Monday, August 17, 2009
Maybe not dead?
Andoni bailed - he's more interested in a free jazz approach, less composed. I've been casting about for the right person. Emailed City Lights, no response. Mal Sharpe suggested contacting the Beat Museum in North Beach, and they put me onto Brian Harris, who, it turns out, has performed the poem from memory several times. We've corresponded, and I'm waiting on a DVD of one of the performances to see if he's a fit. The signs are promising: he's a musician, a responsive correspondent and a thinking man. Might could happen!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Where are you, Andoni?
Our reciter has gone missing - no response to my emails or phone calls. Weird, since this was his idea. I'm gonna give him a few more minutes and hope that everything is OK. If he doesn't materialize, I need to find a new star. I'm hoping for Nov 2009 performances, so we gotta get moving.
Andoni? Andoni!
(Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day in Boston's North End.)
Andoni? Andoni!
(Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day in Boston's North End.)
Thursday, May 21, 2009
We're doing it legally
I started thinking about the copyright issues in performing a poem, and did a little digging. It turns out I'm creating a "derivative work," so need permission of the copyright holder. City Lights Books was kind enough to refer me to the right guy, and he seems OK with the concept, so paperwork approving the "Howl Jazz Suite" is on its way.
If we, god willing, actually record this behemoth, I'll need mechanical licenses, same as for recording a song. So hey-ho, I learned something! The day is won.
Still need a drummer, though.
If we, god willing, actually record this behemoth, I'll need mechanical licenses, same as for recording a song. So hey-ho, I learned something! The day is won.
Still need a drummer, though.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sneak Preview MP3
I've cobbled together a preview MP3 from the rehearsal recording. The whole work is quite varied in groove and mood, but you can hear Andoni's incantatory approach, Dave Tidball on alto sax and bass clarinet (!), Laura Klein on piano, Brian Bowman on drums, Noah Schenker on bass, and me on guitar. Alas, our regular drummer will be in NYC this winter playig Crique du Soliel, and Bryan has declined the gig (not a fan of jazz + poetry), so I gotta find the right drummer.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Meeting Ginsberg
I did, in fact, meet Alan Ginsberg, once: In 1968 I was 14 years old, a burgeoning hippie blues harp player. That sainted summer, my father took me to Kyoto for two months to visit his older brother, my uncle Cid Corman. Cid edited, translated and wrote poetry, and knew the Beats, though I think he was not really one of them. A lot of folks passed through Kyoto in their travels, and those who were interested in contemporary poetry made a point of visiting with Cid.
It was a long, hot and isolated summer for me. The grownups were absolutely uninterested in me, and I was given pocket money and pushed out the door. I spent my time visiting the temples, of which there are dozens, and generally walking the city. No big adventures, and it was a gorgeous place to be marooned, but still I felt lonely and, honestly, angry and abandoned. Cid, my father, and the visitors all seemed to me preoccupied with doing Great Things or alternatively, sucking up to people who they believed were doing Great Things. Lots of posturing, earnest discussion and dispensation of putative wisdom, a heirarchy of greatness prevailed, and it felt competitive and artificial to me.
Cid lived in a suburb? district? in a small traditional house, tiny yard, with other similar houses close by. The summer was hot and muggy, punctuated by huge downpours that left the air steamy. Cid's wife, my aunt Shizumi, gave us dinner most nights, breakfast every morning, and it was at breakfast that Ginsberg turned up.
I had some sense of who he was, and that it was rather extraordinary to be meeting him, but he was in fact a sweetheart, a nice normal guy. He and I talked a bit, and he was kind and, amazing to me, interested in what I had to say. Kinda rumpled, hair aloft. As I remember it, he was very excited about meditation. In discussing why monks are traditionally celibate, he said "You know how your balls hurt after you come?" (At 14, I couldn't say that I did.) He said "That's why they're celibate: it's a distraction from the meditation." You learn something new every day.
It was a long, hot and isolated summer for me. The grownups were absolutely uninterested in me, and I was given pocket money and pushed out the door. I spent my time visiting the temples, of which there are dozens, and generally walking the city. No big adventures, and it was a gorgeous place to be marooned, but still I felt lonely and, honestly, angry and abandoned. Cid, my father, and the visitors all seemed to me preoccupied with doing Great Things or alternatively, sucking up to people who they believed were doing Great Things. Lots of posturing, earnest discussion and dispensation of putative wisdom, a heirarchy of greatness prevailed, and it felt competitive and artificial to me.
