Secret Society

I am fused just in case I blow out

So as a follow-up to our previous Jim McNeely listening session, Ethan Iverson and I got together again last week to listen to Jim's epic recording, East Coast Blow Out, in its entirety.

To begin, let me lay my cards on the table: this is one of the most mindblowingly great bigband albums ever recorded. Jim is very prolific, and has written a ton of outstanding music before and since -- some of which we talked about last time -- but East Coast Blow Out will always have a special place in my personal pantheon. As an album-length cohesive artistic statement for large jazz ensemble, I think it's up there with Ellington+Strayhorn’s Such Sweet Thunder, George Russell's New York New York, Bob Brookmeyer’s Make Me Smile, Kenny Wheeler’s Sweet Time Suite from Music for Large and Small Ensembles, and Maria Schneider’s Concert in the Garden. But unless you are an obsessive bigband junkie (and bless you if you are), you probably haven’t heard (or even heard of) East Coast Blow Out. Even John Scofield completists aren’t necessarily hip to this record, which features some of Sco’s most tantalizing work on disc.

It doesn’t help that the album is long out of print, has never been issued on iTunes or similar, and used copies of the CD tend to be rather pricey. But listen, people: Jim McNeely is badass and this is his masterpiece. You need to seek it out. (I’ve taken the liberty of uploading a few brief clips in this post so you can have a taste of what Ethan and I are talking about.)

Our conversation begins below the fold...

Open the blinds to our complicated lives

So, having more or less recovered from last month's Secret Society+Newspeak Ecstatic Merkin Hall Extravaganza (now streaming, y'all) only to suffer a catastrophic computer crisis (old laptop officially expired, brand new very very nice laptop I totally can't afford now in hand), my return to blogdonia begins.

Truth be told, my hand was forced by Ethan Iverson, who said he wanted me to come over to his place last night to play some Jim McNeely records for him, neglecting to mention until I got there that I would also be encouraged/required to document our confab for the people of the interwebs. But I am glad he dragged me back into it -- it was a fun listening session and I'm happy to be able to share it. Our conversation is cross-posted at Do The Math, but it's also reproduced below the fold (click the "Continue reading" link).

Hey porter

Secret Society co-conspirator Jon Wikan is the kind of guy who really makes the DIY aesthetic a way of life. For instance, when his family's home in Ellensburg, Washington was flooded last year, he insisted on flying out to do the repairs himself, laying down all-new floors, electrical wiring, and so forth. (You can see before-and-after photos here.) He's been home-roasting his coffee beans for years -- the recording sessions for Infernal Machines were fueled in no small part by Jon's own espresso roast. (Bennett Studios do not own an espresso machine -- undaunted, Jon brought his own rig from home.) Lately, Jon has turned the Astoria apartment he shares with Ingrid into an all-grain brew-and-bottle operation, and has been turning out all manner of craft beers. (He's now thinking about planting hops at the Ellensburg place.)

Naturally, it was only a matter of time before these interests converged. Comrades, we proudly present Jon Wikan's own Secret Society Espresso Porter.

Jon is more of an IPA guy than a porter guy (truly, his love of aromatic hops borders on the obscene) but when it came time to create a Secret Society-inspired brew, it was clear that it would need to be a dark beer. I hipped him to the Smuttynose Robust Porter as inspiration, but we both agreed that the beer needed to contain shots of actual Wikan-roasted espresso. Jon also used three different kinds of high-alpha hops, because that is how he rolls.

"But how can I taste this extraordinary creation?" you ask. I will tell you. At first, Jon intended this ultra small-batch beer as a private reserve for the band, but after much arm-twisting, I have persuaded him to put aside a handful of bottles for you, our most loyal partisans.

So listen, here's the deal: if you come to our show at 45 Bleecker tonight, we will be giving away a bottle of the extremely limited edition Secret Society Espresso Porter to everyone who buys both a CD and a Secret Society T-Shirt at the show.

"Offer good while supplies last" as they say, and supplies are incredibly limited, so if you want one, you'd best make a bee-line for the merch table when you arrive. (The offer will be good on Saturday night as well, assuming there are any bottles left.)

One important caveat: you must promise not to drink the beer right away! It is still very young -- bottled on May 1 -- and needs considerably more time to mature. Take it home, store it at room temperature in a dark place, and give it at least another month (if not two or three) or so to develop. Porters need to age.

Below the fold... Jon's recipe (feel free to make your own batch!), and photos of the brewing process.

Never ending math equation

[This post is related to the recent, suprisingly popular "irrational" rhythm posts -- Part 1  & Part 2. Since (A) I can't sleep, and (B) apparently y'all love this stuff, here is the followup I promised.]

Maria Schneider runs in very different circles from the metametric/totalist crowd. Her music doesn't sound anything like  Michael Gordon's (he of the infamous Trance bassline), Mikel Rouse's, John Luther Adams's, or Kyle Gann's. But I think you can see, in some of her works, an interesting example of convergent evolution. Her own approach to "feelable/performable rhythmic complexity" (which, of course, has been a part of jazz since the very beginning) is informed primarily by flamenco, and South American music, but it has led her to stretch those traditions in ways that are, in some respects at least, recognizably similar to the rhythmic techniques used by the above-listed metameric composers.

