You reeka

Holy cow, I think I just discovered the perfect forum for the occasionally-discussed (but mostly unlikely) revival of Dancing Days, that mawkish thing I wrote way back when (and which I have almost finished uploading to Facebook, where you can now experience it in all its 20-year old digitized videocassette-y glory).

One wonders if this sort of thing would have been so popular in the days before the ever-increasing voyeurism/exhibitionism of the world wide web!

Anyway, thanks, Willamette Week, for the tip.

High School Musical

Wow, I never thought I'd be posting what I just posted.

You should be able to get the full backstory at the Facebook page from whence this comes (assuming said Facebook page doesn't lock you out). If you can't, the short version is that, as it says in the bio sidebar of this here blog, I wrote a "rock opera" (Dancing Days) during my senior year in high school (1986-87). Above is a video of the beginning of it.

I realize that by posting this, I risk destroying, in one fell swoop, whatever "avant garde" credibility I have painstakingly built up over the years. (What's that, you say? It's hard to destroy none?) Especially once I get around to putting up some of the more maudlin bits from the show. (With any "luck," the whole two-act mess will go up on Facebook over the next week or so. Thus you should be able to get to the other tunes via the above link. Or, just come find me on the Facebook.)

I guess the question is: why am I posting this? And why now? Especially since I've never been a particularly nostalgic person? And especially since every time someone has asked me about Dancing Days in the 20 or so years since it was first staged, I have almost always changed the subject?

Alas, much as I hate to admit it, this particular trip down memory lane probably has something to do with my recent "graduation" to age 40, which has been accompanied by a desire to get some perspective on my life, not to mention a greater sense of my own mortality... and other stupid existential stuff like that.

I am not, and will never, make any claims for the value of this very old set of songs, written in late adolescence, before I really knew the first goddamned thing about how the world actually works (not that I know much about that subject now). You can't choose your geographical, historical, or social starting point, but you can try to express something about that starting point honestly, until you adapt or change or grow. Dancing Days was pretty much my attempt to do exactly that, circa the late 80s. On a personal level, it was "successful" and gratifying because it captured my state of mind in a way that was musically relevant for me and many of my high school peers. Whether this state of mind was worth capturing is another subject altogether.

Of course, because of the implied answer to that implied question -- no, this state of mind was probably not worth capturing -- some of Dancing Days is downright embarrassing. But that dovetails nicely with the fact that, more and more, embarrassment has become one of my aesthetic tools (possibly one reason I frequently call upon my band-mates to do truly ridiculous things -- things that no self-respecting jazz musician would deign to do -- onstage). I see embarassment as a specific disarming / de-formalizing strategy within an overarching comic sensibility. It's also a key element of the sort of aesthetic and philosophical honesty I was pursuing here.

Sorry, I started to get high-falutin' there for a second.

Anyway, why the embarrassment over (certain sections of) Dancing Days? In a word: "sentimentality." Much of the music I have loved as an adult pretty much avoids directly expressing excessive or overwhelming emotion -- either disregarding it as a phenomenon altogether, or questioning it as a pose and a construction. Which is fitting, given our era: a sweeping Hallmark-ian idea of "love" is used to sell us everything under the sun, tapping into and exploiting our basic insecurities and loneliness... and ultimately leaving us insecure and lonely. Popular music has been greatly implicated in that swindle, as has Broadway.

Zappa pretty much nails it here:



And yet... who among us is so evolved as to have completely escaped the irrational emotional underpinnings of the psyche? Every once in a while I'll be reminded of how Zappa wept at the sound of Irish folk music (toward the end of his life), or how Duke Ellington doted upon his mother, or how John Lennon could write such cloying music as "Dear Yoko" -- all evidence that under even the toughest sentiment-eschewing artistic exterior, there has to be a basic vulnerability, even if the audience rarely gets to see it up close.

So maybe that's why I'm not prepared to disown Dancing Days, and have even started thinking of it fondly again, despite all its faults: it's me at my most artistically vulnerable. (Duh! I was a teenager.) And that's a handy personal reference point every time some critic faults me for missing a soul.

The M word

It's raining, trying to snow.

My ankle is severely twisted, after I stupidly decided to go for a run last night and misjudged the circumference of a pothole (not surprising, since it was rainy and dark).

I can't stand or walk except by hopping on my left leg.

Apparently 40 brings you many things -- but not wisdom. And alas, the fool was right:

Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise.

