Mwanji is right -- this is a very good interview with Ben Monder. In addition to his detailed and insightful commentary on the new record, Ben is disarmingly candid, unaffected, and self-effacing throughout:
AAJ: You talked about the magic of digital editing—I take it this song isn’t one long take.
BM: We tried [laughing], but no. No. It was a really tough record to make; I try to forget about that, but it was. I booked three days in the studio in, let’s see, January of 2004. It was right after the IAJE where I had like four gigs, something like that. So I was there every night, during, I think, the coldest week in fifty years. Something like that. Not that that’s relevant, but I was really distracted by playing with all these different bands.
And then Sunday was the first day of my recording, so I’d played Wednesday through Saturday and that was really a bad idea—because I was not there for my own music. I didn’t have the mental energy left to really deal with it, and I didn’t have the time to put in for the preparation. So we tried that piece, and I just couldn’t play it. It was pathetic, really terrible. So I went through this agonizing process of trying to figure out if I could salvage it, and just decided to book another day about two, three weeks later. And so we did it and it went a lot better. But even so, we recorded take after take, section after section, and just pieced it together.
[…]
AAJ: Is a tune like this particularly difficult for you to perform?
BM: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, at this point it’s not too bad. I’ve done it so much, although I don’t have it worked up at this point. But I attempted to record that, I think, three times and failed. I finally got it on the fourth try. Even if I am able to play it, all the conditions [laughing] have to be perfect. It has to the exact right time of day where my hands are going to feel like they’re able to do it at the right speed or whatever.
If I prepare too much, then I’m burned out and I can’t play it—and if I don’t warm up enough, I can’t play it. It’s kind of tricky! That was the hardest tune to record in a way; I don’t know if it had anything to do with it, but I tried to do it around the time of some really serious health problems I encountered about a year and ahalf ago.
AAJ: Do you think the health problems you experienced in any way color the tune itself? The mood of it?
BM: Well, the tune was written before anything happened—whether it had anything to do with the performance, I don’t know. I think with the performance, if anything comes through, it’s just desperation: “please, god let this one be it! I can’t try to record this again!” When I finally did it, I’d gotten no sleep the night before, so I got up thinking, “great, I’m totally unprepared again.” I got to the studio and my hands felt terrible—I did a few takes and just wasn’t warmed up. Then I remember drinking like six cups of coffee and saying, “Okay, well, this is it.” And I did it. And it turned out okay, I guess.
Also, Ben elucidates his approach to metametrics (paging Kyle Gann...)
BM: Yeah. This one was an attempt to experiment with polyrhythms—superimposed so that the effect would be of two different tempos played simultaneously. The main polyrhythm of the piece is five against three. I kind of divide it up into three strings and three strings, so the five is on the top three strings and the three is on the bottom. Both parts are in cycles of four, which hopefully disguises what it is.
[...]
BM: The origin was an idea of how to divide a bar of six, or two bars of three. I kind of stole this idea from Guillermo Klein—I informed him I was stealing it, so it was okay. He has a series of pieces based on this seven-seven-three clave. So if you think of them in sixteenth notes, you’re going to end up with six beats. On the last record we did with him [Los Guachos III , 2002, Sunnyside], there are at least two or three pieces that are based on that rhythmic idea.
AAJ: I think I found myself counting to six through this tune and being completely confused by that.
BM: Yeah, you can do that do a degree but—well, I’ll explain how the piece evolved. I took the idea of this three groups of seven and one group of three, and I put the three in all the places in relation to the seven it could be, so one complete pattern was basically four bars of 6/4. And then I added a little three at the end, just to confuse that—it seemed like it needed it. So that’s why if you tried to count in six, it wouldn’t exactly work out.
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