fling93 loves fishies

Free Jazz (and Tibet too, while you're at it)

So, as I mentioned earlier, one of my most memorable experiences in Montreal (and indeed, ever) involved an atonal avant-garde-like free jazz improvisation at Hugh’s. I met up with Hugh for the first time when I vacationed in Montreal. I still plan on recounting my experiences there at my LiveJournal account. Sorry it’s been taking so long (don’t worry, I’ll be sure to link to them when I put them up), but as I said, I’ve been keeping myself occupied.

And as I said earlier, one of the things I’ve been spending time with is music, which I think is partly because of the free jazz experience. It all started as a dinner party at Christine and Hugh’s to celebrate his good friend Devlin’s birthday. They had a nice piano, and so I was tinkering on it for a while, playing some show tunes and pop songs (e.g. “On My Own” from Les Miserables and snippets of “Linus and Lucy” from Peanuts).

Eventually, I ran out of things to play, and went outside to smoke a cigarette, and when I came in later, Devlin and his partner, Alisha, were picking at the piano, and Hugh’s fiancee, Christine, handed me an accordion. I’ve never ever touched one in my life, but I was game to try, and I twiddled around with it a bit, mostly exploring what the different buttons did, but sometimes trying to play off of what Devlin and Alisha were playing. Eventually, my shoulders got tired (man, that thing is a workout!), and I handed the accordion off to my sister, Alvina, to take over.

I got promptly sat down at the piano next to Alisha, and she simply said to me the following four words:

“Don’t wake the tadpoles!”

No wait, that was Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (she has frog fear). What Alisha actually said was:

“Don’t think about chords.”

And then we were off. At some point, some of the others grabbed some percussion instruments to play along. And I’m not sure when, but finally somebody (Hugh?) thought to grab the laptop to record the whole thing. Unfortunately, this was well past halfway, but for what it’s worth, Hugh has posted the song file at Ourmedia (in the Ogg Vorbis format). I also have photos from that evening up at Flickr (yes, including a couple with me and the accordion).

I sometimes tried to create a narrative or explore specific musical ideas, but I often got distracted and started playing off of ideas from other people. While I loved the experience, it tugged at the back of my mind to eventually try it again by myself, so I could more fully explore some of the ideas without getting distracted, but also using the multi-track ability of GarageBand to play off of my own ideas, resulting in something that captures a lot of the free-ness and spontaneity of that session while also having a degree of structure and narrative.

I have to admit that the idea was obviously inspired by Bill Evans’s ground-breaking album, Conversations With Myself — only I don’t have any jazz talent and, as I said, this is completely atonal. But like that album, there are three piano tracks placed stereo left, right, and center, and they play off of each other. It was created using the MIDI from my digital piano into GarageBand to trigger it’s piano software instrument. Yeah, that’s probably not the best way to create jazz, but all my attempts at micing the piano came out badly, and I figured it was already a digital piano anyway. Besides, it just sounded much better.

Oh, and as you might have guessed, the song is meant to evoke everything that the letter ‘E’ means to me — which is a lot (in fact, I didn’t get to a few ideas, but decided to go ahead and post this instead of trying again or editing the song). :)

And if you’re wondering what really inspired me to make this, well, time will answer that question.

Anyway, here’s the song (and again, let me warn you that it might not make sense unless you’re, um, tuned in). I’ll create an Ogg Vorbis version later:

fling93 - song of E (freejazz improv self-trio).mp3

I’ve also submitted it to MacJams, so for those of you who really like the song, please go vote for it there. :)