Anyway, is it any wonder that this concatenation of circumstances has put me in mind of a certain well-loved film:



* * * * *

And speaking of well-loved, Amanda over at Pandagon has one of the best blog-obituaries of the late great Bettie Page, who died earlier this week (RIP):

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I don’t see the appeal, from the playful look in her eyes in most pictures, to her refreshing lack of shame, to the way she squares her shoulders, and of course her kitschy style that seamlessly adapted itself to punk rock reimagination decades later. She is very rock and roll, compared to Marilyn Monroe, who was very bachelor pad.

[...]

I have no doubts about why she’s popular at all. The image overload has diminished the power of her image, but for a lot of the kind of rock music loving weirdos who felt alienated from the standard cheesecake middle American version of sexuality---Playboy, Hooters, blond bimbos who all but say, “You want to put what where? *giggle*"---the Bettie Page pin-up pictures offered something genuinely fun. She’s not playing stupid in these pictures, and it’s genuinely hot. She’s naughty without seeming to have an ounce of guilt to her. They cater to the fantasies of men who want something more interesting than cheesecake. But it was women (well, women like me and a lot of women I know) who put her popularity over the top. I suspect a lot of women see her picture for the first time and think, shit, I can actually be sexy without getting breast implants, dyeing my hair blond, and adopting a cloying posture. For real. Not the consolation prize sexy, where you’re not the hot cheerleader but you’ll do. Genuinely sexy, sexy in a way that Hooters and sterile Playboy spreads doesn’t even come close to reaching.

Did I mention, by the way, that the IJG may soon be picking up a burlesque show gig?

Thank you

I have many things to be thankful for, but here's one I wasn't expecting -- after seven years, our first album, Hardcore, is now officially sold out. As in I have to order more.

If you count promo freebies, that's around one hundred sales a year. Not exactly Thriller, but it's a start.

I'll try to have more ready in time for Christmas... cuz, you know, I'm sure there will be a clamor.

Anyway, thanks, IJG fans! (And non-fans who bought the album by mistake...)

A most peculiar paradox

Busy week.

At the top of my radar, of course, have been the various tasks that go along with readying the group for our last trip of 07: a two-day excursion to Ohio (specifically, Columbus and Cincinnati) that comes up at the end of September. Might as well reveal the personnel up front (note that we are picking up more and more NY players, and as such are becoming more and more of a truly "bi-coastal" group -- cool). The trumpets and the rhythm section will be exactly as they were for the Netherlands: Phil Rodriguez, Andre Canniere, Dan Rosenboom, Dan Schnelle, Oliver Newell, Jill Knapp, and yours truly. Other veterans (of the Netherlands tour and other recent trips) will be scattered throughout the group in key positions: Evan Francis on alto, Gavin Templeton on soprano sax, Josh Sinton on bari, Dan Pratt on tenor, and James Hirschfeld on bone. We'll also be picking up a few brand new people: Josh Rutner (an associate of Hirschfeld's, so he must be good) on soprano sax, and Brian Casey on bone (Brian is a composer, and one of the leaders of Honk, Wail, & Moan, the big band we'll be sharing a bill with in Columbus -- more about that in a moment). With any luck, we'll also have another Ohio sub (TBA) on the second tenor book.

Of course we'll be missing some of the old fogeys -- Zick, Tiner, Schenck, Wright, Walsh, etc. -- but that's the nature of this particular beast. I'm pretty confident that each new incarnation of the group has something special to offer -- for whatever reason, we've had good luck lately finding the "right people" for the job.

I'm not sure what to expect from this trip, however. The "pivot gig" is the Midpoint Music Festival in Cincinnati (September 27), which is pretty much a wild card at this point. I mean, I have a sense that it's a relatively large event, but I don't know how it stacks up next to some of the other, better-known indie music festivals (like SXSW or CMJ). One interesting factoid is that Midpoint has something of a "purist" vibe -- they generally eschew nationally-known, "signed" acts (boy, I would have loved to see some of those rejection letters). On the one hand, that's exciting. On the other (let's face it), that could really suck.

But we're going anyway. Chalk it up to my ongoing effort to straddle the chasm between two audiences. To review: on one side, we have the music wonks (also sometimes known as "jazz fans"), who have the finely-tuned ears, the historical knowledge, and the listening breadth to actually be able to make whatever "sense" can be made out of our music. On the other are the "just plain folks" (also sometimes known as the "popular music fans"), who I continually hope might listen to us for the same reasons they would listen to any of the other stuff with which they fill their iPods -- for entertainment, for some sort of emotional connection, for sonic wallpaper at a party, for the things about music that defy linguistic parsing (which, alas, might turn out to be pretty much everything).

In my more idealistic moments, I even hope to encourage these two groups (which I have vastly oversimplified in the preceding descriptions, by the way) to try out each others' listening habits. Just for fun, I guess.

