horrors, that BILLIONS of US Dollars have gone missing in our multiple “wars” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan… who knows since the USA never actually declares war any longer. We just deploy a bunch of taxpayer funded military resources, and an equal or greater military contractor force, and then stop answering the phones over at the Penatgon. Seems to have worked so far. But with the US Government actually paying attention, at least in a small way, it is safer to play this shell game. Even if it tanks the US economy… I mean, once you offshore enough of your business it really doesn’t matter what happens here, right?
First, RIP Steve Jobs. I go way back with Apple, maybe a little too far back. My dad brought home an Apple II to check out, because he was going to be using it as part of his classroom work. He taught Electronics and wanted this new “personal computing” stuff to be part of the curriculum. The school got some Apple hardware, and My dad brought one home to work on classroom stuff… So I got my hands on a very early Apple product. What I remember was it had a 40 column greenscreen display and no lower case. It was still the nicest computer I had seen. Before that it was a teletype console and acoustic coupler (to the Yale mainframe), or this trashed Hex Programming Trainer (probably Heathkit) that I forced to do four-function math (in hex). Anyhow, Apple has been through a real rollercoaster existence, but the company that we now know is very much about Jobs. I kept away from the Apple line until they ditched the System-7 thing, and when they switched to OS X, I jumped back in. Great OS, better hardware, and they had the sense to ditch all that old spaghetti-code under the hood of the old Apple OS. As well, they survived, and thrived, a CPU family switch, which looked like it could be a deal breaker. Nope. It was a deal maker. It proved that you could have a killer desktop OS on an Intel CPU. Something that M$ has yet to find a fucking way to make happen. Thanks, Steve. You Rocked It.
Switching gears, Zappa is the gift that keeps on giving. I think I was about 13 when I first heard a Mothers album, and have been pretty consistent in absorbing Zappa music since. About 34 years later I am still having regular epiphanies regarding Conceptual Continuity. The man left a shockingly deep catalog of great music. Even the songs I don’t like, I see where they fit in as I keep listening. I recently checked out an unreleased album called Chalk Pie. It kinda runs like a low-budget YCDTOSA release, but it has some killer music on it. First off, it might be Exhibit A in “How Great Was Scott Thunes, Really?” The answer: really freakin’ amazing. Especially in the early 80’s before the bullshit of the ’88 Tour went down. Scott plays some brutally hard passages with great fluidity, and you can hear that he is doing what Zappa wanted him to do. Each player in the history of Zappa bands had a whole different set of challenges from the player preceding them. In this case it is Scott, Chad Wackerman, Tommy Mars, Ed Mann and Steve Vai… And they are all playing hard-ass parts and kicking ass while doing it. I really dig that band before it got all tarted up with extra instrumentation…. But about Thunes: Even a piece like Jazz Discharge Party Hats was an eye-opener for me. It is nothing more than a Sprechgesang vocal, doubled on bass. Really stripped down, kinda funny, kinda runs on for a while… Not my favorite FZ piece, but damn, not only does FZ sing the part, but Scott nails the doubling part. Sounds easy? It Ain’t. It is like a crystalline example of the FZ vocal-based-melody principle. Neat.
Another gear change: One of the realizations that I am having Post-Rochefort is that I was lucky to get through that festival in once piece, and I will have to be more organized if I go back. I may also have to be more demanding and let some of my organizational freak-flag fly. I think I extended myself too much, too far in advance of the gig, in musical genre that I am not in practice on. I also let a lot of decision-making slide (I was the FNG, and not there to make decisions) and it made it impossible for me to handle all the demands I was agreeing to. So I either need to put in a lot more time branching out of my comfort zone, or be more particular about what I say “yes” to, or both. Also, it was still a wild ride and I am still buzzing from it.
Dumb All Over
The Connecticut DOT has been planning a busway from New Britain to Hartford, and is supposedly in the “home stretch”. In ConnDOT-terms that means that sometime in the next decade you might move from hearings to the bid process. Glacial Progress is the order of the day. It would seem that taking an underused railway bed and returning it use as an active transportation corridor would be a win-win project. Look around the region, if not the world, and you see evidence that transit projects create economic hubs, jobs, and opportunities. The T System in Boston, MA is a major economic corridor. Home prices near T-Stops are higher than those elsewhere. Retail and service business can leverage transit traffic for everything from convenience stores, gallery malls, and even the ubiquitous taxi services.
