2018 was a good year for music. I put out three new albums (well, two new ones and a remix/remaster of an old one) and both my live bands started gigging regularly.
This year is shaping up to be a good year too. I’ve already played six or eight gigs between my two bands. Now I’m getting going on putting together new material for the next round of studio projects.
With the jazz group Haven Street it’s time to start thinking about the next recording. We’ve grown alot musically in the last year, both in terms our writing and our playing. We’ve been working on depth, range and dynamics in our improvisation, and on group improvisation ideas. And the writing provides vehicles for different kinds of playing.
Our first album, which we were mixing a year ago, had nine songs: four by me, four by Gary, and one by Jay. We now have nine new songs, three by me, three by Gary, two by Jay and one by Rich. This probably more than enough but it’s a nice number, and it’s good to have a depth of material going into the studio.
The most recent song is one of mine, tentatively titled A Lazy Lady. It’s a languid, melodic slow swing groove with lots of major seventh chords and shifting modalities. We don’t have another tune that sounds like it, so it’s a worthy contribution to the set. I actually wrote it around Xmastime but we didn’t get into rehearsing until recently cuz we were focused on a series of gigs and wanted to sharpen the material we had. Once we did, the band instantly got into it and started contributing ideas, and pretty soon it was clear that the song would be a winner.
For a while I had been pushing for the group to do Sun of the Son, a song I originally wrote for Event Horizon back in the ’80’s. It has a lot of meter changes and a heavy synth-laden fusion sound. Rich in particular though it was too prog-y for our group and would take too much time to really learn well and make our own. So I started in on making a new demo for it, making it more latin and less electronic, and re-imagining the middle section. Now that I have another new song the group digs the urgency has gone away, but the track has kinda taken on a life of it’s own. It’s gonna be much more than a basic demo, more like a full arrangement. I’m not sure what to do with it; might end up putting it on my next album.
In the rock world we continue gigging with the G-Force band. With the group lineup stabilized we’re adding new songs every show. We’ve probably added a dozen since the New Year. My favorites among last few (because I’m singing lead) include It’s Only Love by Bryan Adams and Tina Turner, I’m No Angel by Gregg Allman, and Rio by Duran Duran (which has a nice sax solo too.) We’re learning a bunch of new dance stuff too. On the other hand, we still have maybe five of the top ten most overplayed bar band songs in our set, and no matter how many new songs we add, there’s a steady thread of songs of that kind.
The last gig we played in Connecticut. The we had to wait to set up because the dinner crowd was really going on long, but they fed us and food was great. (Dragon Roll Burrtio!) It was first bar we’ve played in a while without TVs on in the room. There were plenty of people enjoying the music. It’s amazing how a dancing crowd can really make it fun. On the other hand, the set up and tear-down all the time is getting to be a drag, as I’m still getting over problems with my feet. Ah well, hopefully with the spring coming it’ll get easier.
Last weekend I was feeling particularly bad and spent most of my time hanging around the house listening to music. Explored a lot of long-forgotten 80’s prog-jazz crossover stuff on spotify. We also got a new King Crimson DVD from the same tour we saw last year, with the seven headed monster configuration of the band including Mel Collins on winds, Jakko on vocals, Fripp, Tony Levin, and three drummers. They played at least one song from each of their first seven albums, including lots of mellotron stuff, as well as updated arrangements from the later parts of their career. All in all an amazing job of unifying an incredibly diverse set of material. There were a few songs I didn’t know that well so I went back and found the original tracks. That got me thinking about lyrics.
In addition to planning the next jazz album I’ve been thinking about my next studio solo album for Buzzy Tonic. I have a the first three or four songs ready to go, and now I might be adding a crypto-jazz instrumental as well. We’ll see. Anyway that’s probably enough for one side.
I always have a big backlog of partially written musical ideas that can be developed. I was surprised to discover I also have a pretty big backlog of potential lyrics. I thought it was mostly random fragments, but I went thru and with just a little organizing I found I have enough stuff for maybe ten or fifteen songs. Of course not all are equally good, most are incomplete, and none have a musical idea to go with them. So it’ll take some work, but it’s great to find this cache of material and It’ll alot of fun go thru it and see if I can get some songs happening.
BTW here’s a lyric I came up with at a recent Haven Street gig for Jay’s song Slope. I normally don’t care for vocalese (listen to pretty much anyone who’s not Ella Fitzgerald and you’ll know why) so I have no plans to ever record it, but it just came to me while we were playing and now it’s stuck in my head every time we do the song. Enjoy!
…
Slope
Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
And then you think that life’s looking down
Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope
Just when you think that life’s looking up
And then you think that life’s looking down
Slidin’ down that slope
Climbin’ up that slope
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope
– jfs 1/19
