perfromance

The Sound of Sense

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece is kicking off a Summer where I’m going to be doing some different things here than what the Parlando Project usually does. Though the Project’s “usual” varies, the capsule description typically applies: “Combines various words (mostly other people’s literary poetry) with original music in differing styles.” What’s coming this Summer?

I’m not entirely sure yet. There may be more behind-the-scenes stuff, even some “inside baseball” topics about recording, composition, and musical instruments. I think, some personal memoir, a few more peculiar “cover versions” of other folk’s music — we’ll see. I’ve never emphasized those things, so I don’t know how this will work yet. Come September, I intend to return to our regular stuff: writing about my experience of other poets and their poems as the Project moves toward its 10th anniversary. I hope there will still be some things of interest to those who come here for that. For regular readers, particularly those that have followed this Project for a while, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this Summer’s personal digressions.

I recorded music with Dave Moore last week. Dave and I have known each other since we were teenagers, and we’ve made music as the LYL Band for 45 years. For much of that time Dave was a driving two-handed keyboard player, pounding first an upright piano, then a Farfisa combo organ and electric piano. The Farfisa had grey keys for the bass register, and Dave was often effectively the bass player in the various LYL lineups. Two-handed keyboard players are a tough thing to integrate into the typical Rock band. That kind of playing can fill a lot of the harmonic space — but in some of Rock’s history, guitar voicings are expected to outline the chords. As it turns out, this was OK for me, as I was never a competent conventional rhythm guitar player. Though LYL had an additional guitar player sometimes, I worked out an unconventional role, most often playing single notes and double stops that decorated the chords that Dave laid down, or adding timbral color with guitar effects.

By the turn of the century, we fell into a regular pattern: around once a month we’d set a date. Just before the appointed time, I’d be ready in my studio space and would start to play a little melodic line or spare pattern. Dave would come by a few minutes later, let himself in, and he’d walk up to the keyboard position in the studio space as I continued to play. I’d lean over and reveal the key I was playing in, and off we’d go. I’d have some words ready, a literary poem for Parlando perhaps. Our familiarity bred musical content: I was accustomed to Dave’s keyboard moves, he likely knew mine after all this time too. We’d extemporize a weaved top line. In 2-6 minutes I’d wind it up. We’d say hi to each other. Dave would next hand me a sheet of lyrics. Sometimes with chords, sometimes just some jottings as to predominant ones or key, sometimes just the words. He’d start to play and sing and I’d find my way to play something that I hoped would fit in. That piece would end, and then I’d hand Dave a chord sheet with lyrics to something I had put together. Though sparse, my sheets would be more organized, allotting info for Dave to drive the basic harmonic content for what I would sing and play along with him.

The alteration proceeded as such from there.* After about an hour we’d take a break, talk a bit, and then we’d pick up the rotation for another hour. There would sometimes be partial takes, even (rarely) a “let’s play through it again” request. There’d be short delays as we shuffled through papers, or switched instruments or keyboard sounds, but there wasn’t much deliberation.

What did the recordings reveal afterward? Some trainwrecks certainly. Some searches for inspiration that snoozed off. Particularly in my case, a lot of poor attempts at singing. None-the-less, there’d also be some stuff I’d think worth working with. You’ve heard some of those spontaneous live-in-the-studio takes here.

As it happens, other than their being two alternating songwriters, this is close to how Bob Dylan worked in the studio throughout much of his career — though he worked with trained studio musicians for the most part — skilled folks who could bring a lot more facility that Dave or I can supply.**

Why’d Dylan do that? Well, I’ll have to ask him, though somehow, I haven’t had the chance. My guess is that when it did work, a real sense of something happening in the room among a group of people was transmitted. An exploration. An edge of the seat, this hasn’t yet been formed, a how will it turn out feeling the listener can share.***

Let me repeat myself for necessary clarity: my skillset as a musical instrument operator is such that I think that it doesn’t fulfill the job description of a musician. I won’t impose a summary on Dave, but I think he’d be unlikely to claim high-level musical skills. I do call myself a composer, and Dave has started to call me a producer. I wish I had more skills, but I work artistically with the ideas and actualities I have.

