I am starting over at the beginning.

Musically, that is.

Our move to Virginia took a lot out of me — it drained away a lot of my time, and left me exhausted.  Finally, I’m back to something similar to normal.

However, I really need to practice.

So, I’m starting over at the beginning — the blues.

I’ve been playing along with the three Kings . . . B.B., Albert, and Freddie.  I’m studying everything that I can about their music — learning not only the guitar parts, but listening carefully to the drums, learning all the subtle bass tricks, and paying particular attention to the piano and other backing instruments.

I will spend a few weeks here, where it all began, then march forward back to jazz — through the expressive phrasing of Lester Young, the maniac intensity of Charlie Parker, and the soulful sound of Ray Charles.  Finally I’ll return to my homeland, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith.

And from there?  New music.

It’s a long way off.  Having your life transplanted is a fairly intense experience.  But there’s no point in making new music just to make new music.  To find a path to the future, I have to dive into the past.

Somehow, I made it.

In the past month, my life has been completely blown to atoms and scattered on the winds.  There is very little that remains of the original material — I’ve been rebuilt along the same basic plans, but with only a few things left unchanged from the previous version.

I now live in Virginia.  The last link to Florida severed last week, and we’re continuing the process of setting anchor here.

I’ll have more to say about all this later, but for now, I’d just like to take this opportunity to be thankful for having survived the changes.

It’s happening.  The move to Virginia starts this week.

I may be out of contact until sometime in July.  I did leave a sort of farewell message on Dandelife.  Hopefully everything will turn out alright, and I’ll resume some form of a normal life next month.

I am in the process of writing a series of articles about the songs on my fourth Jamendo album, Points of Departure. This is about the fourth track, Love and War / World on Fire.

You may be able to tell when you listen: the third song (Let It Burn) and this song are very closely related.  Actually, when you put the two of them together, you begin to see the outline of the original composition.

-1-

Love and War is the first part of the song, that plush, cinematic synth intro.  It’s about my wife, really.  Gentle as she is, it may surprise you to learn her favorite television series of all time is Band of Brothers.

No surprise, really.  Even though my wife and I are only two years apart in age, my father is a Vietnam veteran . . . and hers is a World War II veteran.

But more than that.  This move of ours to Virginia is a tough time.  I’m finding it hard to keep going.  Music inspires me, and pulls me out of the worst periods.  For Hannah, the story of Major Winters and Easy Company is inspirational.

My take on it in this composition (which is much shortened from the original) is that war, one of the ugliest things human beings can do, can set the stage for its exact opposite: the greatest heights a human can rise to.

And in parallel: this move, one of the worst times of my life, has actually seen me gain all sorts of abilities I didn’t know I had (like being able to put in a hardwood floor almost flawlessly).

-2-

World on Fire is the second part of the song, a rocking piece at 152 bpm with that wild, driving guitar line I came up with.  In the background, you can still hear the synth from the first part.  When I hear that sound, it appears in my mind like a shimmering curtain of fire — maybe a rapidly flickering aurora borealis, or even a rolling prairie fire.

The basis for this part is the struggle humans have against their worst natures.  I see it every day, from the broad, nasty strokes painted on the world news, to the fine, aimless doodles of the petty conflicts I see at school every day.  People like causing trouble.  Maybe the Shadows were right.

-3-

I discussed Let It Burn previously.  These three parts were composed together, but in the end, they fell into a natural grouping of (3, (1,2)).  Every time the transition point came up, it seemed like one of the songs ended, and another began.

I realized the tempo change wouldn’t fit — I was trying a clever shift from 92 bpm 16th note feel to 152 bpm eighth note feel, what I call a beat ratio shift of 23:19 (don’t ask).  I’ve only got that sort of shift to work once before, in Hypothermia / The Illusion of Warmth (from La vie sous la mer).  Simpler shifts on this album worked fine — Vale Avis Tenebrica pulls off a 2:3:2 (straight 8th, swing 8th, straight 8th), but that’s close enough to a standard compositional element it’s really not an exception.

Next

I’ve focused on the actual composition of the previous four songs.  The next one, In Memory of Dorothy Blair, has a long story behind it, which I’ll start after the Tuesday upload.

Today I uploaded the original tracks to Let It Burn — the third song on Points of Departure — to ccMixter (see this earlier post for an explanation). Here is an index of the relevant tracks:

1. Bass
2. Guitar (crunch)
3. Guitar (overdrive)
4. Percussion
5. Synth
6. Hammond organ
7. “Sonar“

I’ll be continuing my series of articles about the songs on the album this week as well.

Back in the day, when I was learning jazz, one of the biggest obstacles was the jazz standards themselves. The ones people typically play are under copyright–you can’t record or play them without someone, somewhere, owning a little piece of your work. For a long time, these were sold “under the counter” in the RealBook, then officially licensed in “The New Real Book”.

Time to overturn the applecart.

I am releasing a series of tracks I call the “Short Attention Span Jazz Project.” These will all be short (less than 2 minute) heads that anyone who is interested in jazz can learn to play, perform, modify, and in general make their own (within the restrictions of the Creative Commons license).

The first tune, “Tout le Monde,” is already up and ready. I’ve even included a miniature chord chart for it–check the lyrics.  You can find the SASJP on DMusic (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Have fun!

PS, it’s also cool just to listen.

Track #11 on evolution is “The Burning.” This song was recorded April 9, 2006.

Florida, despite being surrounded by water, has a long dry season some years — a drought. When this happens, wildfires become a problem. There have been times when I could not go outside because of the thickness of the smoke; worse, the smoke would be from fires in another county.

I wrote this song while remembering a time my wife and I were going to a wedding in Miami, during wildfire season. As we drove south, the sky kept changing colors. At one point, the entire world turned sepia, as if we’d walked into an old photograph. It gave us a strange feeling, like Ragnarök was about to happen.

The chord progression has an odd sort of spiral feel to it:

verse / buildup
G7 / E | G7 | Cm7 | Ebmaj7
G7 / E | G7 | C7 / A | Bbmaj7

bridge
E7 throughout.

Strangely, to me, the thing that makes the song work is the sustained distorted guitar.  It is the fire.