musical thoughts

My version of the Eddie Harris classic. I wanted to do a funky track for Youtube, and the idea of playing over a drum loop occurred to me. I found a nice sample of Amen Brother by the Winstons, which I manipulated somewhat (as you do) and looped to give myself some sort of backing track. I was going to do a bass line too, but this worked out to be an interesting sound without it.

This seems to be one of my most popular videos on Youtube. I suppose the lesson is that funk goes over better than bop or ballads. I am trying to find someone who is experienced at using the customary production tools of electronica to collaborate with. I have enough musical sense to bang on my instrument and get something, but I’m pretty behind the curve on modern music software. I think a sort of fusion of jazz and electronic dance music could be very interesting.

I was not a big fan of electronica until I heard a track by Squarepusher once. Then I read up on the guy and found out he was a jazzer. It made perfect sense, I could hear things in there that were substantially more complex and rich than the typical stuff.

But anyhow, this is still more piano playing and less electronica, even if I do have an eye toward experimenting some more in that vein. I work with a couple of musical “kernels” in this solo, playing the diminished scale associated with Bb7 a lot and taking the open “fourth over a tritone” voicing for Bb7#9 and shifting it around by minor thirds to play with some of the symmetry in the dim scale. Another voicing that surfaces frequently is a G major triad with an added Ab, which would be spelled Bb13b9 (the implied root remains Bb throughout this thing).

Some other devices are: approaches to resolutions by chromatic movement, deliberate ambiguity around major/minor caused by playing both major and minor third (perfectly possible within the dim scale), ending melody lines on E and G lot to foster a dissociation from the “one chord,” some plain old minor pentatonic, and the occasional register extreme, mostly down low in the basement.