Anyway, Midpoint will be the first time the current version of the group -- you know, the version that emerged once we "found our voice" or whatever -- will do its thing in the context of a large, essentially indie rock event. (Note that I am using the term "indie rock" in the broadest possible sense here. Also note that, as I have mentioned before, we did play SXSW back in 2002, but that seems like centuries ago now, because not only did we have an entirely different rhythm section, but we were a much smaller, much more obviously "jazz-like" band. The current group is a whole different animal. Or vegetable. Or whatever.)

A quick glance at the Midpoint lineup suggests that we are going to be very much in the minority in terms of our stylistic affiliations. Out of (approximately) 230 or so acts, we are among 3 that have been classified as "jazz." Not that we're really jazz, of course... well, I dunno, maybe we are. Anyway, that's some statistic, eh? A little more than 1% of the festival lineup. And, because I have no control over how these things are scheduled, it turns out that all three of the Midpoint "jazz acts" are booked into the same club on the same evening. Thank heavens (perhaps) that the "headliner" at the club that night is a jam band with a seemingly big following -- otherwise who knows if we'd even get a turnout.

The bottom line is that while Midpoint is a great opportunity and I'm glad we're doing it, things could either go really badly (if all the indie rock kids live up to the negative stereotype by refusing to even visit the jazz ghetto) or really well (if we draw attention and interest precisely because we are so very unlike everyone else on the schedule). So there is perhaps a little bit more of a gamble here than even I'm used to.

Ah well. Of course I've been doing the promo thing via the usual media channels (it's the same shit in every city). But I'm thinking that since the words "music festival" in this case are basically code for "indie rock festival," we'll have to do some serious guerilla marketing that afternoon when we hit town. Maybe we can walk through the city "in character" or something. Or perform a stripped-down version of our set on a local street corner. Or dispense hookers and blow.

(Uh, did I really just write that?).

* * * * *

Incidentally, our "warmup gig" (September 26) seems more and more promising -- a triple bill in Columbus with the aforementioned Honk, Wail & Moan and a southern-fried blues-inflected small-tet called The Free Beer 'n' Chicken Coalition (not to be confused with Tiner's former-group-with-a-similarly-hilarious-name, Big Red Peaches Coalition). And speaking of Tiner, the experience of putting this particular trip together sort of reminded me of a point he has been very good at making (with respect to underrated Bakersfield): the idea that lesser-known, under-the-radar towns can have solid scenes too, cuz (gasp) not all the good music in the world is happening in New York or LA. (A similar theme informs this piece on the music scene in Cincy.)

Big thanks to bassist Steve Perakis and keyboardist Linda Dachtyl (both members of HWM, and very busy players on the Columbus scene) for their enthusiasm and help in setting up the Columbus show.

* * * * *

Among the "various tasks" referred to above: I finally finished four new IJG tunes, which with any luck will provide the foundation for a whole new show that I hope to develop over the next year. These will be the first compositions I've introduced to the group in a while, actually -- the last batch ("Howl," "PDX LIX LAX," "Big Ass Truck," and a tune we have since dropped b/c it required an operatic soprano ("You're in Love with My Mother")) initially appeared during our west coast tour of August 2006.

Not that I have been willfully avoiding the question of new material. It's just that, with this band, changes to the show require logistical as well as aesthetic inspiration. In other words, while we benefit from a certain off-the-cuff approach, and while we make extensive use of improvisation (as a means to an end, anyway), at the core we are still a chart-based big band. So before I can introduce new tunes, I have to consider whether it is even practically possible to do so (in terms of necessary prep time, overall difficulty, etc.). Also important is the question of whether upcoming gigs will be occurring in new locations or contexts, and thus likely to draw new audiences, for whom material that we consider "old" is actually completely fresh. (It can sometimes feel unfair to retire a given tune before it has had enough of an "airing.")

On the other hand, if improvisation really is "composition without the benefit of an eraser," then composition is probably improvisation without the benefit of an audience. Which may be why I chomp at the bit to get my stuff out into the world, and why a year is an eternity for me in terms of this issue. In a way, the pieces don't really exist until they have come to life (or death) on a stage.

I dunno, maybe I write too much music. If so, it is not, I assure you, because I have an inflated sense of my own compositional worth. It's more a feeling of urgency that accompanies my daily existence, like somehow if I don't get some writing done before I turn in for the night, it's like I forgot to brush my teeth or something. (I know from years spent in the trenches teaching freshman comp that the problem of writer's block is where you place your anxiety. The writers who get blocked tend to worry about the value of a piece before it even exists. In my case, I try to save that anxiety until afterward, when it doesn't really matter anymore. So I don't get blocked much.)

