This is, literally, my musical diary–notes fresh from my pen and recorded in a few hours. You can find my finished works elsewhere; here, it's all about capturing the moment!
Before 2023 ends, I wanted to return to the recordings I made with Steve Talaga. As you may remember, these were a dozen or so jazz tunes that he and I recorded one afternoon in September. Nothing fancy, just playing through the tunes and recording them in one or two takes.
Americana was written in a hotel room in Detroit, where I played bass during the day while my wife trained for a new job. I thought it would be fun to have a song intended specifically for the bass. True, there are iconic bass lines like “So What” and “All Blues,” but I was thinking something that allowed the bass to come to the foreground.
What I came up with is “Americana.” It is a simple tune that uses the open strings of the bass to create a sweeping melody. It has overtones of pentatonic melodies like “Shenandoah,” hence the title, “Americana.”
I have a certain ambivalence about Christmas music. On the one hand, I like a bit of schmalz as much as the next guy. On the other hand, do we really need to listen to Mariah Carey from the day after Halloween until shortly before the new year?!
Having said that, I was playing around at the piano the other day, and out popped an idea just begging to be a Christmas song. At first, I was thinking it would be a miss-you-at-Christmas song, a la “Blue Christmas.” But then I thought of how beautiful Michigan is in the winter and what a lovely place it is for family to gather on the holidays. So I wrote an ode to our fair state from the perspective of someone hoping to bring far-flung loved ones back for Christmas.
1. Arizona sounds great on a winter day, but I’d miss all the magic of a snowflake.
Warm and sunny every day has its charms, I guess, but I still love the way the seasons change.
2. As the fire of autumn leaves begins to freeze and the sun shines so bright upon the city’s streets;
Oh, the air may be brisk– I don’t mind a bit when I think of the warm home waiting for me.
Don’t you miss it in the Mitten? You know your home will always be here.
Don’t you miss it in the Mitten? Come back for Christmas in Michigan.
Continuing the series of jazz demos I recorded with Steve Talaga, here is something a little different. “Can We Begin This Again?” is perhaps at the edges of jazz, depending on how you define jazz. It leans toward the pop side of things: Laufey*, Sade, Norah Jones, or Bruce Hornsby, for example.
More notable are the lyrics. It’s so easy to get stuck in the trappings of genre: heavy metal is angry, singer-songwriters are introspective, and jazz is about romance, found and lost. In this song, we’re listening in on two lovers arguing. There is the immediate need to deescalate and take up the conversation later, the realization that a lot of our conflict is based on past events rather than what your partner said or did, and the hope that friction is one of the things that makes a relationship go deeper. In that way, it’s a lot like the Williams Brothers’ song, “Friction.”
1. Can we begin this again when we’ve both had some sleep, some time to cool off and some space to think?
This is just going to end the way it began: with so many words we’re going to regret.
Words that are heard as an echo of voices that hurt us long ago.
Can we begin this again?
2. We can’t begin this again as if we’d just met; as if there’s nothing to lose and the cement is still wet.
As time goes on ruts start to form, but love can grow deep as the path is worn.
Can we grow closer still through the failure and pain? Offer the tender parts of our hearts every day?
Can we begin this again?
*For a fascinating introduction to Gen-Z phenom Laufey, see Adam Neely’s video, Is Laufey Jazz?
Sometimes you have to cut through all the angst and just be happy, right?
This song is a light and airy pop tune whose instructions say: “Without a trace of cynicism.” Indeed, it is one of the happiest tunes I’ve ever written; hence the title, “Content.”
Now, it might seem that writing a carefree little tune would be easy, but this actually went through about five drafts before I settled on a final version that felt bouyant, but not cloying; a bon bon of musical goodness that was satisfying rather than sickeningly sweet.
This is just a quick demo of a song I introduced previously. Interestingly, shortly after Steve Talaga and I recorded this demo, I changed the key of the song to put it in a better range for the horns that played it with me at an Outside Pocket concert on Friday, 10/06/23.
Maybe I’ll post the recording of “Big Bottom Blues” from Friday’s concert in the future. For now, enjoy this one-take wonder.
A while back, I was playing with the minor blues form. Songs like “Sugar” or “Stolen Moments” are so simple, yet seem to provide endless possibility. I actually sat down at the piano and sketched out a half dozen directions a minor blues tune might go. As I played with each of those, a few songs began to emerge. “Sky Blues” is perhaps the most straight forward of all of them. Not as low down and greasy as “Sugar” or as smooth and mysterious as “Stolen Moments,” but with a charm all its own.
