How are you doing?

Time for a vlog style blog post, spring 2019 style. I like to write these every now and then, talk about real life, as opposed to sharing memes, tweets, and Facebook posts via social media. That stuff is so blah.

First off, I quit soda and energy drinks cold turkey. I've noticed a big difference in my stamina and stress levels. In addition, I'm starting to lose weight again, albeit very slowly, about a pound or two a day. At this rate, I'll lose twenty pounds in twenty days. This might be the way I lose weight and keep it off forever, in shallah. [as the Muslims say] 

I really needed to do something drastic because I don't want to get diabetes. I was drinking soda and energy drinks every day at work. I'm glad I'm not buying and drinking that crap anymore. 

My body is detoxing. My stress levels are down and my stamina is up. I still get tired after one am shifts at the job, however, without the sugar chemicals messing with my system, I don't get as tired as I used to. It's quite a change. 

Speaking of changes, I've been taking things slower with my reading. I'm spending more time reading the news during the day before work and reading physical books at night before bed. I'm letting all the readings ruminate more. Rather than say, reading a book in three days and then starting another one on the same day. I'm guilty of that. 

I'm also guilty of being completely obsessed with classical music. I've always liked it but now its pretty much my favorite thing to listen to. Saying since most modern straight-ahead jazz is pretty clean cut, not many interesting things going on, I mostly listen to classical music, usually while reading. 

My favorites lately have been baroque composers within the last couple months-Bach in particular right now. Coincidentally it was his birthday the other day. I'm getting into piano prodigy Glen Gould's Bach interpretations. I've also been listening to Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Mozart, Chopin, Corelli, Marcello, there are tons of composers from 1600-1700s that display beautiful music, composed of functional harmony. I've become a huge fan of harpsichord and clavichord. So much to the point that I'm planning on playing keyboard more seriously and possibly having my dad put together our harpsichord one day [yes I have a harpsichord]. I have the time, I just need to put in the effort. "Or so it goes."

Work is work and I'm glad to get the hours. My jazz trio is coming along nicely, although I need a bass player asap to complete the sound I want, a chamber jazz sort of sound, with bass playing the role of percussion. The plan is still to record at a studio [and release an album on bandcamp], and apparently, the saxophonist can get us free recording time at the studio because he's done session work for the studio, ie they owe him. I'm still working on my memoir, and I've got thirty-four pages to work with so far. I'm at a crossroads with the text at this point, but I'm getting ideas on how to make it flow more thematically now that I've covered all the facts, exposition and lots of dialogue between characters. Lastly, I've been doing well making new friends, of the female variety. As that Ramones song goes, "I don't wanna be a pinhead no more, I just met a nurse that I can go for." 

April will bring hot temperatures and soon summer will be among us Californians. Bring on the one-hundred-degree heat. I love it when its over one-hundred degrees in the Valley.

Not! 

April Fools     :D 

John Zorn's Simualcrum

Simulacrum is an album with music written and directed by composer, saxophonist John Zorn that features John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin, and Wood fame), Matt Hollenberg and Kenny Grohowski which was released on the Tzadik label in March 2015. John Zorn is a magpie of sorts. Sure he's respected in the improvised music industry but there's always been one problem about his music. Its all over the place. Sometimes he plays straight ahead jazz, sometimes free-jazz, sometimes rock and roll, sometimes pop, and here we have ourselves an instrumental heavy metal album, running at forty three minutes by an organist, guitarist, and drummer. I ain't complaining though. I dig this album very much. But why, you might ask? 

Sure this album treads no new ground and doesn't do anything groundbreaking. But I find a certain amount of fun to the way these guys play on this record. The tunes sound heavily improvised to the untrained ear, but I bet a lot of it was written out by Zorn, after all he's a 'composer', right? 

I first heard the album a year or so ago on YouTube, and about three days ago I bought the actual CD. I like it so much that I threw down thirteen bucks for it. The reason I like it is that the musicians here bring a sense of heightened adventure to progressive rock infused heavy metal jazz. Say what?

The music here encompasses mostly a jamming instrumental sensibility. Oftentimes the guitar takes the lead with distorted metal tropes. And then the organ takes over, leading the charge. The drummer stays away from stereotypical metal blast beat marathons, opting instead for jazzy fills on the snare, toms, and cymbals. The result is oddball jazz and blues sound, oddly enough. Not real blues or jazz, but a kind of white blues, jazz, more about experimental science than emotive sensibility. What the album succeeds at is creating a live open jam sort of environment. Like you're at the studio, watching them record it. 

