Lee Barry Composition Diary

   The usual way that I work is to sit down with my songwriting diary, which is essentially an unorganized collection of song titles, lyric lines, and couplets, and I attempt to match them with what I'm noodling around on, or riffs I've already recorded to some extent. In this case it was a line of poem by A. Pushkin, quoted in Alexander Luria's book, The Mind of a Mnemonist , "Small Wonder, is it? Kharita". I notated the natural rhythms of the words as follows. The tune was extrapolated from that one seed. This is more of a placeholder lyric and different lyrics can be swapped out later.   

  One of my Composition Strategies is "Accretion", and that's what happened here. As I was reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, specifically paragraph in the "Blue of Distance" chapter, jumped out as particularly musical. I already had some angular guitar music that I was noodling on and I married the two. Anything with the word blue in it compels me right into cool-school jazz. Edges Of Blue by meta4s