Cid lived in a suburb? district? in a small traditional house, tiny yard, with other similar houses close by. The summer was hot and muggy, punctuated by huge downpours that left the air steamy. Cid's wife, my aunt Shizumi, gave us dinner most nights, breakfast every morning, and it was at breakfast that Ginsberg turned up.
I had some sense of who he was, and that it was rather extraordinary to be meeting him, but he was in fact a sweetheart, a nice normal guy. He and I talked a bit, and he was kind and, amazing to me, interested in what I had to say. Kinda rumpled, hair aloft. As I remember it, he was very excited about meditation. In discussing why monks are traditionally celibate, he said "You know how your balls hurt after you come?" (At 14, I couldn't say that I did.) He said "That's why they're celibate: it's a distraction from the meditation." You learn something new every day.
Monday, April 27, 2009
The First Rehearsal - Apr 26, 2008
Before the rehearsal I'm antsy, wondering whether I've committed musical mayhem. Will any of this stuff sound remotely good or is it a heaping helping of idiocy?
Fortunately, I'm in good hands. FivePlay is me (Tony Corman) on guitar, Laura Klein on piano, Dave Tidball on reeds, Alan Hall on drums, and Paul Smith on bass. Today we've got Bryan Bowman subbing on drums and Noah Schenker subbing on bass, so I'm in good hands.
Andoni, the reciter, drives in from Gilroy, bless him. We haven't met. Very nice cat, probably half my age, as are a lot of people. I'm really impressed that he's memorized 45 minutes of poetry. This guy is not afraid of work, and that means a lot to me. He's also clearly a natural performer, with a strong desire to be out there, up in front doing it. That is not me - I enjoy the audience and seem to need to perform, but it's always mixed for me with nerves and the sense that it's not good enough, ("it" being my own offering). This guy wants the spotlight, in the nicest way, and that will be essential for the performance. The poem is not for the faint of heart: it's explicit, joyfully profane and frank, and must be dispensed with full conviction.
New for me: the distortion box. I've been a jazz guy, plug the single-pickup archtop guitar into the amp, maybe turn the tone knob, and play. But some of the more apocalyptic moments of the music really require that nasal, buzzy, thin sound, so here goes.
We plunge into the music, and I learn several things: (1) I'm playing with four terrific musicians, (2) Andoni is going to be totally easy to work with (he's a musician himself, so slides right into rehearsal mode, and he's got his stuff down), (3) the parts need more verbal cues and (4) I need to figure out how to kick into time in three or four places I hadn't adequately considered. I also found out that I wrote some passages that are really hard for me to play. I can see what I'm going to be shedding this summer.
The good news is that, at least for now, I'm OK with the music, the notes and rhythms. I think they're doing what I want them to do, so I don't expect to have to rewrite much. I recorded the session and will need to crawl through the recording with the score in hand to figure out how to put more context into the notated parts. In the rehearsal, I needed my guitar part, the score, and a cued version of the poem to know what was happening. I've written for big bands (and small), but the requirements for this type of performance are different. I'm not surprised or disappointed; I figured I'd need to revise.
Overall, it's a good beginning. We're unavoidably off until September, at which point we plan to buckle down and see whether we can mount a performance in November. It's gotta debut in Berkeley, I think: the poem was written here (Caffe Mediterraneum)! while Ginsberg was living on Milvia Street, about five blocks from my house.
After the rehearsal, I'm a bit depleted. it took a lot of energy to run the whole thing down in two hours. But also elated, because the music is a lot less stupid than I feared. I'm especially happy about the 3/2 section behind the passages extolling the joys of homosexual anal intercourse.
I've got another posting or two to write, but it's probably going to be kind of quiet here this summer. Nonetheless, fans of jazz and poetry, keep watching this space.
Fortunately, I'm in good hands. FivePlay is me (Tony Corman) on guitar, Laura Klein on piano, Dave Tidball on reeds, Alan Hall on drums, and Paul Smith on bass. Today we've got Bryan Bowman subbing on drums and Noah Schenker subbing on bass, so I'm in good hands.
Andoni, the reciter, drives in from Gilroy, bless him. We haven't met. Very nice cat, probably half my age, as are a lot of people. I'm really impressed that he's memorized 45 minutes of poetry. This guy is not afraid of work, and that means a lot to me. He's also clearly a natural performer, with a strong desire to be out there, up in front doing it. That is not me - I enjoy the audience and seem to need to perform, but it's always mixed for me with nerves and the sense that it's not good enough, ("it" being my own offering). This guy wants the spotlight, in the nicest way, and that will be essential for the performance. The poem is not for the faint of heart: it's explicit, joyfully profane and frank, and must be dispensed with full conviction.