It is a bright tune for a minor blues, hence the name, “Sky Blues.”
After a long absence (from blog posting, not from composing), I am back with a series of new jazz tunes. You may be aware that my jazz group, Outside Pocket, just came out with an album titled Grace Notes. But you know my motto: “Can’t stop. Won’t stop.” Even while Grace Notes was in production I was writing new music. Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting the fruit of that labor, in the form of a casual read-through recording session with Steve Talaga.
Steve Talaga
Today’s song is “Flutter.” It is a breezy tune that ascends, dips, and floats like the butterflies that visit our house’s monarch waystation. On a future recording, I could hear flute on “Flutter,” but for now Steve creates his own magic on the piano.
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I had an idea for a jazz tune: it would be a minor blues in A minor, but instead of heading to the D minor chord as its next move, it would move down to a G minor. [I know, I know, what an exciting life I live with all these important decisions.]
Well, I had it pretty much done–I had even named it “Mode Blue”–when I began playing around with the chords and found myself writing a completely different tune over the same harmonic sequence. The new tune was equally fetching. I couldn’t decide between the two.
But wait… Something began to change. The new tune started to feel different. It didn’t want to be a minor blues swing at all! It wanted to be more of a smooth jazz tune. Who was I to argue? Since it was no longer a blues, I named it “Blue Turned Green.”
Maybe someday I’ll record “Mode Blue” and put the two songs side by side so you can decide which one you like better.
A few months ago, I accompanied my wife to Detroit. She attended training for a new job while I stayed behind as a “hotel husband.” Since I had only a bass to work out my musical ideas, I gravitated toward ideas that were playable on that majestic, yet cumbersome instrument.
I called this song “Americana” because it has so many echoes of classic American folk tunes and their roots. It is expansive like “Oh, Shenandoah,” pentatonic like “Were You There,” and bears the same four starting notes as “O Danny Boy.” It is not jazz in the traditional sense, but as you can hear in this recording it lends itself well to improvisation.
I’ve been reading Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave. I highly recommend it. In a series of interviews with Seán O’Hagan, Cave discusses his artistic process, the death of his son, and the way his faith has changed and grown in recent years. I’ve found it immensely inspiring.
Even though neither is “orthodox,” Cave leans toward Christianity and O’Hagan leans toward agnosticism. This makes for some interesting dialogue. At one point, O’Hagan pushes against Cave’s superstition about life’s mysteries, to which Cave responds “Perhaps it is a kind of delusion, I don’t know, but if it is, it is a necessary and benevolent one.” I love that line, and immediately wrote down the phrase, “A Beautiful Delusion.”
You may remember that I’m on a quest to write jazz with deeper lyrics than the typical themes of romance and unrequited love. I thought “A Beautiful Delusion” would be a perfect fit. One of the things I love about the way this song came out is that the first verse could actually be a love song in which a suitor tries to woo a love interest: “You think I’m crazy, but if you listen to your heart you’ll know that we could be lovers.” But verse 2-3 move on to “if you listen to your heart you’ll know there is too much mystery, beauty, joy, and pain in life for humanity to be mere configurations of carbon responding to the world via the chemical soup bowl known as our brain.”
While the lyrical subject is heady, the music is simple and pretty. In fact, when we played it instrumentally at our weekly restaurant gig, a patron rushed up and asked the name of the song. She thought it was a tune from a musical!
Lest you think composing and performing music is always serious, I’ve included an outtake from Thursday’s recording. Even though Ed and Susan are great musicians, there are always snafus when reading a new song. Below is our false start, a conversation about how the song should actually begin, and the successful restart of the song. When I say, “Don’t talk!” I’m not being misogynistic. I’m kidding Susan because every time we record a song she’ll lean over to me and say something during the recording. But even my stern warning didn’t work; you’ll hear on the full recording that she turns to me and says, “So pretty!” at 1:58. I guess the recording could be interrupted in worse ways…
1. A beautiful delusion– maybe that’s all it is. An innocent confusion– that there might be more than this.
A beautiful delusion– that’s all it is to you. And though you may be right, is it your heart or just your mind that can’t believe it’s true?
2. A beautiful delusion? Look all around, you’ll see a thousand aching beauties, a million mysteries.
A billion stars are shining. You catch your breath with awe. When your heart wants to explode with all the longing in your soul, it doesn’t seem delusional at all.
2. Ineffable illusion, a faint remembered dream, a sorrow for no reason, a joy inside a pain.
Questions that search for answers and hearts that yearn for love. Oh, how do you explain the little magic of each day? Maybe this delusion’s enough.
