cosmic boredom

The most boring man in the world plays the most boring music in the world on the most boring instrument. He does this, why, he does not know, but he does this for that is what he does.

playing irresponsibly: a moderately weird situation

Just did a gig. The group / collective / band in question, for whatever reason, couldn’t get their numbers up. So I get a call: I get to be the outsourced labor.
In the end I only play for, I don’t know, five, ten minutes—one ‘piece’.

Weird feeling.

My playing of late has been divided between the solo context; ad-hoc, getting-to-know-one-another musical meetings; and reunions with old musical comrades. If you’re playing any significant duration of time (a performance that lasts, say, twenty minutes or longer), you really need to pace yourself. Especially in solo playing, it helps to be judicious with the deployment of atoms / gestures / lexical elements (a lesson learned from For Alto). And there’s a certain tactical advantage in holding your cards close to your chest in novel musical encounters.
On the other hand, the gig I just did (those five, ten minutes) was weird. Knowing that I had only a few minutes, knowing that I was unlikely to be invited back up on stage, I let rip—threw everything (well, not quite everything) out there. With all the chips on the table, I could afford to play a little recklessly. I mean, what did I have to loose?
Bizarre. Was that a responsible thing to do? Probably not, but it felt oddly liberating.

in front of a live studio audience

I hate recording.

…Well, no, that’s a little simplistic.

I have a hard time performing for recordings.

Hmm… that’s not quite right either.

I have difficulty playing for the purpose of recording.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I were actually performing.

I have no comparable or corresponding problem when performing for an audience (which is probably why so many of my more successful recordings were done ‘live’).
Some musicians are skilled with studio recordings (and by studio, I mean without an audience—the studio in question could be a loft, basement, garage, or bedroom). They love the process and/or they have (I’m not sure how to describe this) ‘recording chops’.

I don’t.

I can’t seem to discipline myself into making every take count. At the back of my mind is the voice that says, “don’t worry, there’s always take two”, except that ‘take two’ tends towards take seven, take eight, nine, ten or take forty. Each take comes with ever diminishing returns; further and further removed from that compact, concise, information-rich play that I was aiming for. The problem, for me, comes from not having an audience, not having the pressure of performance, and this process is exacerbated if I’m recording solo. (The only recording, which was, incidentally, in a trio setting, in which I managed to avoid falling back on the psychological safety net of the next take was when I was suffering from the flu, and I was far to sick to be doing more than one take: that take, the one we just did, was going to have to do.)
This got me thinking, what if I just set up a faux-public-performance (like sitcoms ‘recorded in front of a live studio audience’), and recorded the results of that? All the technical resources would be geared up for recording, but the performance vacuum would be re-pressurized with a minimal audience. In the end, only three people constituted this audience, but (I haven’t heard the tape yet) the play felt more focussed.

solo: primary territories

Given that my lexicon is so pared down, what do I do—what can I do—with, or within, it? I could atomize theses elements further, but I prefer to see these as regions in which I have a certain amount of mobility. Here again is where the language metaphor breaks down: to borrow (admittedly out of context) a term from Anthony Braxton, these three elements—harmonics, clusters, and ‘touch’ playing—are primary territories.
I can get a certain amount of movement within each territory. Natural harmonics can be, for example, melodic or rhythmic, concerned with intervalic color or timbre.



Clusters and ‘displaced’ clusters (pseudo-clusters which I’ll explore in more detail in future posts) can be approached, say, pianistically (à la Tippett), or more guitaristically (à la Frith).



Circular-breathing wind players (e.g. Parker, Mitchell) get incredible creative milage from constructing illusions of polyphony and lines that are impossibly long. And while, I admit, it’s strange to bring these tactics to bear on a polyphonic instrument that doesn’t need to breathe, two-hand ‘touch’ playing nonetheless gets me within, maybe, commuting distance of this neighborhood.
In addition, since, without radical techniques that are alien to me, I’ll never be able to deploy clusters to approach the complexity, density or noise-level (I’m not talking about loudness, you understand) of pianists like Taylor or Crispell, a variant of ‘touch’ playing is maybe as close as I can get.



But none of this gets me very far, certainly on stage. Time to perhaps renegotiate boundaries….