Honestly, I seem to work best from a contradictory mindset. On the one hand, I have to believe that composition (at least the way I do it) is important enough to be worth a ridiculous amount of my time and energy. But I also have to tell myself that it's a completely frivolous (or at most purely entertaining) enterprise. Otherwise I would be focusing on something other than how the music actually feels and sounds (the notion of "importance," after all, derives from a social context -- and while social context is of course relevant, I wonder if that's where music-as-a-phenomenon really lives, at a deep level). Psyching myself into a sense of happy worthlessness also has the added benefit of encouraging me to take artistic risks, enabling me to casually shrug when something doesn't work, and (when that's the case) giving me the lack of sense to immediately move on to another compositional project with the same gusto.

Basically, I try to treat the whole business as if it is simultaneously the most and the least important thing I could be doing. (Which is not to say that it is actually either.)

We'll see how it goes this time around.

I sing the body, whatever

(Aside: I suppose the above image gives a new vibrancy to the "navel-gazing" tag...)

So I know I'm guilty of occasionally using this blog to less-than-surreptitiously complain about a certain back condition (ankylosing spondylitis) that has been a part of my life for the last ten years or so. I'm going to start out this post by being a lot less surreptitious.

Apparently, according to my rheumatologist, there are some new developments. What the most recent X-Rays suggest, anyway, is that my vertebrae are now actively fusing together. That's right: my spine is slowly calcifying into a single bone! Neat-o, eh?

So yeah, I've entered a more aggressive phase of this fucking disease. The usual trajectory from here is to fuse and fuse until you "cain't fuse no more." It takes a while, yes, but that's the narrative.

No point in getting melodramatic about this, of course. There's no way I'm going to end up like the guy pictured above (even though he had the same illness). Besides, there are a few new "wonder drugs" on the market that purport to be able to stop the thing in its tracks. (Alas, like most wonder drugs, these oddly-named concoctions have the potential to create a whole different set of problems. But what the hell -- it's not like the "booze therapy" I had until recently prescribed for myself was without its own side-effects.)

* * * * *

Why on earth am I boring you with the tedious details of this situation? Well, like everything in my life, it always seems to come back to music. In this case, I've been thinking a bit about composition and its relationship to both the body and the physical act of playing an instrument. I wonder: is composition a habit you develop when your fingers aren't skilled enough to articulate the sounds your mind is imagining? (By "you," I mean "me," of course.)

My own history as a player has been a hodgepodge at best. The piano was the first instrument I can remember wanting to play, and though I started early enough (2nd grade), I never came close to being what you might call "accomplished." I was certainly never the kid who played exceptionally well at the recital. I could find my way around a keyboard alright (still can), but I hated reading music (still do), and more than once was caught by my teachers(s) filling in the gaps of what my eyes couldn't follow with what my ear was hearing.

Sure, the piano was always my main axe, but I was never really in love with it the way I was in love with the process of "making up songs" (even way back then). I suspect on some subconscious level that I felt obligated to find an instrument at which I could truly excel -- this, I believed for a while, was the essence of being a musician -- so at some point in my youth I spent quality time with the drums, the guitar, the trumpet, the clarinet, the bass clarinet, and the tenor sax. Alas, nothing clicked, though of course I got a lot of practical knowledge about how these instruments worked. But I always came back to the piano, and that was where I did the bulk of my writing.

In high school I found myself constantly at war with the notion of instrumental virtuosity. On the one hand, many of the extra-curricular musical circles I moved in were oriented toward the heavy metal / prog rock vibe, which of course is all about technical mastery. I was one of a handful of keyboardists in my class willing to take the time to learn some silly Yes or Rush song or other, mostly for the "benefit" of the opposite sex.

But truth be told, I hated the whole chop-heavy ethic of that environment. Partly because I suspected that I couldn't hang with it consistently. (It's one thing to play a little flashy piano for some big-haired girls in a choir room, but something else altogether to do that sort of thing regularly with an actual band.) More importantly, it all felt a little misdirected to me. I probably knew even then that the time it would have taken to get my technique up to speed -- if such a thing were even possible -- was time that would have been better spent actually writing music.

So at some point in my early college years I resigned myself to being a merely competent instrumentalist (piano mostly, but a little guitar too), and concentrated on writing the best music I could in spite of my technical flaws.

