musical thoughts

I’m going to try to do better about posting things here that I’m working on. I need to quit worrying so much about whether a thing is “good enough” to post, because they all are. With that in mind, here’s something of a white elephant.

This is a 75-minute excerpt from a 2-hour (or so) Ninjam session I did with some guys I’d mostly never played with. I mixed this down from the client-side recording in Reaper. I was playing just Rhodes using ReaNinjam.

There are two bass players, and I had played one session with one of the guys. Both bass players (Trib_Bass and SYLDAU) seem to be Ninjam regulars, and both are in France. A guy named ninjaz was playing some very cool synth statements, very sparse and laid back. And speaking of laid back, the drummer (MadHatter) was the most laid back drummer I’ve ever played with. And he left some huge spaces that were really refreshing and made the whole thing a lot more open and expansive. All these were great players that I would seek out and jam with again. A couple other people came and went but didn’t play much, so this is essentially a quintet with two bass players, which is cool. I manipulated EQ to make them a little more distinct sounding from each other in this mix (guys, if I brutalized your tone I’m sorry). SYLDAU has the deeper tone while I made Trib more of a lead sound.

This is nothing more than a four bar loop of Cmi7 – F7, but it goes some very interesting places. It hangs together by a thread at times, and it coalesces into seriously bent grooves at times. Sometimes the group collectively tries a direction and then abandons it. I have a couple short freakouts, but mostly this is really laid back and (at least to me) interesting half time shuffle funk.

Anyhow, here you go, listen to some or all of it:

I specifically edited it to 75 minutes so it would fit on a CD. If you like, you can also download this here [129MB MP3].

I don’t honestly know how people will deal with a four bar loop that lasts 75 minutes and only covers two chords. So let me know what your reaction is to this please. Some of the best moments in this remind me of a Miles Davis jam, the looseness and the way it changes directions abruptly at times, and the great playing from several directions. I think this is pretty cliche-free and very listenable, but I can see how it may tax someone’s attention span. I especially love how at 34:00 it breaks down to a whisper and we reconstruct a sort of mutated reggae groove by 37:00. That whole passage is some of the best quiet playing I’ve heard from a group.