[BTW, the audio recordings were made quickly, so apologies for the quality (or lack there of).]

updates:

04-05-07: Use the XSPF Flash Player. Please let me know of any problems.

solo: my humble lexicon

Having critiqued the music as language metaphor, I’m now about to talk about lexicons.
Let’s be clear here: by lexicon I don’t necessarily mean a kind of musical building-block—the atoms by which a performance/piece is constructed—although, interestingly enough, atomizing tends to be the first step in creating a lexicon (but that’s a discussion for another time…). I find lexicons—vocabularies, palettes or classifications of gestures, relationships, tactics or sounds—are useful not so much for generating material, but as a “temporary acknowledgment of one boundary [that] allows for [the] renegotiations of others” (Devin Hurd made a similar comment in regards to two-note scales).
My vocabulary has changed significantly over the years, and substantially over the last four years or so during which I began to seriously explore the solo context. And although there’s a kind of (irrational) logic to my vocabulary, much of the choices are arbitrary and ad-hoc—it’s what I can practice and train practically.
My vocabulary is also, for lack of better expression, non-formally multi-dimensional (but more on that in the future). However, in its bare-bones, ‘flat’ form, in the solo guitar context, I have only three elements that make up my improvisative vocabulary: open strings plus natural harmonics; chromatic and ‘displaced’ clusters; and two-hand ‘touch’ playing. Never mind Anthony Braxton’s hundred or so ‘sound classifications’ (Braxton, 1988, pp. v–x), ‘impoverished’ does not begin to describe my lexicon (it’s a small part of why ‘lexicon’ is entirely the wrong word for it).
I’ll take closer looks at these elements from various angles in future articles; discussing some of the (irrational) logic behind it, and exploring some of the implications of it.

references:

Braxton, Anthony (1988), Composition Notes, Book A (distributed by Hanover, NH: Frog Peak Music).

solo: niche in the ecology

After confidently kick-starting this thread, by the very second entry I had to admit difficulty in writing about the solo context, and I still can’t quite figure out how to crack this. Well, gotta start somewhere (I’m prepared for this ending up as the most confused and lamest of entries…).

Our idom is an open field. If I were to play bebop guitar, well, it’s pretty crowded in there….

John Scofield quoted in Mandel (1988), p. 33.

At It Is Not Mean If It Is True there was an interesting discussion that touched on the crowdedness of instruments. sjz asked if “all the instruments [are] crowded now,” and I think the answer is yes, but they’ve always been crowded—they’ve always come with personal and collective histories.

I prefer the kind of object which… have some kind of inner life. …The ‘conservation’ of certain contents in objects which people touch under conditions of extreme sensitiveness. The ‘emotionally’ charged objects are… capable of revealing these contents and touching them provides associations and analogies for our own flashes of the unconscious. Thus, in several of my films I used an object or a whole group of objects which I ‘heard.’

Jan Svankmajer quoted in Hames (1995), pp. 110-111.

This intersects with cyborg identities (Haraway, 1991) in which, perhaps, “the guitar forms the interface (both the surface boundary and communication channel) between the guitarist and techno-cultural narratives. Narratives that enroll trans-corporeal characters such as tastes, sensibilities and tradition, and corporeal characters such as luthiers, audience members and other guitarists.” Whatever the case, however, let me, for the moment, talk about this crowd.

…I thought about the space, the niche that I could look for was somewhere between Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, with… the way John Tchicai played. …not exactly a synthesis, but I could work my way through the gaps that were left between what those people were doing. …It sounds very mechanical but I was actually emotionally moved to want to be in that space. It wasn’t just a calculation, I felt an impulse.

Evan Parker quoted in Lock (1991), p. 33.

Who’s in this crowd? In my case, there’s a trinity of improvising guitarists who I look towards in navigating this space—this particular socio-cultural intersections of guitar and improvisative performance. In no small way I get my bearings (technically and culturally) from this constellation. Additionally (non-guitarist) improvisers inform my socio-musical approach and position within the performed ecology (there is, for example, a trombonist who I think of every time I play in a group situation). There’s also an assortment of pianist whose techniques and strategies I’ve begun to transpose into the context of the guitar(ist). And somewhere in that crowd—a group that is very much partial and not innocent of issues of identity (class, gender, race, nationality, etc)—is me. In retrospect, this might be a good reading of the title I gave the first entry on the ‘solo’ context: “alone together.”
And that, people, constitutes my niche (or at least the self-conscious, visible aspect of it). It is pretty crowded in there (I would be lying to say that I have an easy time negotiating within it), but I feel like there’s enough space to breathe and maneuver, and, on a good day, a ‘sound’ that I can (tentatively) call mine (and ours).

references:

Hames, Peter (1995), ‘Interview with Jan Svankmajer’ in Peter Hames (ed.), Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer (Trowbridge: Flicks Books).
Haraway, Donna J. (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge).
Lock, Graham (1991), ‘speaking of the essence’, Wire (issue 85).
Mandel, Howard (1988), ‘Hard Pickings: John Scofield’, Wire (issue 53).

2007: improvising guitar new year’s resolution

Well, it’s nice to finally be back here. I would have returned sooner except for having to finish off that ‘real’ writing task, and then having to fish for funding (I don't expect anyone became a musician because of their love of bureaucracy and red tape). Anyway, I’m much better now, so let me gently break into 2007 with not, I think you’ll be glad to hear, another list, but a proposed outline of what I’ll be writing about….

