Now we come to the song that is usually the crowd favorite. I’m not really sure why. Even people who are iffy on the rest of the album like this one.

Track #3 on evolution is “All I’ll Ever Be.” It was recorded June 14, 2005. Unlike many of my other tunes, this one started off with a guitar riff–a series of double stops that outlined a basic chord progression. (The guitar was recorded through a Leslie rotating speaker simulator pedal; this was the week before I finally got my Hammond Organ. You can tell I was reaching for that sound, even back then.) I recorded the guitar riff, then found the bassline that fit the sound–not a complicated chord progression, but highly improvised.

This period in my life was known as “Dark Side Summer.” My wife was in Cambodia, and I was home alone, a middle school teacher on summer break. I thought I’d get a lot of recording done; I was wrong. It didn’t take long for depression to set in.

When I wrote this song, I was looking back at my path through life. I started out in engineering, of all things, decided I hated it, moved on to chemistry, decided it was too dangerous, then wound up in a job I love–teaching.

So I had found a home, but not a highly respected home. I do not know why, but in the US, teaching is a poorly regarded profession. Despite how good I am at what I do, despite the lives I enrich and the kids I inspire, in the Great American Money Grab, I’m a poor contender; and in the US, sometimes it feels your worth as a human being is measured in dollars per year.

And small wonder. The Americas have been the scene of a tragedy rivaling the Holocaust: an entire people wiped out in a combined gold and land grab. Columbus brought slavery to the Americas; DeSoto killed and tortured for gold; dead Indians used to be redeemable for a five dollar bounty. It seems capitalism is the new God, and social Darwinism is the order of the day.

So yes, with all that on my mind, no wonder this song sounds like the Blues.

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded or listened to evolution. The last three days have been incredible. So far, as of today, the album has been downloaded 52 times, which is exactly 50 more times than I thought it would be Having never done this before, I was pleasantly surprised.

I am going to have to start studying French again!

Yesterday’s post was the story behind the song. Today’s is the story of the song itself.

The 2nd track on evolution did a bit of evolution itself. I recorded the final version on July 12, 2005. It is essentially a modal jazz composition, written in 3 parts:

Part A is in 11/8 time, divided into beat units of 4-4-3. The chord is Dm7b5 (scale = F melodic minor).

Part B is in normal 4/4 time, but the chord has changed to C melodic minor (CmMaj7 or Cm69).

Part C is back in 11/8, except now the key is Ab melodic minor, and the chord is G7alt.

There are a number of unifying themes, but the most prominent is probably my “humpback whale” song. I used an e-bow, a hollowbody jazz guitar, and a lot of delay and flanging, trying to duplicate the feel of the whalesong sound–sort of, anyway. See, The Bermuda Depths had this giant turtle, and when it “talked” to Jennie Haniver, that’s the actual sound used in the movie–humpback whale songs. So I wanted a spookier version for this song, which is about dreams, and loss, and longing.

Track #2 on evolution is Jennie Haniver. There are many hidden meanings in this name, but the most obvious two are based on old sea legends … and an obscure 70’s movie called The Bermuda Depths.

Some of you might have sort of a vague idea what I’m talking about, but if I said “That movie with the giant turtle where the girl’s eyes turned green” you’d catch on much quicker.

Actually, the real Jenny Haniver was a fake, dried “specimen” of a sea monster or mythological creature, made from the dried bodies of skates and rays, sold by sailors in Antwerp. Therefore, this “girl of Antwerp” (jeune d’Anvers) acquired an anglicized version of the French name: Jenny Haniver.

This is the thing we have in common. I am a Creek Indian; my last name is unique–it is not Scottish, or Irish, or anything else you’d expect from the “Mc.” My ancestor, Cosa Fixico (in the Creek Language, this would be spelled Cosv Fekseko) had his name anglicized during Indian removal to the west. His nickname was “Mac”; the person who put him on the tribal rolls entered his name as “McCosar”–a completely new name.

They just didn’t care about the facts. I suppose they figured the high death toll of the forced exodus to Oklahoma would take care of clerical errors such as this.

Some of my relatives have reverted their names to Fixico; I have not. I think it is useful to remember that once your life is reduced to an entry in an uncaring clerk’s ledger, anything can happen.

Day Two of my CD on Jamendo — exciting! Everything has been going quite well so far. I even received a positive review — in French!

This brings up an interesting point. I can read (that is, get the sense of) many languages, but speak none of them. Why didn’t any of my musical abilities translate over to language abilities? Somehow I can tell the difference between Cmaj7#5 and C7alt, but can’t make sense of any spoken language other than English. What a strange paradox.

This international music website has certainly inspired me to try harder to cross that bridge.

Track #1 on evolution is “Tattered and Torn.”

Composed the day my first jazz band, Rhythm Method, broke up. Not a sad song at all; it was time to move on. By that, I do not mean to imply anything was wrong with the other band members; they were great. However, I had changed. Emulating was over; duplicating was over; innovating was beginning.

In the U.S., I’m afraid Jazz has become little more than historical reenactment. That is, the mainstream jazz societies and venues seem to want performers duplicating the sound of jazz bands from 50 years ago. Fellow musicians disparage innovation and modern instruments—to sound like Wes Montgomery or Django Reinhardt, they go to the extent of even buying exactly the same equipment and amps, as if the last 50 to 80 years of sound technology had never been.

Fine, but I want my music to be more than comfort food. Hasn’t the world heard “All of Me”, “Blue Bossa”, and “Autumn Leaves” enough times to say it’s been done and move on?

Jazz used to be about innovation and creation. Now, with Lincoln Center and jazz purists breathing down our collective necks, how are we supposed to revel in a music that at one point was mainly predictable in being unpredictable?

That’s the story behind the tune. As for the music, it is written in 7/4 time, returning to 4/4 on the chorus, a form of tension-and-release that I’d been playing with for a while. The main riff is in Am; the chorus alternates between Dm (Dm7 or Dm69) and Am (Am7 or Am13).

The bridge is a different story. I paused the music a bit and filled in the following four chords over 8 bars: Dm (DmMaj7 or Dm69); Eb dim; E phrygian (G7 / E), and Fmaj7#11.

The melody evolved over many times experience with the song. I started recording versions of “Tattered and Torn” as far back as 2004, but only recorded the final version on July 9, 2005. Finally, the song was “speaking to me”, and I knew it was ready.

The album has finally posted. My next few posts will be about the individual tracks. Here’s the link to the full album.

How I came to be here:

Yesterday, I posted a CD of original music to Jamendo. Part of the registration process required me to post a particular snippet of HTML verbatim on “my website.”

Well, that’s a bit of a problem. The closest I have to a website is my Wikipedia user page. It didn’t work when I put it there. So I found myself searching the net for a place to call home–fast.

Here is where I landed. Turns out it’s a pretty cool place. I still haven’t explored it fully; as you may guess, I spend most of my free time making music. I figure I’ll invest some time here and see what I find.

This would have been the “good” result in yesterday’s Internet Hejira. Besides that little adventure, I had to wrestle with firewall configurations, port forwarding, and assorted other bits of techno-mayhem in order to get Azureus to work. What I don’t get is this: it was working fine before Thanksgiving. But for 10 hours, I was without P2P file sharing capability because some little gremlin had snizzled a widget in the configuration somewhere.

So, finally, here I am, with all the pieces in place, waiting for my album to be published on Jamendo. I’m excited, and exhausted. More later.

I sure hope this works. Maybe one day I’ll look back on it and laugh. Maybe.