As simple as it would seem to explain the benefits of transit infrastructure investment to the communities that would be hosting that investment, this busway is becoming a layer-cake of what is wrong with transit planning in America:
That’s not a complete list, but you get the picture. This busway project is not dependent on some kind of Jetsons-like unproven technology. The technology is off-the-shelf old-school stuff. The money is available through a routine bonding process. The roadblocks to this busway will not be technological or financial, they will be social. The host communities have been built “facing away” from the railway corridor (the busway uses an existing railway… more on that in pt2), in both the physical and societal sense, and those communities are now being asked to accept a new use of that space. Residential and commercial development has occurred, centered on the automobile and the roads that accommodate the automobile, at the same time that rail use on the railway has declined. This creates a form of NIMBY in the host communities, instead of a PIMBY (Please, In My Back Yard) reaction that could have resulted from a positive approach to leveraging infrastructure investment.
The DOT has taken their typical “lowest common denominator” knuckledragger approach to solve a problem with the only hammer they have ever known: rubber tires on blacktop. Conventional buses on a closed roadway is about the least effective form of mass transit possible, and (in my opinion) the least best use for this transit corridor. The DOT is doing nothing less than replacing one single-mode system (cars on surface streets) with another single-mode system. The busway plan has no bike lanes, no pedestrian facilities, and no set-aside for future expansion/retooling to light rail. You could possibly see a move to a “guided busway” in the distant future, which is akin to lipstick on a pig.
Next Up: a 300 foot wide mountain range in Connecticut
I have been taking photographs about as long as I have been playing music, which is a long time… about back to age 8 or 9. My father and grandfather were amateur photographers with a darkroom in the basement for black and white processing and printing. For my grandfather it goes back to the early days of photography, and the economic realities of the day. The day was, more specifically, the Great Depression. Photography was not inexpensive, but if you developed your own film and printed your own photos, you could do it on a budget. Later on, in the days after WWII, my father had more of a tolerance for the cost of commercial processing, but was still a rabid economizer. I learned film processing, use of a changing bag for loading tanks without a darkroom, and basic processing. That is not unrelated to my interest in both chemistry and cooking! It is all a matter of recipes and knowing what is actually going on in the process.
Music was a little different, but my dad had a few el-cheapo stringed instruments like a ukelele and a tenor guitar (Zim-Gar!!!). The tenor was my favorite. I was not tuning it in fifths (it was meant to be tuned like a tenor-banjo), but EADG, like a bass. When I got my first guitar, a nylon string folk guitar, I played that the same way… picking out bass lines on the low strings, chunking through some basic open chords, and baffled by the asymmetrical B string! One day a friend of my dad’s saw me playing and basically told him: “Paul, I hate to tell you this, but your son is a bass player.” That was that. By the time I was 13 I had a really awful Fender P copy (a Memphis… ugh), with a bad neck and worse electronics. I ripped the frets out of within a year and that was all she wrote. I have been playing bass since… over 34 years now, which is mind boggling.
Which is a long way of saying that music and photography are two constants in the way I approach the world.
As a result I always bring a camera to gigs, and if I am lucky I find a balance in time to perform music and time to capture images. At an event like the NHIC Verge-Fest back in April of 2011 I was in charge of running sound, and had plenty of time to concentrate on photography. At an event like Rochefort en Accords I had no balance. It was 95% music music music… and then the time for an occasional snapshot opportunity. The goal was purely that of capturing a few snaps as “souvenir”, in the true French meaning of “memory” or “memento”. I am glad I did, because I would not have the great image of Charly Doll stoking the charcoal grill with a hairdryer! …or the murky images from Charly’s bonfire, or the beer-tent party after the Friday rain-out at Rochefort, or the iPhone panorama of the school kids, or Nini Dogskin practicing the Saxhorn… and so many more. See the Flickr set HERE.
A Rochefort I was surrounded by a bevy of fantastic musicians, and it was all I could do to keep up. World class singers, songwriters, instrumentalists, and solo performers, all opening themselves up to what other musicians had to share. I also met a few people who were putting all their energies into making images. Christian Duchesnay and Olivier Longuet were the two I saw the most often. Chris was the official photographer of the festival, and Olivier was working for himself. Photography is different from music in many ways, but one difference that is central to this observation is that you have no idea what the photographer’s images will look like until you see them. I can tell a few things about musicians by their gear, their mode of dress, and maybe their “entourage”, before hearing them play. With a photographer you only see the person with a camera and think “nice camera” or “nice lenses” or something like that.
After I returned from Rochefort I saw some of the work of these photographers. I believe that I have yet to see ChrisD’s complete work from the festival, but I have seen a good selection of what Olivier was up to. Wow… the guy is very very good. He has a few images featuring yours-truly, but to be honest they are not the best of his images. I am flattered and also honored to be in the frame. The extra added bonus from Rochefort, as if I needed one, is that in addition to the influence of the great musicians I worked with, I have this influence on the photographic side. I will keep adding links as I find more stuff on the interwebs. Right now there are a lot of small collections on Facebook, but I am not linking to those here.
