May 8ths
5/8/2005
News has become more and more idiotic. Once you have decided what’s important to know, news generally becomes less important to day-to-day functioning.
[5/8/2025: Looking back 20 years it was the advent of the internet that stoked news idiocy, 30 years before in 1995 it was the post-Rodney King, post-Waco, post-OJ, post-Oklahoma City world that were in the 24-hour news cycles, 40 years ago in 1985 it seemed less insane. There was no way to vent online, and we did fine].
A Songday ditty based on this. Think real heavy guitars, not cheesy MIDI sounds.
5/8/2020
Autolands, A crab canon to be rapped/chanted backward and forwards, lines 1-8, and 8-1 with set rhythms. One pitch or a chord can be used as well. As the original Autolands was in Gb Lydian, the use of characteristic interval (#4, Gb-C) would be recommended. If SATB, Gb-C-F. If four, Gb-C-F-Bb.
5/8/2021
Watched interview Ron Carter the bassist. What I said a long time ago was that jazz sounds like an art but it’s really more like a science. He comes from a time when jazz was more like a physics–all this analysis that went into improvisation, knowing the chord changes, and so on. But what I learned from this interview is that it’s much more intuitive than I thought. You have to know the changes of course, but it’s the essence of improvisation that is more spontaneous and free but the underlying science of it does matter as it creates a good foundation. You will find that most jazz players will understand music theory and don’t avoid it like in pop music where it seems to not be important. You don’t want to have rules. Jazz sounds free but it has lots of rules, and you can move on a continuum of staying within the rules and breaking the rules, and that’s where the art comes in and the science as well. #riff
[The Riffs are video transcripts. I used YouTube as a video diary, but they were never public, and now I have the text].
Working on one of the Brassai for MFP which has complex changes that are very jazz-like but I don’t consider it jazz. It just comes out that way because this particular idea started on a guitar with a jazzy chord cluster. Very often I have to go to the keyboard to find out what it is and then take it from there.
I can approach something from a jazz level but I won’t consider it jazz–considering how invested I am in the genre. Sometimes you have to avoid jazz because it’s too easy for it to slip into Steely Dan, especially with a Rhodes. The fact that I’m working on an acoustic guitar would seem to make it more folky. But it has major seventh chords in it so it’s definitely going to sound jazzy because of its natural verticality.
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Knowledge is “ethereal” and might have existed for a long time. One of the things I’ve always said is that if it rhymes somebody has already thought of it and relates to the idea of the rhythms of language being involved in the dissemination of ideas. A song chorus is a dissemination of an idea–a meme. A ditty or short song is a meme. Memes erase individuality. One person can say that they thought of it but at that point, once it becomes a meme it doesn’t matter.
5/8/2025
As I was watching the Vatican live there was an interesting juxtaposition of bell ringing and a brass ensemble (Bbs). It gave me an idea, so I quickly scored it up. It's polytonal with the low strings playing a 3-bar repeating phrase of E-naturals and B-naturals with oscillating G minor and E major triads and a repeating Bb on top. Could possibly use drums on it with a backbeat.
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