Of course, just as I was becoming comfortable with this role, I accidentally started studying jazz more seriously. It began with a ragtime phase (in 1995, shortly after moving to LA to go to grad school) and that quickly led to an immersion in classic jazz piano styles, like boogie-woogie and stride. I was so hardcore about this stuff for a while that I actually found myself playing fairly regularly with a sad little "dixieland band" (their term, not mine), which was, incidentally, where I met some of the original members of the IJG (including some, like Evan Francis and Cory Wright, who are still in the group).

Because of the level of tactical precision required to execute any of the stride-oriented styles in particular, I found myself spending long tedious hours trying to work up something resembling a technique. I never really achieved that, but I got to the point where I could fake it well enough to play publicly. From there, I got bored, of course, and also got so sick of the dixielanders that for a short time even Louis Armstrong was ruined for me. I then spent about three years burning through an ad hoc "modern jazz piano course" (of my own devising) during which I aspired to play mostly like either Bill Evans or Monk, depending on the day of the week.

Once again, at the end of this period, a certain basic competence was attained, but once again, it wasn't enough to satisfy my own personal criteria-for-doing-it, which was, roughly: if I am going to put in the effort as a pianist, I want greatness to at least be an option. Merely being good at the piano wasn't enough of a justification for going through the mind-numbing hell of daily rudiments. So my self-imposed routines started to drift, and I inevitably found myself using the piano to write instead of practice.

Thus for a second time I abandoned my aspirations toward total instrumental proficiency. And thus for a second time I confirmed my identity as "one of those composers who can't play so good." And all of this, I realize now, was at least partly spurred on by a new reality in my life: suddenly, sitting with the "appropriate piano posture" on the typical backless piano bench for more than fifteen minutes at a time could lead to excruciating pain. Suddenly, too, I was unable to sleep through the night for the same reason. (Ankylosing spondylitis is at its most onerous during periods of inactivity.)

I have always been a night owl, but the fact that I could no longer sit still for the amount of time it usually took me to get into a good compositional work rhythm (for me, writing at the piano always involved a warming up period of basic noodling) meant that I had to develop new work habits.

The first of these was pacing. It's amazing how many compositional problems can be solved by walking back and forth, humming to yourself. I've always been interested in the relationship between sound and movement -- but suddenly this relationship was much more immediate and compositionally relevant for me. The fact that I took up writing-while-walking may help explain why so many of my IJG-era tunes are more groove-oriented than the stuff I was writing during, say, the Evelyn days.

The second new habit was writing music on a computer. I know, it sounds kind of scary. But the computer has come to feel very much like a neutral device to me -- it doesn't seem to guide or limit the direction of a particular piece in the way that writing on a piano did. Thanks the invention of notational software, which could be loaded on a laptop, which could be placed on a counter so I could work while standing, I could score an entire piece without touching the piano at all. (And actually, with my temperament, I can't imagine keeping a group like the IJG stocked with tunes if I were computer-less. With the original quintet version of the group, I used to do stuff the old-fashioned way (i.e., by hand) and found it tedious as hell. But I suppose that's a topic for another post.)

I guess the irony in all this was that, though I was suffering physically much of the time (both from the disease, which was finally diagnosed in 2002, and from the fatigue that came with the accumulated lack of sleep), I was suddenly writing better music than I thought I was capable of. I suppose there was something delightful about being "freed by necessity" from the limitations of an "actual instrument" -- no longer did I need to cultivate my tunes by physically playing them. This (for me) fresh perspective on the process of writing music was like rediscovering the rush of completing my first compositions: I felt like I was seventeen again, and writing for all the right reasons.

Anyway, we'll see if the new drugs make any difference in all of this. First, I guess, I should get over my aversion to having to stab myself in the thigh once a week.

We just bought a dorky red upright piano for the basement -- just for fiddling around, I told myself, though I hope it will also tempt the kid into learning to play. I do daydream from time to time about starting some kind of free jazz duo or trio -- as a periodic diversion from the stresses of running a fifteen-piece group. But the piano portion of that hypothetical project would inevitably be more of an energy-over-ability thing. You know: "punk piano." Certainly if I ever start taking myself serious enough as a pianist to act like this, you should feel free to tell me to fuck off.

What I did on my summer vacation

So summer is here and the time is right to finish the next IJG record (in production for over a year now). I know I've been dropping all sorts of ludicrous hints as to its concept, character, title, and so on. Here is the latest update:

Shortly after I moved to Portland last September, my friend and longtime recording partner Michael Kramer (responsible for the recording, editing, and mixing of three of our four "official" albums -- Hardcore, City of Angles, and Industrial Jazz a Go Go!) seemed to sense the impracticality of my 6-month plan to commute to LA every few weeks in order to complete the new record (at that point each tune in the current show was on hard drive in some form, but there was a lot of overdubbing -- not to mention editing, mixing, and mastering -- left to be done). Realist that he is, Kramer talked me into getting set up with my own home recording rig. This turned out to be easier than I expected, and after laying out a few hundred bucks I had converted my basement office into a humble-but-functional studio, with the requisite ProTools software, a set of decent monitors, and a few spare hard drives.

