Och no it won't do - revisited

I had to track back through my old posts to see if this had made it into the stream of consciousness. There was a post last 12th June which talked about setting standards and an old physics teacher of mine.

Yesterday I had a full afternoon of music. I started by listening to the section I'm working on (2.1.3: Memory) and trying to decide whether I was going to ditch the idea altogether. After the crisis of confidence two days ago that was a very good question.

I decided there was some merit in it and that I should continue.

Let me tell you in more detail what I am doing.

First of all, there has been a running theme through the "mental capacities" section (2.1...), which represents cognition, perception and memory, or in other words, future, present and past. The future entirely featured sounds which are not created until mastering time - in other words soft-synths controlled by MIDI instructions. The present was represented with sounds all made at recording time, (in the "now") and was all using microphones, and sounds made with my hands. The past: it's all about sampled sounds, in other words sounds that in reality were made in the past.

Then there was a strong temptation (to which I succumbed) to use a tune I used in "horns of a dilemma" on "The Binary Tree" - which was a tune I wrote for a song back in the early 90s. To give that context (and several of my other musical ideas too) I should give a little background to my "recording career" such as it is. I didn't just suddenly decide to record music one day in my 40s without some sort of background to it. Although there had been quite a gap, I have actually been recording music since I was about 14 or 15. At school I was in a band with a couple of mates (Andy Dalton and Tim Watson - you are not forgotten) which existed to record, not to play live. This band changed name and peripheral members quite a lot, but produced in the end about 3 cassettes of music. I started to take myself semi-seriously as a songwriter, and continued to write even when the equipment was no longer available. After University in the late 80s I had access to a studio for a while, and I recorded 3 "albums" - two under the name "Dan The Man" which featured songs I had written, and one called "Tidings Of Comfort And Joy" which was instrumental re-working of various Christmas Carols. My access to the studio went away after that, but I continued to write songs. Some of the songs were fully-formed and some were fragments which lodged in my brain as "to be worked on". The chance never came but some of the ideas stuck. In particular this one tune with words, in a jazzy style, which I can pin-point down to 1994/5. To be honest the words were kind of twee, but I liked the tune.

"Do you remember the night when we kissed in the moonlight

Do you remember the sign on the wall

We were singing, we were dancing, we were out and out romancing

But now you've gone and left me all alone".

So I used the tune, as I said in the last album. I also used it in a section that comes later in this album, but in a mangled form, section 3.2.1 in which I use a kazoo. Actually it's the chord sequence I used.

So there's part of me that thinks recycling ideas is a lack of originality. There's another part of me that likes being self-referential, and to have themes which recur in my music, usually in changed form, and there are certainly riffs and motifs that have been featured several times in one album, or have made it from one album to the next. That part usually wins.

And then the idea is to use this tune, but to play jazz at three different speeds and feels to explore the tune, the chords and solo ideas and so on.

When I left it two days ago I was feeling like it was stupid to try and do jazz with MIDI, jazz should be "live" with real musicians. I was feeling that the sampled upright bass felt artificial, the drums too, and the soloing was weak.

When I came back to it yesterday my confidence came back a bit, remembering that while this can be a jazz style, it is not a jazz band, and instead of being frustrated by the artificiality, I should work within the constraints to create something worthwhile in it's own right. I fixed one problem which was that the slow speed bit was too short, I recorded more middle speed, and some fast speed, in fact the whole time-slot's worth.

I have another, smaller crisis of confidence about it now, but really not so much a crisis I guess. I am questioning my soloing, particularly one piano section in the middle speed. One thing I did yesterday was add to it, because it didn't feel like what a good piano player might play. Now I feel like it sounds like two people playing the piano at the same time and not listening to each other. I'm writing this before I start on another session on this, and feel like I need to bring three principles to bear:

1. Again I should remember this is not about authenticity of jazz, it is about something good to listen to - focus on the consumer not the producer
2. Simple can be good. In this case especially light, simple & expressive
3. I should NEVER say "och it will do" if I'm not sure. I learned this by looking back at Binary Tree. Be willing to change, mash-up, move around, mix up and reject things that have taken time. Even if I liked an idea in principle, I need to be ever-increasingly striving for that Pink Floyd quality

And I get this far and still feel like I haven't said what instrumentality I am using: brushed drums, upright bass, acoustic piano, organ and mellotron.