Okay, as far as pedagogical topics go, I’ll continue with the studies in playing in position (with, despite my reservations, an excursion into talking about posture), with the eventual goal of returning to natural harmonics (which was really the exciting stuff), and then clusters.
In addition, I want to open a thread on group improvisation. Specifically, I’ll start with a set of schemes for quartet. These schemes hover somewhere between exercises, training and tactics. Nothing particularly original or earth shattering, but I have found these schemes useful, and they bring up, for me, problems of conceiving interactions and issues of pedagogy.
On the flip side, I will continue to discuss (or at least try and find out how to discuss) solo improvisation. (I say “on the flip side”, but of course that’s a false dichotomy.)
Back on sociological ground, I want to tackle in more detail the idea that improvisation is ‘society-in-miniature’. Topics that I hope to address are utopias and the distinctions between the micro-social and the macro-social. I got into a bit of a twist in regards to ‘diplomacy’, and I hope Peter, sjz and others will continue to keep me on my toes, and prevent me from making broad generalizations.
I also want to flesh out the subject of the body. Recently, MLM, PE and myself, among others, have got ourselves into rhetorical funk trying to talk about bodies in the context of music and performance. It’s tricky to avoid that neo-Cartesian impulse (our language conspires to reinstate that distinction and that hierarchy), but bodies, as Butler might say, surely do matter.

I’m sure more stuff will present itself as the year ambles on (I hesitate to say ‘progresses’), but as a starting point, these suit me fine… for the moment (and that’s the important thing).

charming little ditty

Well, so much for that being the final post for 2006…

…ahem.

Anyway, not that I believe in aesthetics, or want to claim that beauty is the be-all and end-all of music, or that the value of art/entertainment is found through some kind of nonsensical list-making big-dick daftness, but… just have a listen to an ol’ YouTubified clip, and maybe I think it’s one of the prettiest things I’ve encountered in a while.

solo: writing about music is like…

Other things have conspired to keep me away from this blog (not least having to do some ‘real’ writing this month), but also one of those brick walls has hit on the blog as well….

Having, optimistically, kick-started this thread on the solo context, I thought I could separate the various elements—the various techniques and tactics—that I enroll when solo. I would talk about, say, the lexical model, the cyborg aspects, the pianistic transpositions in their own corresponding entries. Well, at least that was the scheme I proposed in that first entry.
Things, however, never work out quite how you expected, and as I tried to formulate these ideas in my head, they started unravelling. Or, more accurately, the opposite of unravelling—elements started to fuse together. Or, better yet, I realized that these discrete categories were a lazy dogma that I carried around without thinking about its unworkability.
I couldn’t figure out how to talk about one element without another infecting it. Couldn’t figure out how to maintain the ‘purity’ of the ideas (yet more blurry boundaries, but this time in regards to writing and thinking music). Thinking about pianistic transpositions, for instance, would intersect with notions of the vocabulary, which, in turn, seemed to be connected with the cyborg dialogs.

I will get back to this, but the process of writing about this might be a little bit more haphazard, a little bit tentative and aimless (hopefully in the best sense of the word), than I had initially sketched out.

solo: alone together

Solo.

Well, I’ve been trying my hand at the solo guitar improvisation context for a few years now. It’s still, when I stop to think about it, terrifying, but it is getting a little easier every time, and, although I have yet to leap off the edge in this context, I’m beginning to find the geography a little easier to navigate—a little more comfortable. In fact, it feels as though the my most recent solo performance (just earlier this month), was the first time it came together in any semblance of a musical way.

Let me kick-start this thread on solo improvisation by outlining some themes and topics I want to return to.
Once upon a time I played the piano, and it was with that particular instrument that I first tried my hand at solo improvisation. Under the guidance and tutorage of CL, I studied strategies and tactics of pianists such as Paul Bley, Cecil Taylor, Keith Tippett, and, under my own steam, Marilyn Crispell. And it took years to figure out how to translate and transplant these pianistic techniques and strategies onto the guitar(ist). The process was, not just convoluted, but sometimes, well, backwards (realizing that existing guitar(ist) techniques could be redeployed as pseudo-pianistic ones).
The approach of creating and defining a vocabulary of boundaries and areas of exploration is something that probably warrants several posts to itself. This lexical approach to improvisation is associated with players like, say, Anthony Braxton, but in (very) different ways I can also discern in playing of musicians as diverse as Taylor and Pauline Oliveros.
The way I finally cracked (or at least allowed me my first steps into) the solo context was by listening to what the guitar had to suggest. The strategy I found was maybe more a very body conscious cyborg diplomacy than, perhaps, anything to do with personal expression.

Solo. Is that alone together, or is that in partnership by myself?