New music...

I'm *way* behind on my listening, but I did want to say I listened
recently to Dan Stearns' "No More Next Time". I like the slow jazzy stuff,
and there are some surprising turns.

Rick

There pieces were an experiment in simultaneity in which I tried to
use more traditional jazz as the sonic palette because I felt its
general familiarity and inherent flexibility as a "sound" would help
conceal some of the experiment from being as radical as it actually
is. By simultaneity I simply mean the simultaneous sounding of
unrelated events,a technique used to great success by Ives,
Brant,Ornette, Braxton and many, many others. But what I was trying
to achieve with these pieces--there are three of them, I tried a mid
tempo, a ballad and a blues--was a sense of unity with a minimum of
clashing, and, for me, a new way to hear things working together in
a "jazz" context. As far as the particulars go,it's a collage using
two completely different recordings in four passes. The two
recordings were only a few seconds off in total running time,and
knowing them both I could hear, in a rough and brute force way,that
they would work together. The idea of the four passes,two for each
record, was to make the composite massively microtonal, so I let the
turntables run and "played" the pitch knob on the recorder exactly
as you would an instrument. But the real thing I was after with
these experiments,and out of a dozen carefully planned attempts only
three really worked to my liking, was a different way to hear
TIME...to listen to the phrasing as whole completely independent
parts run concurrently and coalesce into a single piece of music.
These kinds of exercises are the types of things I like to do to
both stretch my ears as a soloist and as a composer. It's one thing
to have the idea,but I find that when I take the time to make little
working models it's much more instructive when it comes time to
actually implement the ideas or concepts.

http://zebox.com/daniel_anthony_stearns/

mid-tempo
ballad

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Rick McGowan <rick@u...>
wrote:
> I'm *way* behind on my listening, but I did want to say I
listened
> recently to Dan Stearns' "No More Next Time". I like the slow
jazzy stuff,
> and there are some surprising turns.
>
> Rick