Playlist

Live

Like it is

September 2, 2018
CHA Trio - Heather Bentley, Amelia Love Clearheart, Carol J. Levin
Cafe Racer, Seattle

Such a beautiful time this was
CHA Trio is a chemistry found, a rare and precious thing

after their set other threes of us rode their sparkly wake
(thank you for allowing your blogger to join in progjazz keyboardist guise)

Recorded

September 1, 2018
Duetto "Pace e gioia sia con voi" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

conflict is a structural interaction

Rabbit Foot Blues - Blind Lemon Jefferson [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

"bisquits are a little thin"
light quick strummelo

Do blues guitarists often play in A-flat
or has this recording been sped up?

Your Promise To Be Mine - The Drifters [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

The vocalist needed a pop guard.
(sweet sax track in the back)

The Great Airplane Strike (remix) - Paul Revere and The Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

spy sound with a power blues heft to it

Jenny Nettles - Harry "Pappy" Wells [from The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1]

fiddle scribblin' with left hand pizz!

followed by the obligatory "I made some mistakes like I thought I would but that there Jim Davis used to play that awful nice" nuanced self-deprecation

It sounded pretty fine to me.

Strict Time - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

gamelonic flow

Banned Rehearsal 81 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

Tad Pole - Kosály-Meyer - we continue sudden singing
slip rattle backbeat

several false starts stacked in sequence onto the end bone of it

microtonal study - some people likes a beat

goes on too long in a most peculiar way
part two with vocals and funmaker sneaking in there
quite the sham man there chant there

Kyrie eleison - my vocal plus 'du

more of the sorts of microtonal thinking that only liberated intonation would allow
whipping flames out of that tambourine back there karen!
the between bits composed as to be uncertain for a good long whether one is in which bit of what song

". . . to pick up where we left off" (more stuff under the seat left back there)

one is in or not static stuck but tugged

Karen lofts the date into the epistolarisphere
the rhythm of the pace of writing read as improvised textual crosspointed 3-dimensional poetry

September 3, 2018
Fear Bitterness and Hatred - The Young Fresh Fellows [from Electric Bird Digest]

we hear in excruciating detail some venerable genre of psychedelic surf parking out in a moralizing 60's message board

Duet in D - Haydn - Philharmonia Virtuosi [from Evenings With The Captain]

a pleasant breakfast in the sun room
its own costume drama parody
playing for its fellow wizards

Lakeside Summer Home - Wes Weddell [from My Northwest Home]

its tense: past telling present subjunctive had now been past narrating the present as though from the future

"...woe my road is spoken..." - Keith Eisenbrey [midi draft of June 3, 2006]

disparate times in a row of chained pitch worlds

Great White - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

coloristic active composite arranged patterned

Something of Mine - St. Rage (Your Mother Should Know) [mix of April 19, 2016]

And we're going to go give blood today too! waddayaknow!

September 6, 2018
Concerto in B-flat BWV 1051 - Bach - New London Consort, Philip Pickett

reveals what is admirably small and transparent
allowing maximum differentiation, the play among individual strings isn't washed out in box resonance
inner overlaps each distinguished

portativ continuo? interesting and quite successful!

not played as THE SIXTH BRANDENBURG CONCERTO
but keyed down so that its intricate address is made plain
its hocket phrases are allowed to remain made of parts made by individual players

no big deal here move along

we can't

See, The Conqu'ring Hero Comes from Judas Maccabeus - Handel - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Richard Condi, cond. [from Handel's Greatest Hits]

played for dreariness and all it doth not add
rah!

Aria "Contra un cor che accende amore" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

every moment a theater
a stage made of dynamic moments

High Fever - Coon-Sanders Orchestra [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

patterned sequence of time spans similar
but made not so
by each's display
watch me!

Symphony 1 - Samuel Barber - Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin

comes on like movie credits of the 30's
must grab NOW
moments of being must be ultraexperienced
in big screen passion

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 3, 2018
Gradus 338 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

shows its hand as the better idea
recomposed from the ground up

the color of water
protesting singularities

a discussion about wealth
among friendly climes

playful
glittering

Playlist

Recorded

April 9, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus 7 - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

This is a plug

All about the fugal entrances, and how each one opens a new window.

Symphony in D (93) - Haydn - Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer

Dramatic pauses and uneasy balances. The fart joke falls flat because it only points out what was obvious throughout anyway: dramatic pauses are the subject matter.

Grosse Fuge in B-flat - Beethoven - Amadeus Quartet

A fugue we enter through a hall of inward facing windows.

April 11, 2017
Katya Kabanova Act II - Leoš Janáček - Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles Mackeras, Gabriela Benacková, Dagmar Pecková, Erika Bauerová, Dana Buresová, Eva Randová, Miroslav Kopp, Jozef Kundlák, Peter Straka, Zdenek Harvánek; Czech Philharmonic; Prague National Theatre Chorus

Listening to this music is like reading the expression of an open-book face.