And so Ugly Rug Records was reborn.

Backstory: though I have never been a studio obsessive by temperament (among other things, I've always been just a little leery of the way technology can interfere in the creative process), I did catch the home recording bug for the first time back in the late nineties, initially as an expedient to help with a number of film scoring projects I had picked up at the time. "Ugly Rug Records" (named for a brown-orange shag carpet that lined one of the many apartments Daphne and I shared when living in LA) started with a very basic four-track-and-DAT-machine setup -- and in some ways I still miss its simplicity, as well as the kinesthetic rush it inevitably provided (actual knobs and buttons and tapeheads and faders, oh boy!). This was the main contraption used in the creation of the only Jay's Booming Hat album (a lo-fi-ish mess called Gruel -- you can, if you must, hear excerpts (including the original versions of "The Job Song" and "Big Ass Truck") here, though I will probably unleash the entire thing upon the Internet Archive someday).

When I finally did take the full-on digital plunge, it was by way of Steinberg's Cubase program. I got a number of good demos out of that fucker, and concocted a few of the more "experimental" tracks on the first few IJG albums (e.g., "Los Feelies," "Fantasy on Eine," etc.) using it. But once I recognized that Cubase was not going to be the industry standard, and once I started down the time-intensive road of expanding my compositional ambitions from the quintet to bigger configurations, I lost interest in cultivating whatever modest engineering skills I had developed.

So for the last three IJG albums I have mostly contented myself with shaping each recording "from afar," so to speak -- that is, I never got in and actually did any of the engineering moves myself. I have been very lucky to be working with Kramer throughout most of this period -- because we've been recording together for awhile now, and because we have a basic musical simpatico, we developed a shorthand (and sometimes a telepathy) for the recording / editing / mixing process. This shorthand has been immensely valuable, because there are certain things, when dealing with the creation of a musical recording, that are just very difficult (and tedious) to have to explain to another person. And when you're paying for studio time by the hour, you sure as hell don't want to have to rely on a spell-it-all-out-in-detail mode of communication. You want someone at the helm who just gets it.

Of course, even with a good producer/engineer relationship, there are edits or mixing moves that (given a basic familiarity with the technology) are easier for a producer to do him or herself. And hence the brilliance of Kramer's suggestion that I just bite the fucking bullet and get my own rig. I'll admit that, initially, I was a little put off by the learning curve -- I thought it would take forever to get up to speed on a whole new system. But lo and behold: it turns out that several years of watching someone else use ProTools can actually help you learn how to use ProTools! And so much of this has proved to be more intuitive than I anticipated.

Not so intuitive that I feel ready to finish the project entirely solo, of course. I'm having a lot of fun geeking out, but I know my limits, and I'll still be leaving the final mix in Kramer's hands. With any luck, that will be happening in LA sometime in August (at which time I also hope to have a reading session for some of the new IJG charts). But between now and then (so goes the plan), I'll be holed up in my basement here in Portland, madly editing, assembling in-the-ballpark rough mixes, taking care of the few remaining overdubs, and coming up with the "eureka" album sequence and whatever transition pieces are necessary.

It's gonna be a long, hot summer (did I also mention I'm writing a whole new set of material and trying to plan out the band's touring itinerary for the next year or so?)

* * * * *

So what will the new album be like?

First, I should clarify by saying that I'm actually working on a pair of albums -- it's just high time to get all this material (fifteen or sixteen tunes, I think) finished and out into the world, already. (For a brief moment I actually considered releasing a single double album, but who buys those anymore? No, these will be two separate releases, but meant to be understand as a set.)

Before May, there were basically two main sessions I was working from. The first was meticulously tracked (old school rock style) at Kramer's Wolftone Studios. That was a process that began more than a year ago, and as of today is still not completed (there is at least one instrument left to track on most of the tunes). The second was more of a live session done at CalArts with a skeleton crew version of the group, just before I moved to Portland (this session was engineered by the very talented Owen Vallis). The CalArts session too is in need of some overdubbing. In any case, I had been poking at these sessions half-heartedly throughout 07, not exactly sure how they would end up. But I had been assuming the album(s) would be a purely studio effort, with all the clarity and precision that that implies.

