cult of stuff.

It is strangely wearying, this restless search for a better life through the acquisition of objects; although we now know happiness can be bought. As outlined in the last post, I had it in writing from a local spiritual leader that a fixie titanium audax frame would cease the endless slow but exceedingly fine grinding of the wheel of karma, and help me lose my pod, all for just £899. And now it has happened again, with the discovery that after callously abandoning my first love, tenor sax, for the last three years to play alto, mainly because I "... just wasn't, like, hearing it any longer, man..." (what was I thinking? like someone who throws over his whole life; job, relationship and family, and ends up waking up in a fly-blown motel with an excruciating headache to find that a fickle piece of tall Estonian brass has left him sans wallet or car keys when his money finally ran out....)

please, please: Newk, Trane, Prez....forgive me.

So after my tenor sat, sullen and accusing in the corner of my room for a couple of years, I guiltily gave in and started practicing the damn thing again after purchasing a new (and pricey) mouthpiece a couple of months ago. This is not unlike couples who hope an expensive holiday will help them find the magic they lost somewhere. And because these kind of hopes always prove foolish and desperate, I've always fought shy of getting involved in the 'new mouthpiece' arms race that all players can succumb to; all too often they end up with bags of expensive mouthpieces that they thought were going to change their life at some point. My stand was always this: buy something decent and learn to use it. Like bicycles, it's the man not the machine.

However, my tenor sound had been getting woolier and woolier, and I seemed to have trouble projecting when compared to anyone standing next to me. Ultimately embarassing for someone whose one-time point of pride was scaring guitarists with a 1960's duckbill Brilhart Level-air. (sorry, very obscure, I know, but once the last fucking word in 1960's rock and roll space-age sax technology; complete shite to play)




This is all caught up in sad guy stuff; such as almost keeping senile Italian motorbikes running, and, with a tight smile and a little self-depreciating chuckle, gamely taking on modern 200 mph carbon-festooned Japanese rockets at the lights (and always losing, plus having to go back and collect the trail of small bits that vibed off when I revved too hard)
Or stomping my aging converted fixie up a hill without getting out of the saddle trying to drop tri-guys riding with the latest pricey kit, jabbering about their iphones and playing with their 'on-bicycle sat-nav'. Sad, sad, very sad aging guy stuff, I kept telling myself. Not very good at all; girls are so not impressed - time to let that stuff go and grow the hell up, for Christ's sake.

But surprisingly, the new mouthpiece was good, and did change my whole sound - my old set-up must have been quietly becoming crap over a number of years. Now to address the underlying problems: the fact that my rhythmic accuracy has also slowly degenerated over the last few years when I made a conscious decision to let my playing slide a bit to finish my post-grad studies. This is not entirely a bad thing - I have now come back both in a wildly different mindset, and realizing that the idea of purely virtuoso playing is not quite enough. But we are talking hours of metronome stuff; wildly boring. The real excitement is in the composing and realizing of new textures, trying to break from being the "...the fastest tenor player..." (which I never was) and think about compositional issues, which is far, far more interesting and engaging. (Or so I tell myself?)

Ted Gioia points out in his excellent book The Imperfect Art, (after which he sadly never followed up some of the points he raised, concentrating since then on history rather than aesthetics) namely that jazz has long been, aesthetically, a somewhat immature art form because of its over-reliance on virtuosity at the expense of structure; the cult of the virtuoso soloist over the that of the composer. When younger, I could never see what the problem was, but after years of gladiatorial pick-up gigs and head-to-head tenor battles, you start to realize that the attraction of what is primarily spectacle begins to pale; this insistence of technique over content has long been banished from the aesthetic of other art forms.

but hey, none the less, I can now play really loud on tenor again, and that feels good - for all the wrong reasons. Now to get a new set of wheels for the fixie. And now that I've more or less finished the cello piece and my weird singing piece for solo viola + voice, I can start messing with The Holy Goof again, and prepping up for the Ruth Padel gig on the 30th.

aarrgh...

