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Looper's Delight
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“ i'm not connected to the
classical world anymore. i play a looped version of the 2nd mvt of beethoven's
7th symphony and it gets some classical people REALLY upset (just read the
comments on a youtube recording of it) like they are personally offended by it.
i tell them its a COVER of beethoven, and i can do as i damn well please ;-) as you can see I've got my
toes in two different worlds.... rant over.” You Go Girl!, Musical Fascism comes in many forms. There are
classical Nazis, Jazz Nazis, Blues Nazis, you name it. You will find purists in
every genre. Unfortunately sometimes they can even be very accomplished
musicians who just happen to resist change as being inherently bad. Your world
frightens them Zoe, you and your one woman techno chamber orchestraJ That’s
just someone’s insecurity talking. There are always going to be
people who resist innovation and exploration, The haters of the new and
different, hey, they rioted for Stravinsky, consider it a red badge of courage
that you are pushing buttons. I don’t know why people insist on having
their sacred cows, but there is much about humanity that I find crazy making. I
think the best way to honor a song I am covering is to render it from a fresh
perspective, even if it means deconstructing it entirely. To do a song precisely
as written is fine and a great way to develop one’s technical accuracy,
but it isn’t infusing your own personality in to it. Otherwise why
do it at all? I have mixed feelings about doing covers in the first
place, probably from too many bar band gigs over the years. Also doing covers
represents a sort of musical tyranny to me, as if that is what we must do as
musicians to “relate” to our audience, because somehow the audience
won’t be able to relate to us otherwise. I have been messing around
with more covers recently, but they tend to be obscure enough that most people
don’t notice. I haven’t had too many people recognize “
Memories of Tomorrow” by Keith Jarret, or Ralph Towner’s “the
reluctant bride” but that probably has as much to do with how imperfectly
I play them J I personally have
adopted a performance style that involves an equal mixture of musical templates
and pure improvisation. The templates will consist of a key or tuning, an
instrument of choice, and some basic A B structures, what effects or looping
techniques I might choose to feature, the mood, etc. Some of these templates evolve
in to more structured composition, but for the most part the form is improvised
from performance to performance. So in essence, I’ll story board the
performance, but everything is essentially improvised, even though I am often
times improvising on familiar themes and progressions. I guess you could call
it comprovisation. Bill |