Preface:
"The Beat: The beat is just the most primitive crude way to instantly transform time consciousness out of realword time and out of clocktime into - ontologically - the space of virtual time. Serious composition discovers numberless more contextual and multiinflected ways to get there with limitlessly variable resultant qualities - not just the repeatable orgasm - of habitable transcendent timeworlds. It's only the most firstorder music that needs beat to make this trip happen at all, to provide a cheap and dirty transcendence. Composition creates that from within but beat imposes it from without." - Benjamin Boretz [from Unconnecting the Dots, Open Space 19-20 - fall 2015/spring 2016]
Texts:
April 20, 2016blues sequence from 'Breakfast Feud' - Benny Goodman [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]
Goading on to showing off.
I Could Make You Love Me - Sarah Vaughan [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]
Extraordinary, but not fully confident. It is still, to some extent, an imitation of a torch singer, an imitation of someone who might be aiming at Billie Holiday, but who certainly isn't yet a full-blown Sarah Vaughan.
April 21, 2016
Turn Over A New Leaf - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]
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| Chet Baker |
Resonant Emotions - Chet Baker and Art Pepper [from Playboys]
Echt westcoastcooljazz, eelishly smooth, slimily unctuous - completely open about what they never could mention in so many words.
Sally, Won't You Have Me, Do Gal Do - Clester Hounchell [from Art Rosenbaum's Art of Field Recording volume 1]
A quickly revolving timescene configuration of open to stopped tones. Nothing firstorder about it.
My Generation - The Who [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]
Abstracts to a stutter the blues' required severance of melody time from rhythm-bed time.
Cry Baby - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]
Janis calibrates her affectual intensity, always an offset step ahead of the band.
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| Steve Reich |
Music for 18 Musicians - Reich - Shem Guibbory, Ken Ishii, Elizabeth Arnold, Rebecca Armstrong, Nurit Tilles, Lary Karush, Gary Schall, Bob Becker , Russ Hartenberger, James Preiss, Steve Chambers, David Van Tieghem, Glen Velez, Virgil Blackwell, Richard Cohen, Jay Clayton, Pamela Fraley
The increment is so in-your-face it could disappear, as though one were looking through a screen window, or twirling bike spokes. What would it sound like, for instance, if enough reverb were added to erase the choppiness? When increment vanishes what are we left with? Rhythms of emergences, patterns of repetitions. Would we then need to re-posit the increment in order to relate the parts to each other in time? Does the explicit increment absolve us of this duty? In order to free us to do what? To discover what? One could read the emerging pattern-regions as movements of a larger whole, transplanted pretty much straight across from standard concert practice (the sort of thing one might mention in a program note to comfort the worried). Is the increment intended to obscure every other parameter, rendering only its repeating as actual? A bargain ride to the eternal hijacked to the merely conceptual?
Another take on it: A concretion of the sense of acoustic space as we might imagine ourselves wandering through it, to the point where actually getting up and moving through the house, where it has joined you, independently, in just the same activity, but in its own virtual house - each of you hearing each other in a mutual sharing of virtual inter-experience. The needle-y probing of the music constantly sensing and groping into the data of our own experience of place, pulling into itself our moment-to-moment sense of where we are. Monitored.
Frame by Frame - King Crimson [from Discipline]
Honestly, this came up to listen to entirely on its own, just like everything else. I didn't handpick it to follow Reich, of which it is both a virtual twin and comment - but with an overlay of what, if this weren't King Crimson, might be mistaken for a standard rock beat.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
April 17, 2016
10 Minutes for Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey
Aaron asked for a sound file for a project of his, so I obliged. I used a loose cymbal balanced on a milk can, and various mallets.
April 18, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 909 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer
April 18-22 2016
".....such words as it were vain to close....." - J. K. Randall - Keith Eisenbrey
I spent several hours every morning this vacation week trying to get a straight-through recording of this. Blame for my eventual failure to avoid an edit was equally distributed among my own errors and in-opportune trucks, cars, and motorcycles outside. This was my last go-through Friday morning, with only one edit due to traffic noise. I share it here on the assurance that Jim's feelings about copyright are similar to mine: "open and free", but without any claim that I have got the piece right yet.
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