Jazz Electronica as a category label

[Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

Many of you have noticed that we periodically go on long rounds of discussion about how to label the kind of music we do. Well, this is a contribution inspired by constraints. I was booked to play the first annual Warwick Valley Jazz Festival, mainly because I'm old friends with the originator of the concept, drummer Steve Rubin. (Steve was in my kindergarten class - and those of you who've met me know how long ago *that* was!)

I needed a headline for my set - putting my name up there would draw my 3 closest family members and 2 local musicians.... so I chose Jazz Electronica and then tried to figure out how much of what I do could fit in that category! I think it was a good idea, and I had a full (small) house, which was wonderful. (of course, if i didn't have the association with the jazz festival, i probably wouldn't have pulled that well, even with that label)

As it turns out, my smartest move was, 2 weeks ahead of time, to figure out that performing 2 full-length solo sets was utter folly, and I managed to convince fellow looper Tom Ritchford, aka Tom Swirly, to perform with me. He plays electronic woodwinds, among other things, has great melodic and also adventurous sensibilities, and never has to be told what key I've wandered into. We were featured in a little write-up of the fest in the Times Herald-Record, which is the major paper for the county. http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100829/NEWS/8290337 - it's more impressive in the paper than it is online.

My first step was to start identifying drum approaches that worked with swing time. I've been experimenting with RMX lately, and it has time profiles which allow you to fit any of their patterns to whatever groove you like with a pretty fair amt of flexibility. And, the compelling feature of RMX for me is the ways in which variability (lfos and randomness) can be easily used. I still have a lot to learn, but it's quite interesting.

I also noticed during "development" of the meta-instrument for this performance that the Mobius plugin was far easiest to control than RMX because of Mobius' midi inputs independent of the host. Everything in RMX has to be mapped to a host control in order to use MIDI with it, and that's a bit of a PITA.

btw, Tom has a formidable music collection, and you can listen in at radio.swirly.com.