Chock House Blues - Blind Lemon Jefferson [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

I kept wondering if, as has been suggested of the contemporaneous recordings of Robert Johnson, this was recorded at a slower rpm than we hear as playback. There is probably no way to know for sure, but the possibility of it might be determined by a comparison of other recordings. Did his voice always sound so weirdly high? If you bring it down a step or so does his voice sound more like it does in other recordings? Is it a likely guitar key? Can the probable tuning of the guitar be ascertained by figuring out which notes are on open strings? Are there other recordings of the period that we know were sped up, i.e., might it have been a common practice? Is the weirdness confined to this time period (ca 1926)?

Hard Times Stomp - Red Perkins [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Sheik of Araby - Milt Brown [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Lovely, fat, almost clarinet-like guitar sound.

Apollo Jump - Luck Millinder [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Children's Dances - Zoltán Kodály - Jenö Jandó

Classy teaching pieces. The lesson hidden under the fingerwork is about the deftly shifting attention's focus from one voice to another.

April 13, 2017
Just One Of Those Things - Charlie Parker [from The Cole Porter Songbook]

Breathless momentum, stripped down arrangement.

John Verrall

Autumn Sketches - John Verrall - Kimberly Davenport

The ground is solid rock, but neither level nor even. Up is on a different slant than Down. Any attempt at parallel is doomed from the get go.

Ain't No Use - Sarah Vaughan [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

Precise placement of voice. She dances inside her instrument.

19th Nervous Breakdown - The Rolling Stones [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

An instrumental with a backing vocal for an excuse.

99 Lbs - Ann Peebles [from Original Funk Soul Sister The Best of Ann Peebles]

In the same sub-genre as 60 Minute Man. The song is so brief as to barely get started. Perfect at every moment.

Changes - David Bowie [from Changes One]

An assemblage in lieu of a song. Tactic: garble the narrative.

AKU (cassette version) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, Christopher Mehrens

Realized on Synclavier, courtesy of the University of Washington Department of Systematic Musicology. Chris and I spent hours and hours laying down these tracks. The reel to reel master tape deteriorated into something else entirely, so this is the "safety" copy I kept on cassette tape. There was a certain amount of institutional grief involved trying to schedule a time to play this for the composition faculty at our weekly Friday department workshop. Looking back on it now, I have to wonder what I was thinking, to play this for exactly that group of people? Over 30 minutes long, it pretty much forgoes anything like regular musicality in favor of design. The synclavier could only play 8 sounds at the same time, so in a fit of maximization I decided to base the whole thing on a sequence of 8 numbers. This sequence (I've forgotten what it was) determined the relative amount of time each patch would be present in the mix, the relative density of notes within each patch-track, various settings of complexity of wave form and envelope for each patch, and (my favorite) the relative amount of time from the end of each patch-track to the end of the piece. The notes were a hodgepodge of things, quotes of myself and others, "that'll do" doodles, and carefully stacked pitch piles. And then I had to arrange it so that there were never more than 8 sounds playing at once. I had charts all over the place.

In Session at the Tintinabulary
April 10, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 932 170410 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

Steve brought over a little purple guitar and played it.

Playlist

Recorded

May 24, 2015

Symphony in D Major (#2) - Jean Sibelius - BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Jerzy Maksymiuk

The problematic process of developing a synoptic stance. How to be on all sides of the mountain at once. Sinew and bone. Gaping holes. Synthesis by assertion.

La Patti Negra - Orquestra Typicas - [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

One suspects more slippery rhythm back there than remains on the artifact.

Bambino - Grupo Bahianainho - [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

To be heard on foot, moving.

May 26, 2015
A fából faragott királyfi - Béla Bartók - London Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati

A caldron of bubbling forces transformed into a cartoon. What would be comic turns grotesque. The dire extreme has blotted out all else. Cruelty is the spectacle. The happily ever after seems ready to start the whole thing over a few octaves higher. I used to like this piece a lot. now I'm not so sure it's healthy.

Concerto in C Major (#3) - Serge Prokofiev - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Dickran Atomian

Innocuous in the sense of being stylistically sophisticated riffs that never stray past unquestioned assumptions about how music goes. From the linear we ne'er veer. The best parts are when it gets busy fussing with its own innards, going nowhere, twiddling its thumbs, crossing its legs, waiting for us to applaud.

All I Want Is That Pure Religion- Blind Lemon Jefferson - [from Goodbye, Babylon]

One-to-one music, rather than one-to-many. The size of a private meeting rather than of a public gathering.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

May 25, 2015
Duet 150525 - Keith Eisenbrey

Back to my duet project for awhile. This session is hollow-body electric guitar and drumset. I was having fun with lots of microphones, 6 tracks per part.

Banned Rehearsal 886 150525 - Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Aaron and Jenny have returned for the Summer from far-off climes.