I'm sorry if this blog does languish from time to time; but, like standing quietly for a period of time, things around you begin to emerge. If, for instance, you were to practice Three Circle Stance at dawn by the stream you'd become aware of a deer walking quietly behind you, rabbits emerging from the brush and going about their business as if you weren't there, small birds pecking around the ground near your feet and a sparrow hawk alighting in the branches in the oak above you. Or you'd start to wobble around like the poor sod in the video. But, to be honest, it has been anything but quiet for the last month: college stuff rises to a crescendo of mild hysteria towards the end of term...exams, marking, recitals...not too mention trying to remember how to play saxophone again, catch up to some looming compositional deadlines. There's a series of Ruth Padel settings to finish and rehearse in the next few weeks. I've got about four sketches on the go, and I'll post up some clips soon

Apart from all that, I've been poring over the score of Ades' Asyla every afternoon for the last week.... damn. Superb handling of orchestral color, which makes me realize that I didn't grow up performing, conducting or just being immersed in the 19th century canon. The beginning, with two pianos tuned a quarter step apart, chromatic cowbells and high string harmonics make for a unique gesture in the opening. The whole thing seems quite humbling and reinforces the fact that I'm arriving at this quite late having started out as a jazzer... it keeps sending me back to the drawing board with Holy Goof. It's the adroit use of color and gesture that I envy. The people who I admire for this seem to come from a French brilliante kind of effortless use of texture, which I know is always much harder than it sounds; folks like Takemitsu or Dutilleux.

Life goes on here - Spring has arrived with a vengeance - there's a pair of buzzards nesting in the next field, I hear them mewing at dawn when I'm out emptying the wonderdog (who is limping badly these days - best not to think about it yet). The daffs, cowslips and primroses are up and the snowdrops are finished. The hawthorne is beginning to blossom, and the tawny owls nesting next to the house have finally shut up in the mornings. I've been able to practice in the meadow for the last couple of days in the evening, which is always a special thing - I love to hear the sound bouncing off the hill opposite.

So...trying to re-learn sax again for upcoming gigs, recording and such in the summer.. ..depressing; I used to be a contender. Things feel more and more like a one-way ticket to Palookaville lately. It seems that my tenor concept is particularly crap at the moment; I've been making myself listen to recordings of my gigs, which I always avoid as it is sooo depressing. The fact that I now don't have the time to spend hours on my horn seems to be the most evident on tenor; most days for the last few years I come home and put in as hour or so just trying to keep my fingers and embouchure intact. This now shows up in an improvising concept that seems to consist primarily of tired stock phrases I've been calling on for years and fluid scales which are ok, but nothing to do with music. Time for a re-think, or at least a Glenlivet.

The header photo is one of the latest distraction here at the Lazy K, a Guzzi Le Mans - someone gave this to me as it needed a good home and some fettling. The poor guy didn't have the time to work on it, and I think after 5 years in the garden shed it was precipitating a major domestic in a small-ish terrace with two young kids.

onward

the old gods awaken...

There are two possible ways of re-mounting the auto-advance plate and cam lobe in the distributor on a Guzzi, and it's impossible to know which one is right without splitting the frame, dropping the engine and pulling out the distributor drive cam; so you have a 50-50 chance of getting it right. This morning, I stood next to the Guzzi's inert carcass and flipped a coin in the mild late-winter sunshine, full of hope for the immediate future.

On the one hand, hitting the start button is greeted with a throaty roar (and as a musician, I've begun to realize that the reason the sound of various V-twins is so attractive is because of the asymmetrical firing pattern - each one , Guzzi, Ducati, Harley, has a unique signature sound depending on the degree of that asymmetry; the, say, 135 degree da-dup of a heartbeat instead of the even, bland 180 purr of a BMW [sorry Rog...]); or, on the other , the engine produces a few strange poops and echo-y metallic burps as the ignition tries to fire on the exhaust stroke. Needless to say, the latter was the outcome at lunchtime, after a morning spent stripping out the old electronic ignition system I now knew to be dead, and re-installing a pair of standard breaker points.

It took two clumsy hours to install the first time, but only 30 minutes to change over for the second try; and the fact that it was the right way around was announced by a hellish, rising open-pipe din as one of the carb sliders stuck and I frantically stabbed for the kill switch. Whey-hey.

Next, some time spent trying to getting the timing, points, valves and carbs back in the ballpark, as I've changed the whole set-up between all the mismatched parts from the two bikes..


In the meantime, I've been spending a lot of time sketching some Arias for the opera project Holy Goof while I'm waiting for some text from Malcolm. The idea of Cassady's adventures, first with the Beats, later with Ken Kesey, to his last mad walk of into the freezing night along some railway tracks to his death is beginning to get exciting. If I can get a couple of arias into some kind of orchestral suite form for Peter Britten's orchestra next year, it could serve as a launching for an entire opera production. All I need is (sigh) money.

Also, I'm spending some of the weekend going over the AHRC composition grant for the Riprap project, and starting to think about the Ruth Padel gig this June 27th, and setting up a companion gig in Cambridge for her as well, and I've just gotten a green light for one in November as well. I'll have to organize a recording of the new stuff once we play it in a bit.

Still thinking about bass clarinets.... when will they come into my life?