New Studio Space MIDI keyboard

One thing was different last week. For nearly 20 years Dave usually played an older non-MIDI keyboard at my studio space. I may write more about the context later, but I’m thinking it’s time to move to MIDI. Dave has no experience with MIDI and computer instruments, so this will be a journey. I was able to find a good open-box example of this affordable, semi-weighted MIDI keyboards with aftertouch.

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So, last week, after decades of this, when Dave and I met, I was in progress, playing a guitar riff, and he, on arrival, began playing electric piano. I had set out a drum loop and had a bass track running that hung around the key center. The piece I read as I played my electric guitar was a sonnet, a recent one in my sonnet-series about Alzheimer’s disease and a care-home for those suffering from it — and how we, outside the disease, interact with those within it. “The Sound of Sense”  doesn’t lie: Robert Frost actually did think there was a basic undercurrent in how poetry works — that it’s like how we hear others speaking just out of earshot.

Dave’s not Bill Evans or McCoy Tyner. I’m not John Coltrane or Mike Bloomfield. Some people say I sing like Bob Dylan, but I think on a good day I might sound something like Bob on a bad day. Here’s something I’ve been thinking lately, as successful music gets more produced and marketed from the moment of conception on: it’s still good to have some notes made that don’t know what the note to follow will be. If that next note is unexpected, even “off,” — well that’s better than always knowing what the next note is. And that latest artistic worry: Artificial Intelligence and LLMs? They’re programmed to work-to-rule, creating statistically what you’d expect next.

Two old guys playing live in the studio together. I perform a sonnet I recently wrote that Dave hasn’t heard. He and I weave together in a loose, homespun warp and woof, and unlike a lot of poets reading to music, I spend a minute playing electric guitar at the end, trying to not play the next note that you’d expect. You can hear that performance with the audio player below. No player? You aren’t out of AI credits or something — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

I hope we’re going to have an interesting summer.

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*When other musicians played with Dave and I, I tried to continue that strict arbitrary rotation — everyone got to start a piece in turn.

**A few years back a huge box-set including alternate partial and unsuitable takes from Dylan’s classic Sixties period was issued. Fascinating, listening to and hearing the outright failures or “just not it” attempts. Given what I know those musicians involved could  do, knowing those failures keep me from utter despair when I listen to a busted LYL take uttered from my limited skill-set.

***Some classic Jazz recordings of the LP era were done this way, though often with a substantial shared mental “book” of structures and cadences for the skilled musicians to rely on. It may be one of those shared illusions, as there’s no strictly technical reason that Kind of Blue  or A Love Supreme  couldn’t have been recorded as most modern pop music is recorded: many instrumental tracks played separately and laid behind featured top-line tracks constructed of many passes collaged together. Those old Jazz records feel like the musicians are breathing together in the room to me, in my mind’s eye I can see them glance at each other — but we can be fooled.

My Life has stood — a Loaded Gun

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The achievement of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is unusual, but the poem I set to music and perform today stands out even amid the rest of her work. This uniqueness has led to varied interpretations of what the poem is getting at: sometimes esoteric readings of the poem’s matter, written by folks plausibly smarter and more knowledgeable about Dickinson than I.

And so, if I was stopped before approaching this poem to make a song from it, I would have replied with a vague recall of what I’ve read: that it’s about something singularly, perhaps secretly, important about Dickinson herself — a striking, summary image of a rage or force she felt. Well, maybe it is. I’m not proposing that I have any authority to change any charge this poem has given you. I’ve often found myself ignorant or obtuse. Still, I found a rather different poem than I expected as I tried to arrange how I’d express the poem while singing it.

My Life has stood a Loaded Gun

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. One intent in providing this is a hope others will sing it, perhaps better than I can.

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The poem I read anew had Dickinson’s poetic voice playing a dramatic role, and the play is a tragedy whose protagonist is a sentient non-animal object, a gun. The gun’s relationship to humans, or particularly to its owner, is subservient and not rage-filled. It self-portrays itself as if it was a loyal dog: happy that it’s been selected like a pup from the pound, happy with a woodland walk in the company of its owner, proud of its sharp echoing bark. The stanza-scene where the gun is snozzled up to its owner’s pillow in bed, as if a sleeping pet, would make the most ardent gun-enthusiast contentedly smile.