But this is a heavy metal kid's record. This isn't a jazz aficionado's album. If you're into Miles and Trane, this isn't your bag. However if you're into Slayer or Opeth then this is right up your alley. The guitar playing is very heavy, played with a good but oftentimes stereotypical metal guitar tone. There's not many single note solos from the guitarist, instead he performs as chordal accompaniment to the organ and drums. The organ takes up most of the single note melodies, and does a beautiful job doing so. The drums holds it all together with compelling rhythms, technically brilliant but not showing off and taking over the show entirely. 

The album cover is one that reminds me of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, their first album from 1969. With song titles like Alterities, Snakes and Ladders, Paradigm Shift, and the Divine Comedy, there's a sense of intellectual curiosity and stimulation. The name simulacrum reminds me of Phillip K Dick, who had a novel called the Simulacra, check that out if you're into science fiction. 

Its a musical curiosity really. And the music portrays this in its style and grace. There's so many musical changes, everything from time signature changes, to many different riffs, to what seems like spontaneous free improvisation. Its quite exciting to hear. 

You can listen to the album on YouTube if you're curious enough to take the plunge into jazz influenced heavy metal.

The Classics

So after going through a lot of new music, avant-garde classical music I found myself listening to the "classics", the warhorses of classical music. I am of course speaking about composers like Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and Stravinsky, who I could lump in as a classical composer and a new music composer. He's someone who's influenced many and is important in the development of new music as well as being apart of the "old guard" of classical music.

The interesting thing about all of this is that I've listened to all this music a lot when I was about eighteen years old. In fact, I would turn on the classical music station at all times in my dorm room in college and I always had Wagner's Ring Cycle on various CD's as well as Mahler's symphonies, both of which at the time I thought of as being very heavy and dark music, like heavy metal which I was also interested in at the time.

Coming back to the music now at twenty-eight is a lot more engrossing. I'm a lot smarter, I can hear more of the harmonies and rhythms, and my musical experience has increased so I can understand the music more. That's not to say that I understand how Bach used counterpoint. I have a long way to go to understand that sort of stuff. But the aural ear training is much more on point now than its ever been.

After going through so much new music and going back to the classics I find myself more appreciative of the past, European art, history, and music. I can see why the Romantic, Baroque, Classical, and Renaissance eras were important in the development of twentieth century music. Sure, the teachers in predominantly white schools (and some black educational facilities) will tell you its high art but if you don't understand why its high art then you can't truly understand the music.

There is a lot of references to classical music in other art mediums, namely film and television. But for me the work must be found from the source and studied, otherwise its just a tune you hear and probably forget about. Miles Davis would say, "So what."

-Stravinsky pictured above

New Music, Jazz History, and Science Fiction

I've been doing more research into jazz and new music, avant-garde classical music. I've also been reading science fiction and such.

The science fiction novel is easy enough to explain. It's a science fiction novel set in the future where a scientist is trying to find out what happened to a town in Germany called Eifelheim. Then it goes back into Medieval German times where a priest named Dietrich is working as the communication between humans and these insect-like aliens called Kreken. The novel explores this idea: Can we convert aliens? There's other ideas and tons of rocket science abstraction (dense reading!) in it but this is the primary subject of the book. Its called Eifelheim and its written by Michael Flynn. The book was nominated for a Hugo award back in 2007. Although the book came out in 2006 this is already ancient by today's memelord society.

I also picked up two new books on jazz. Both seem superb after only reading a bit. They're two books written by Nat Hentoff. Jazz Life and Jazz Is. Both explore jazz in a variety of ways with interviews, history, and in depth analysis of the music, the musicians, the audience, and the time periods (some of which include when jazz wasn't popular). Hentoff is a Jewish writer (that wrote for pretty much every major publication) that was well known for his politics. He comes to know the music personally because he met and knew most of the "greats" as a kid in New York. I find his insight on the people to be enlightening. He explains that although the people who play jazz are flawed, the music itself isn't. I'm looking forward to reading both books and I hope to learn a lot more about the history (black history) and people that made such great music.

Then there's the readings on and about the new music scene. I've become a listener of the avant-garde, so called "new music", or as I like to say avant-garde classical music. It started during the Chicago trip when I saw Messiaen's Quartet For the End of Time performed and then it just expanded from there like a mothership dropping its young onto an unsuspecting planet.

I've become particularly fond of Xenakis, Ligeti, Guillermo Gregorio (Argentinian clarinetist and improviser), Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and others. Xenakis wrote a great book about mathematics and music but once I got past the initial introduction the book goes a little over my head. Interesting to check out and read about still.

The thing I like about this sort of music is that it sounds like it could've been completely improvised but it was all written down and thought about. They didn't just throw together random stuff and some people say it sounds random and not music at all (a general opinion on the avant-garde) but I've come to learn that music can be made out of anything and everything, a lesson this music has taught me more so than ever. These composers were revolutionary because they didn't follow the standard norms of composition and influenced music of the twentieth century in a profound way. 

