more scrittles

I'm gonna try to keep this thing better updated, as lots of things are afoot.

I've been able to put a lot of time into music the last few months. I played a short show in San Francisco, three songs on my own and a few with Julie Zielinski, who organized the event. It was my first time performing in well over a year, and I had a blast. I did three Maxwell Horse songs, which I re-arranged for standard tuning and fingerstyle. It seemed to be well-received, which was nice, especially as I haven't sung a note since the last band recording I did. I realized how much I do miss performing; there's an electricity that comes with the attention of a crowd that's addictive.

Currently, I'm working on doing the music for a wedding of some friends of mine. They asked me if I'd be available to play some music, and as they were nice enough to give me a lot of advance notice, I thought it'd be fun to write all the music for it; scoring the event, as it were. I'm finding it incredibly inspiring, in the past three weeks I've written nine pieces, five of them completed and most of those notated. Just the last two days, I've been working on something which really feels like a breakthrough piece. It's pretty much in the classical vein, and takes a lot of inspiration from Bach and the way he perverts a simple idea into all kinds of strange and wonderful things. But what's been amazing to me is the way that ideas have been presenting themselves, and how I seem to finally have the vocabulary and skill to be able to play what occurs to me. And with this piece, I've been able to carry the original idea a lot further than where it usually goes; it maybe that I'm finally escaping the limits of the songwriting genre where a few harmonic ideas are all that's needed.

A great by-product of this project is that I'm going to have a stockpile of solo pieces to play. I've always been AWFUL at being able to play for people who ask me to play something, in informal settings. It happened a few months ago, here; I pretty much choked and just threw flamenco riffs at them with no rhyme or reason. But yesterday, I played one of the pieces for someone and it felt natural; I had confidence in the piece, and for once I wasn't overcome with concern for the listener's response at all times. This is a very good thing.

The project has been so involved that I haven't been playing jazz. I've been listening to it non-stop - Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young - and I think what I'm hearing is flowing into my compositions, and I believe that what I'm learning through composing solo pieces will flow back into that kind of playing, too.

I'm rather taken aback by how well this kind of playing is going, and how much I like it. It's almost troubling, really; my focus is stretched further, again. I'm dying to authentically play jazz, but also to explore ambient/looping music, and at some point come back to songwriting, and incorporate some parts of all these things into recording projects. Now I have another field I need to explore. I can forget about ever playing bass or drums again.