Then came the European trip. In the weeks before we left, I did some research and discovered that (for a somewhat pricey fee) I could get our Bimhuis show recorded. I had been wanting to get a good multitrack live recording of the group for some time, and I gambled on the possibility that the excitement of the trip, plus the fact that we had a critical mass of very experienced IJG-ers (and some amazing subs), plus the possibility of a truly receptive audience would all conspire to produce a good performance. You can read the post on that show to get the details on how things actually went, but in short, the group played a mostly fantastic set, much of which, it turns out, is album-worthy. Of course, "IJG live at the Bimhuis!" would have to be a very different release than "IJG Multitracked in the Studio!," the album I had initially been imagining.

So I found myself faced with a bit of a conundrum, now that there were two extant versions of almost all of the tunes. Do I 1. make the studio album, which has the benefit of clarity and precision, or 2. make the live album, which has the benefit of that elusive and magical "live vibe" that jazz fans so crave?

The answer should have been obvious from the start, given my aesthetic interests (and the circumstances of my life in general): hybrid vigor, baby! Stay tuned for the specifics...

Going forward to get back

I know, I know; not only am I behind on my blogging (and so many other things), but the sequence-of-events component of this thing is starting to read like the fractured chronology of a Faulkner novel. (And speaking of novelists, holy cow am I (still) bummed that Vonnegut is gone. I know he was an old guy and everything, and I know he's probably a lot happier wherever he is now. But he was one of the good guys -- and, by the way, a not-insignificant influence on my own worldview and philosophy. And so on.)

Let me explain: I still have to provide some sort of after-the-fact recap of the recent "return to SoCal" tour. That post is long overdue, and only coming together slowly. So what'll I do in the meantime? Well, why not look ahead and spill the beans on the next batch of stuff in store for the group?

Sure, that makes sense. Let's see. How 'bout starting thisaway:

May 2007, with a little luck, could be a high point in what has already been the best year the group has ever had.

For one thing, we'll be performing in a pretty sweet slot at the Bakersfield Jazz Festival on May 12 (we're the third-from-last act, followed by Matt Wilson (yee-haw!) and Lee "too smooth for school" Ritenour). That will be a milestone in itself -- not because it will be our first festival (a "distinction" which belongs to the Brewery Arts Center Festival in Carson City, NV), but because I'll actually be able to guarantee everyone in the group more than a hundred dollars for a gig (don't worry, I'm not going to delve too far here into the boring woe-is-me behind-the-scenes economics of a postmodern big band). A low three bills probably sounds like a pittance for anyone who deals in trios, quartets, and quintets, but believe me, when it comes to a group this large (playing left-of-center music, no less) it's a real coup. Credit must go to Kris Tiner (who thankfully will be rejoining the group for this gig), at whose gentle insistence Doug Davis -- the very sweet guy who heads up the festival and the jazz department at Cal State Bakersfield) finally got to check us out, first at our Bakersfield gig last August, and a second time at IAJE. I guess we made some sort of impression.

The other upcoming event-of-note is our May trip to the Netherlands. We'll be performing (twice) at the Hague Jazz Festival (May 16 and 18), and also squeezing in a show at the world-famous BimHuis in Amsterdam (May 17). I've been keeping this one on the down-low, partly because I didn't want to jinx it, and partly because I believed for a while that it was all some sort of cruel hoax. The booking originated in our IAJE performance this past January -- that's where I met Ruud Wijkniet, who liked our show well enough that he immediately invited us to play the festival, all-expenses paid. Again, I was more or less very suspicious, but it turns out that Ruud was for real (and, like Doug, very pleasant to work with -- where have these folks been hiding for the last seven years?). Now that our travel arrangements have beeen finalized, I feel it's safe to act as if the trip is really going to happen. Needless to say, I'm (cautiously) psyched.

For those of you who are interested, the bands for these gigs will be as follows. For both, we'll have Dan Schnelle (drums), Oliver Newell (bass), Jill Knapp (vocals), Dan Rosenboom (trumpet), Evan Francis (alto), Cory Wright (soprano), and Brian Walsh (tenor). In Bakersfield, add Stephanie Richards and (of course) Kris Tiner, trumpets; Ian Carroll and Ron Christian (bones); Gavin Templeton, Ben Wendel, and Damon Zick (saxophones). In the Netherlands, the substitutions will be Andre Canniere and Phil Rodriguez (trumpets), Beth Schenck, Katharina Thomsen, and Josh Sinton (saxes), and Wolter Wierbos and James Hirschfeld (bones). That's right, for the Netherlands gigs I'll be borrowing key players (Canniere, Sinton, and Hirschfeld) from my favorite east coast big band, DJA's Secret Society. I'll also be bringing in two heavy hitters from the Dutch scene: one lesser-known (Thomsen), and one pretty goddamm well-known (Wolter Wierbos).