New for me: the distortion box. I've been a jazz guy, plug the single-pickup archtop guitar into the amp, maybe turn the tone knob, and play. But some of the more apocalyptic moments of the music really require that nasal, buzzy, thin sound, so here goes.
We plunge into the music, and I learn several things: (1) I'm playing with four terrific musicians, (2) Andoni is going to be totally easy to work with (he's a musician himself, so slides right into rehearsal mode, and he's got his stuff down), (3) the parts need more verbal cues and (4) I need to figure out how to kick into time in three or four places I hadn't adequately considered. I also found out that I wrote some passages that are really hard for me to play. I can see what I'm going to be shedding this summer.
The good news is that, at least for now, I'm OK with the music, the notes and rhythms. I think they're doing what I want them to do, so I don't expect to have to rewrite much. I recorded the session and will need to crawl through the recording with the score in hand to figure out how to put more context into the notated parts. In the rehearsal, I needed my guitar part, the score, and a cued version of the poem to know what was happening. I've written for big bands (and small), but the requirements for this type of performance are different. I'm not surprised or disappointed; I figured I'd need to revise.
Overall, it's a good beginning. We're unavoidably off until September, at which point we plan to buckle down and see whether we can mount a performance in November. It's gotta debut in Berkeley, I think: the poem was written here (Caffe Mediterraneum)! while Ginsberg was living on Milvia Street, about five blocks from my house.
After the rehearsal, I'm a bit depleted. it took a lot of energy to run the whole thing down in two hours. But also elated, because the music is a lot less stupid than I feared. I'm especially happy about the 3/2 section behind the passages extolling the joys of homosexual anal intercourse.
I've got another posting or two to write, but it's probably going to be kind of quiet here this summer. Nonetheless, fans of jazz and poetry, keep watching this space.
The Composing Process Part 2
Other motifs: the heartbeat. There are a lot of variations on the dearly beloved "lub-dub," because I felt that the poem devoted so much energy to describing people in desperate situations -- on the street or some dead-end hotel, in mental hospitals, laid out on junk or, god help you, in *Denver* -- places where I could imagine that your sole consolation is the fact that your heart continues to beat.
Carl Solomon/I'm with you in Rockland: the poem is dedicated to Solomon, (Ginsberg met him during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949). The music for part 3 sets the rhythm of his name against the recurrent line from the poem, in Afro 6/8 time.
The derivation for the other material is more abstract. There's a recurrent atonal line, which is an absolute bear to play, drawn mainly from the Dolphyish inspiration. There's a fair amount of augmented major 7th harmony, as bright as major can be and intended to underscore the happy or intense passages. There's a country tune that came to me in a dream: I'm six years old and watching TV in my jammies. It's a cartoon of a train speeding along, while a country group sings a tune called "A Cloud Came O'er the Hill." This is the only time in my life I was able to remember and notate music that came in a a dream, and I never thought I'd have a use for it, but it's used to underscore the section in Part 1 where he describes how the greatest minds, some of them, simply melted into perpetual travel. The music used under the passages about the joys of man-on-man love is new, intended to convey the joyous nature of those stanzas.
I'm probably omitting something, but these two posts cover the main sources. Getting it on paper, once I had a framework and a collection of possible motifs, melodies, grooves, and colors, was a simple question of hard work. Once I had it roughed out, I was faced wth putting it in front of musicians and asking them to play it. Oy.
Carl Solomon/I'm with you in Rockland: the poem is dedicated to Solomon, (Ginsberg met him during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949). The music for part 3 sets the rhythm of his name against the recurrent line from the poem, in Afro 6/8 time.
The derivation for the other material is more abstract. There's a recurrent atonal line, which is an absolute bear to play, drawn mainly from the Dolphyish inspiration. There's a fair amount of augmented major 7th harmony, as bright as major can be and intended to underscore the happy or intense passages. There's a country tune that came to me in a dream: I'm six years old and watching TV in my jammies. It's a cartoon of a train speeding along, while a country group sings a tune called "A Cloud Came O'er the Hill." This is the only time in my life I was able to remember and notate music that came in a a dream, and I never thought I'd have a use for it, but it's used to underscore the section in Part 1 where he describes how the greatest minds, some of them, simply melted into perpetual travel. The music used under the passages about the joys of man-on-man love is new, intended to convey the joyous nature of those stanzas.
I'm probably omitting something, but these two posts cover the main sources. Getting it on paper, once I had a framework and a collection of possible motifs, melodies, grooves, and colors, was a simple question of hard work. Once I had it roughed out, I was faced wth putting it in front of musicians and asking them to play it. Oy.
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