Motus Mentis

One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (“Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring. A particular […]

I haven’t written much about music lately, and have almost never, I think, written about my own musical background, other than as a recording engineer. But I have played the drums and the guitar since I was a boy, and before I landed my first job in a recording studio and began a career at […]

We note with sadness the death of bassist Dennis Irwin. I didn’t know Dennis well, but I had met him on many occasions, and did record him once or twice. He was, in addition to being an outstanding player, a wonderfully sweet-natured man. Dennis died soon after having been diagnosed with cancer late last year, […]

Another sad note: from my friend Pat Goldsmith I have just learned that drummer Buddy Miles, best known for his playing in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, has died.

Well, your humble correspondent had an album up for a Grammy this time around: Borrowed Time (Tiempo Prestado), by guitarist Steve Khan, which was nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category — but the award went to another outstanding artist, Paquito D’Rivera. Sorry Steve! We’ll get ’em next time.

I’ve been a fan of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, for a very long time. Though you may not be familiar with him, he is one of the more influential figures in late 20th-century American music, and without question one of the oddest.

I was saddened to see in today’s news that the great Joe Zawinul has died, of cancer, at the age of 75.

From my friend Eugene Jen comes an interesting item about one Dmitri Tymoczko (Harvard ’91), who has come up with a new way of mapping musical tonal clusters into the topological space known as an orbifold, with interesting results.

The interesting question, of course, is how the orbifold mapping would represent “Oh, Pretty Woman”, or perhaps “Only the Lonely”.

Read all about it.

If you enjoy music, and have a broadband Internet connection, then I must recommend an outstandingly clever website, Pandora. The site allows you to create virtual streaming “radio stations” that you seed with music you like — after which the system analyzes your choices and scans its vast collection to find other music that it determines, by its proprietary algorithms, that you will be likely to enjoy as well. It’s a smart idea, and done very well, with a simple and intuitive user interface. Take it for a spin. One caveat: no classical music yet. Apparently the analysis and assortment of classical music is a more difficult problem. They’re working on it.

As sometimes happens, it’s late, and I may have to shirk my bloggardly duties for today. After a late night Wednesday, an early morning today, hours in the office reviewing mind-numbingly opaque Internet-protocol documents, and then a long drive from New York City to Wellfleet, MA, I am simply too zonked to opine about anything.

Well, almost. As I write I am listening to a 1965 recording, by the incomparable Arthur Rubinstein, of Chopin’s Nocturnes, in particular Opus 9, No. 3, in B major. The ‘A’ section of the piece is a simple melodic figure, played with infinite tenderness by the great master. The structure repeats several times, and each time the second half of the figure is reinterpreted with increasingly intricate variation. It is sublimely, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Listening to this music, sometimes I feel that even if this were all the human race ever accomplished, it would be enough.

Sorry not to have posted anything yesterday; I spent the whole day in the ‘B’ room at Avatar Studios, doing some mixing with my old pal, guitarist Steve Khan. We were mixing two takes that didn’t make it onto last year’s album The Green Field (which featured Jack deJohnette, John Patitucci, and Manola Badrena). At the tracking dates back in May of 2005 we wound up recording more material than would fit on CD, so the two songs we mixed yesterday – Henry Mancini’s “Dreamsville” and McCoy Tyner’s “Blues for Ball” – will just have to wait till next time around.

Studio B is a nice little room, with a cozy live area that’s just right for a small rhythm section – among others, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards recorded a string of hits there, back in the 80’s – and an expansive Solid State Logic 9000 series console.

I was a staff engineer there from 1979 until 1987, back when the place was called Power Station, so I always feel right at home.

Have you a recording of Chopin’s Preludes? I listened to them today for the first time in quite a while. They are a strange collection, not preludes to anything really, despite the name, but each a unique meditation. About them, Liszt said:

“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart. They are not only, as the title might make one think, pieces destined to be played in the guise of introductions to other pieces; they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams, and elevates it to the regions of the ideal.”

and Schumann:

“I would term the Preludes strange. They are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.”

On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedzwater, who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.

Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.