LINKS:
Chris-D outtakes at Poudriere Blog
The Poudriere is a facility across the road from the Clos in Rochefort, and is the site of a really great selection of music events.
On September 11, 2001, I was on my way to Misquamicut Beach in Westerly Rhode Island. I had come home the day before for a Monday night target pistol competition, and was headed back to join my wife and some family at a house we had rented for the week. First, ESPN radio host Mike Greenberg mentions that a “small aircraft” may have hit the WTC… I was in the bank parking lot in East Hartford, CT. When I came out I was in for the most surreal hour of driving, listening to the drama unfold on the car radio. My concept of the future quickly shrunk to getting to my wife’s side, and then… the abyss. It took a long time before I was willing to look past those events and consider any kind of future, for myself or America.
From that morning onward I have watched the United States of America undergo a transformation that I scarcely believed possible. A world superpower enacting draconian social control measures and surveillance against its own citizens, and descending into a rhetorical hell where fear rules and reason has no quarter. The Bush-era, I believe, will stand throughout time, as one of the darkest periods in modern history. The shockwave of September 11. 2001 has been used to rationalize economic rape of the highest order, illegal wars, war crimes, political assassinations, and an endless torrent of social ills that defies direct assessment. We have allowed the United States financial industry to liberate Trillions of dollars from the economy at large, concentrating it in the hands of the few. In a recent chapter they were actually rewarded with the full faith of the US Treasury for their crimes, and allowed to keep the money that was “lost”. The “wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as conduits for wealth extraction of historic proportions. You can debate whether you have a “war” if there was never a declaration of war. But you would have a hard time arguing about the scale of the transfer of American Taxpayer Wealth out of the control of the United States and into the hands of pretty much everyone else. All the while the Trillions, of dollars of US taxpayer money that should be used to rebuild infrastructure here in the US, invest in R&D here in the US, rebuild our Space Program (fer crissakes), educate citizens of all ages here in the US, provide health care for those taxpayers here in the US, and advance the domestic interests of all Americans… is being thrown around foreign countries like Monopoly money, to provide for others what we as a Nation can not (more specifically: will not) now provide for ourselves.
For a brief period of time it looked like the stampede of idiocy that followed September 11, 2001 might abate. The election of 2008 seemed to have repudiated the Bush Doctrine, under which “his base” turned out to be the social rapists extracting wealth from the US Economy and returning nothing. A Black American with an Ivy League education won the election for President of the United States of America, against massive social odds. He campaigned on, of all things, HOPE. CHANGE. Greatness of America… A Nation that could once again set an example to the world regarding freedom.
Barack Obama had a chance to change the game. Now he is just a player, and maybe worse, the football. He has been a huge disappointment to the people who let down their guard for a moment and believed that there was a way toward real change as a Nation. There was a brief twinkling of belief that the country that knuckled under with the Patriot Act, and made a conscious decision to be Much Less Free as a response to external terrorism, might be able to regain its course. They let themselves believe in HOPE, and they got swindled. We now have a government that would make Orwell blush, led by a master of pure concession and rationalized failure.
Instead of bringing that same full faith of the US Treasury to bear on the current economic crisis, as was done for the ultra-wealthy in the financial crash of 2007, we have a string of half measures and economizing rhetoric. The current economic crisis is far larger, affects far more Americans, and reaches further into the future and across the globe than the crisis addressed with the TARP program. But that program, and its siblings, was there to keep the ultra-wealthy afloat, and keeping them whole, despite the fact that they brought the crisis upon themselves through their own greed and avarice. Were the communities, who lost Billions of dollars when their investments tanked, made whole? Uh, no. Were the individuals whose retirement accounts, you know… the ones that some politicians would like to use to replace Social Security… were they made whole when they lost their nest eggs? Uh, ditto… NO. It would be irrational, if not insane, to ignore the role of the recipient in these examples of US Economic Policy… If you are anywhere below the economic top 1% of the American public, you are fucked. Your money is being moved into the hands of a very select few, and well, deal with it. Some will deal better than others.
The one fact that I believe outlines the real crisis here in the Unites States, is that while real income has plummeted, unemployment has increased, home prices fall, and masses of college graduates enter the workforce behind the curve and may never catch up… Corporate profit taking remains at pre-9/11 levels. The richest have not slowed in their extraction of wealth from the economy. Everyone else, well, their “wealth extraction: has taken a bit of a hit. The other 99% of Americans, you know, ALL OF AMERICA, are being asked to accept a prolonged economic downturn, and prepare themselves for less return on their tax dollar with every election cycle. Oh, no real end in sight, sorry… and you might want to take up speaking Mandarin as your next hobby.
Until that inequity is brought into balance, and the American system is allowed to work for the majority of Americans, the game is fully and truly lost for virtually all of the citizens of the United States of America.
Have A Nice Day!
petebrunelli 