Guillermo Gregorio's music is great. His playing is as my dad put it,"dated". He has a sound that was popular back in the mid to late 1960's jazz, free jazz to be specific. He has the sound of Eric Dolphy, if Dolphy was from Argentina and became an intellectual artist inspired by architecture and European art and philosophy. I don't want to generalize him but his playing reminds me of Dolphy a lot. And I dig that very much.

On the other end of the spectrum (the one where European/American art music and rap don't mix!) I read the entire LA Weekly edition that just came out and in the back they had a list of fifteen of LA's best rappers. I'm not a fan of rap but I figured I would check out some of these guys and see if they had done LA proud with their work. DJ Quik has a nice funky style and Tyler the Creator has become a rap darling. Apparently the guy who doesn't give a fuck about anything actually cares.

All of this stuff will enrich my musical and literary palette. I'm trying to improve the blog, do more editing and limiting my posts and sentences, something before I never would have done because I thought too much editing was a bad thing almost akin to censorship. My goal is to eventually be showcased somewhere on a website and for something to come out of all of this. After all, nobody should write for free. But a free thinker must express his ideas to others lest it all sit inside one's head. As Grace Slick (from Jefferson Airplane) sang in White Rabbit, "Feed your head."

Picture is the composer Ligeti

Experimenting with jazz standards

So when I was in Chicago I took a music lesson from my dad's composer friend Frank Abbinanti, a really great pianist, composer, musician working in the avant-garde classical (we call it new music) scene. He's worked a lot with this really great clarinet player named Guillermo Gregorio, and they've both played a lot in Europe. Anyways, since he taught me some stuff I've been thinking about music in a different way and I'd like to jot down some of these new ideas mainly for fun and so I don't forget them.

So one of the things that's new when I look at standards when I play the chords is that if there's too many changes in one measure I'll default to just using one chord for that measure. Instead of just playing a root position voicngs I'll also play first and second inversion of that chord but with some extra melody notes on top (adding a melody that isn't there in the sheet music). This gives the music a much more original and modern sound than what I was doing before, which was more basic.

For example in the past if a measure was 4/4 with Gmin7 I would just play Gmin7 with maybe first inversion but it would always just be stock Gmin7 notes rather than adding a melody on top.

Another thing I've been doing is playing triads when comping through a standard. For example if it says Gmin7 for a 4/4 measure I would just play Gmin and first and second inversions in a jazz rhythm more akin to piano. This simplifies things and makes it a lot easier to focus on the changes of the song. However, this is also really limiting because there's no melodies or voice leading happening on the top, just bass notes and important notes of the chord. Its a simple way of thinking about jazz guitar comping. Good for practice.

Yet another thing I've been working on is bebop phrasing and improvising through changes. I've realized that as long as I always hit the important notes of the chord and you always come back to it you can go as far out as you want-to a point. For example if its 4/4 and measure 1 is Cmaj7 and measure 2 is G7 I can start on a c note and play lots of chromatic legato stuff and as long as I hit a g when measure 2 comes around it will always sound "right". For this example my old method was always to play something like Cmaj scale through Cmaj7 and then when measure 2 comes around I would play G7 dorian or something like that. Pretty basic and standard way of thinking about it. However, now I've realized that as long as I hit one or two important tones in the chords, even if they're just passing tones, I can fake my way through it and it will still sound right. I can't just play anything but there's a lot of open possibilities to the way I'm thinking about it now which is still based on the harmony given but I can go out and then come back much more easily. Before I was a lot more buttoned down when it came to soloing through changes.

Lastly, I'm also working on improving my tone, particularly jazz guitar tone. Typically this would mean more of a Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall kind of modern jazz guitar sound but I play on solid body guitars (not a hollow or semi-hollow body guitar) its harder to achieve this. But I try to make do by turning my bass sound higher, medium treble, and medium mids. I also roll down the tone knob on my 7-string Jackson to produce a more round richer and dark tone. I also use a chorus pedal too that gives me quite a bit of sustain without a distorted effect. It sounds nice but I think I can get a closer traditional jazz sound if I just played a semi or hollow-body guitar. They ain't cheap though so I'll have to make do with what I  have. You don't have to play on a hollow-body to play jazz. After all I'm playing on a 7-string Jackson most of the time but I can get a really traditional jazz sound out of my Hagstrom Les Paul because of the Jazz/Blues pickup in the neck on that thing. Now that one can get really close to say Jim Hall.

These are all things I'm thinking about. Good to share with other musicians.