Some readings have over-weighed the “stood” in the first line, as a Chekhovian gun frozen in the first act — all unrealized potential violence, a symbol of a quiet hurt or rage.

But then the turn, the volta. In the penultimate stanza the gun’s self-portrayal takes on another aspect: it’s like a gangland capo here, a deadly enforcer. Is it proud of its efficacy and efficiency in killing that it recounts? There’s no clear moralizing, but there is a contrast between that stanza and the sleeping master and gun. They will stir, and awake, while any foe the gun has shot will not “stir the second time.” The final stanza will tip our speaker-gun’s judgement on this.

Am I not diving deep enough into the wreck here? Am I stuck on the surface symbolism and not cognizant of the deeper meaning of what is being symbolized about Emily Dickinson, the middle-class, likely non-violent, non-weapon-toting woman? Could be, but as a singer of subjective quality, as a poor strutting player in this tragedy of the loyal gun, I might be able to convey that deeper stuff by playing the images well.

What was Dickinson’s self-knowledge of what she’s doing here? Was she the gun any more than Shakespeare was Macbeth or that Bob Dylan secretly sees himself as an Early Roman King? Deception and hidden meanings are a Dickinsonian trope, and the final verse clearly intends to be a hermetic riddle. I solve the riddle by thinking that the gun muses that as a non-living durable object it could outlive its human owner — but that in a better, wished-for world, the master would destroy it.

You can hear my performance of “My Life has stood — a Loaded Gun”  with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? There’s one more bullet in your chamber — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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William Carlos Williams “The Birds” and what nature sounds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Something about the Spring I noticed this year — oddly, this year as an old man who has had a full lifetime of Springs — is the intensity of natural sounds in my city. There’s a tendency, demonstrated in many poetic tropes, to make nature a portrait or a silent movie, putting nature in contrast to the noise of our civilization’s hum and bark.

I ride my bicycle nearly every day off to a café to have a breakfast, sometimes early enough to feel like the single soul on the street, but by the return trip certainly part of the city waking and doing: kids on their school bus stops, sometimes with a parent, sometimes waiting with their own cohort only, folks holding coffee flasks unlocking their car doors to go to work, a few other bicyclists, including those on big front basket bakfiets or long-tail rear-seat-shelf bikes holding small kids, this observant cargo watching whatever in the morning beneath their pastel helmets. The human noise is slight and clicking. In such mornings we are more like crickets rubbing their wings.

But the birds! When most of those humans are making only accidental noise this early, and the kids waiting for the yellow bus aren’t always talking, perhaps practicing quiet for the ordered schoolroom, the birds are singing at the tops of their voices in the morning. Like miniature feathered fiddles, their song cuts through larger sounds, it insists on being heard. “Ladies, I got your genetic material here!” “This is my and my kind’s tree!” “Whatever this is, this Spring, I am here, and I’ll use my breath to say it!”

Like us bipeds lacking much fur, other mammals aren’t sounding much. Yard bunnies are suspicious and quiet. The squirrels don’t chirp, and their little feet make quiet footfalls. The dogs on leashes: all nose-leading in an alternate sensory dimension. But the frogs and toads are singing out too — whole amazing choirs of them, all wanting to contest Emily Dickinson’s Nobody with a harrumph and high whistle of who they are.

So, it is this Project’s nature to add sound to page poetry. Today’s audio piece is just me alone with a Telecaster electric guitar during a hurried session early this Spring to put down some musical ideas. In the poem that I’m combining with my music, “The Birds,”  William Carlos Williams follows Imagist principles, melding a moment into concrete images. Given that we’ve just had a set of rainy days throughout the long holiday weekend in my city, I resonate as Williams poetically paints the bird-morning wet as undried paint.

Is the world not “wholly insufflated” as he says at the start? The bird song is breathing into our world — nature is not silence, but poetry aloud.

Strange Powers Magnetic Fields photo by Heidi Randen 600

My wife found these* stapled to poles around our neighborhood on Sunday.

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You can hear my performance of Williams’ “The Birds”  with the player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Want to follow along with the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that.

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*This bird couple’s heads are superimposed over a human pair of heads from the cover of The Magnetic Fields Holiday  album. The quatrain quoted below is from a song found there “Strange Powers.”   Despite being a substantial Magnetic Fields admirer myself, I had never seen this album cover.