…a celebration of the practice of improvisation in all its diversity, complexity and, perhaps, contradictions
I was on my way, one Monday evening in January, to a trad session with my melodica, when a different music drew me into Stet Lab at The Roundy.
Han-earl Park was making good interesting sounds on guitar and pedals and stuff; Kevin Terry played the cello, what a lovely sound, and later Jesse Ronneau found some fun wacky stuff to do with it; Anthony [...]
I’m sitting in London writing this.
[I’m typing this up in Cork several days later, however….]
My initial idea for this report, fueled by my less-than-wonderful playing with Paul Dunmall (Paul, of course, is never less than fantastic) [info on this performance…], was to write about the tightrope balancing act between playing something—crafting something—‘musically’ satisfactory (however you gauge [...]
Since Piaras Hoban published an algorithmically generated text for his Lab report, and since I’m not averse to conversations with technics, I thought I’d follow his example with a conversation with Eliza (in this case Charles Hayden’s Java implementation of Eliza), the grandmother of Turing-test contenders. Here’s a more-or-less unedited conversation on the October Stet [...]
click clip
surprises bell floored click clip the
end light a little
bell floored
click clip the low end light
bell
blow tap tap wind
tap tap wind tap
tap tap wind tap type
floored click clip
hum no alarm this
the low end light a
off blow
click clip the
time some
tap type somebody little mains
mains hum no
a little on blow left right
hum no alarm this time some
clip [...]
I’ve said previously that “I’d be lying if I said I did not have allegiances—in idiom, in tradition, and in practice—I do, but I want to stress the possibility of trans-cultural meetings and creative (mis)understandings.”
I don’t subscribe to a silly ideology of some impossibly impartial, neutral, transcendental performance, free of tradition, history, identity. I’m not [...]
As I approached The Roundy on Monday night, alarm bells were a ringing. “Surely someone will silence that alarm?” thought I. Ha ha, how optimistic. The power of the universe wasn’t with me unfortunately, and 50 minutes later, as Piaras Hoban, Francis Heery, Áine Mangaoang and I began our masterpiece, the alarm was still sounding. [...]
Somewhere in Belfast, May 16, 2009
Snippets from a conversation between three musicians:
“Man, I should play more free jazz.”
“It’s not an idiom at all…”
“…a tradition? …a practice?”
“Just play all over the keyboard.”
“It is so much fun.”
“Why don’t I do this all the time?”
“There’s nothing better.”
“There really isn’t.”
“And it’s the simplest algorithm: play all the time, and [...]
Number one (the first thing): playing with Han-earl Park
Listening back to the recordings I can’t remember what I was playing or what’s coming next, but I can remember what I was thinking as I played. Such thoughts included “That doesn’t sound like what I expected”, “Now What?”, “Ha!”, “That was cool”, “Where’s he going [...]