The only problem with all this goodness is: where do we go next? (Ah, well, I'll figure it out when we get there.)

Given that this is an important moment in the life of the band (even if we never get any further), I have been allowing myself an unusual amount of self-analysis as I consider what we've accomplished with the last two incarnations (specifically, the Go-Go era tentet group and the Mix-Tape-era big band). Of course, just because I've been allowing myself to indulge in this sort of intro-speckshun doesn't mean that I don't know in my heart of hearts that any conclusions I draw may be more or less total bullshit. I have always found that I compose best when I don't overthink what I'm doing (not that that's an appropriate strategy for all composers). So what follows will be a very loosey-goosey sketch of what I consider to be the elements of the mature IJG "sound." It's all off the top of my head, without actually going back to listen or think through the repertoire in question. Contradict me if you must!

1. Hearty portions of the basic building blocks of popular music (mostly American popular music, but not exclusively), often tweaked and permutated beyond recognition. What do I mean by the "basic building blocks" (BBBs, I guess) of popular music? Specific riffs, phrases, rhythms, harmonic progressions (and so on) that get used repeatedly in that canon. I'm not talking about broad genre characteristics (like the blues scale, for instance), but rather more specific (though still recurring) things. (See, for instance, the bassline at the beginning of "Doo Wha?", or the repeated rhythm at the beginning of "Bongo Non Troppo" -- these BBBs can be found all over the place in American popular music (in various permutations, of course).)

2. Displacement. As a way of building tension, I like to take intact figures (a portion of a melody, for instance) and set them off, complete, against their originals. This may occur horizontally (in time), usually at some counterintuitive spot (like one beat away), or vertically (creating a parallel harmony). The crucial thing for me is that the listener be able to recognize the displacement -- so I don't try to hide it (thus parallels stay parallel most times).

3. Simple canons, rounds, etc. Canons / rounds are displacement built up in a comparatively fancy way. That's probably how I got here -- though I should also acknowledge the influence of twentieth-century round-master, Moondog.

4. Strong melodies. I started seriously writing music in high school -- a time when I was strongly influence by the Beatles. Is it any wonder that I still give a shit about a beautiful melody when I can squeeze it in? Sometimes this interest yields what I would call "pseudo-folk" melodies like the one that appears in "Bandoleero, part one." Honestly, I don't think my melodies are all that great by classical music standards (they don't usually rise and fall in the traditional way), but I can write catchy music when I put my mind to it. I used to flee from this ("it can't be weird and tuneful at the same time!" I told myself), but now I just throw caution to the winds let the notes fall where they may.

5. Taking simple ideas to their extremes. Why subdivide by eighth notes when you can subdivide by sixteenths? Why change the tempo once when you can change it twice, or three times? And so on.

6. Layering / reverse layering. This is a Mingus-ism (see "Moanin'" on Blues and Roots for perhaps the best example, though my favorite Mingus tune ("Hora Decubitus") does something similar). Start with one instrument, add another, add another, and so on until you have the densest thing you can still hear individual voices in.

7. Long compositions with mutiple disconnected “movements.” I have always been interested in form, but with the current version of the group I seem to be going for sequential, episodic structures as opposed to organic, narrative ones. I'm not trying to tell you a story when I write. Instead, I want to make you aware of how the book is made.

8. Juxtaposition of unlike things. Beautiful melodies cohabitate with noise; genres collide incongruously; endless, seemingly-static vamps cohabitate with rapid change and forward motion (more of a Go Go era thing for me, that last one is a technique borrowed from Zappa); and so on.

9. Naturalistic use of odd time signatures. See the story in this post about people clapping along to the 3/2 section at the end of "Fuck the Muck."

10. Timbral substitution. Take a figure heavily identified with one instrument (such as a boogie woogie piano bassline) and put it in a horn (for instance).

11. Comedy. Been thinking about what I mean by this, and I know I'll have to return to it. I guess I feel most comfortable using the word "comedy" to describe a category of resistance to authority (with the assumption that authority is always corrupt / arbitrary / unkind). More specifically, for me, it's the idea of resistance-from-within (and thus is somewhat incompatible with (and suspicious of) the notion of a pure revolution "from outside"). Oh, and it also has to be funny.

I told you it was loosey-goosey.

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Addendum: Just got the sad news. RIP Andrew Hill.