Let's take a look at Maria's Bluería, Soleá y Rumba from her 2004 release Concert In The Garden -- specifically, the initial bulería section. The bulería is a 12-beat flamenco rhtyhm. It comes in a couple of varieties, but the version we're interested in is the one with accents on beats 3, 7, 8, 10 and 12:

Note that the pattern begins on beat 12, and beat 1 is a weak beat. If you're not versed in flamenco (and/or if you're a white kid from suburbia, like me), you'd probably hear the bulería pattern like this instead:

Since Maria isn't trying to write authentic, traditional flamenco, but instead to use bulería as a jumping-off point for her own personal expression, she opts to use the shifted form above (which, as you will see later, makes her subsequent rhythmic twists and turns much easier to read). When you look at the shifted bulería rhythm above, you can see it implies a 6/8 + 3/4 feel — which is, of course, also ubiquitous in a whole range of South American music:

The first thing Maria does is to subdivide the "6/8" portion of the bar into four parts instead of two parts -- which, if we go back to the 12/8 notation, looks like this:

Does that combination of dotted eighth notes and non-dotted quarter notes in 12/8 remind you of anything?

No, it's not "irrational" like the Michael Gordon bassline -- if you wrote it out in 4/4, you wouldn't have incomplete triplets -- but the rhythmic profile is similar.

Anyway, in her score, Maria chooses to augment the bulería rhythm, doubling all the rhythmic values — again, out of notational convenience:

This makes it possible for her to notate the entire bulería section without resorting to any sixteenth-note subdivisions. But you can see that the underlying pattern remains the same, only instead of 6/8 + 3/4, it's now 12/8 + 3/2.

Here's the initial theme -- check out how it sometimes reinforces and sometimes pushes against the 12/8 + 3/2 bulería foundation:

(I took the liberty of making some slight alterations to the beaming patterns in the original notation, in order to make the 12/8 + 3/2 pattern explicit.)

Here's the audio of the above, from the original recording:

MP3: Bulería, Soleá y Rumba, Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra (excerpt) -- click to listen, right-click/control-click to download

A bit later on, Maria introduces triplets, a new rhythmic element that creates 3-against-4 and 6-against-4 relationships to the bulería pattern:

She also frequently uses this rhythm, a string of quarter notes starting on the second eighth of the bar:

There's also an incredibly striking moment beginning in m.19, where the 12/8+ 3/2 pattern is temporarily suspended in favor of an eight-quarter-eighth sequence, whose binary profile strongly implies a superimposed 2/2:

These are a lot of different, non-obvious ways of carving up the 12/8 bar! But even so, we have only just barely begun to scratch the surface.

For instance, I like what happens when you play the bulería pattern followed by its retrograde (in other words, play it forwards, then backwards):

Or, in classic metametric fashion, you could mess around with multiple simultaneous juxtapositions:

Finally, if you're interested in acquiring the score to Bluería, Soleá y Rumba -- which trust me, rewards close study -- you can buy it from Maria's site.

What is a compound without an element?

RE: the infamous Trance bassline.

What do y'all think of this?

The above is actually not too far off from some of the rhythms in Maria Schneider's Buleria, Solea y Rumba (from Concert in the Garden) -- thanks to Pat for triggering the association.

I also found this new click track to be the most helpful -- cross-stick dotted quarters, hihat eighths (click to listen, right-click or ctrl-click to download).

Don't listen to them suckas when they say you too irrational

[WARNING: This is a post about irrational time signatures, incomplete tuplets, and the intricacies of music notation software. If your eyes just glazed over, you should probably skip the rest of this.]

Kyle Gann has been busy working out how to notate Henry Cowell-inspired time signatures in Sibelius, like 2/3 and 5/6. Commonly called "irrational time signatures" (even though they aren't, strictly speaking, irrational), these meters have been around for years. People like Ferneyhough use them but they've never quite caught on, even in new music circles.

Everyone's first reaction, upon first encountering a time signature like "2/3" is "What the fuck is a third note? And how the fuck I am supposed to count that?"

"Well," (Cowell's thinking goes), "if a quarter note is 1/4 of a whole note, and a half note is 1/2 of a whole note, then it follows that a third note is 1/3 of a whole note -- in other words, one triplet half note. So, in a time signature of 2/3, a measure is the length of two triplet half notes." Similarly, 5/6 is the length of 5 triplet quarter notes, and so on.

Of course, these time signatures only make sense in the context of a more standard meter. You can't start in 5/6 -- you have to be chugging merrily along in 4/4 or whatever, and then switch gears to go into 5/6 for a measure, and then  go back to a "rational" time signature.

As you might imagine, this is really, really hard to play accurately. Take a look at the examples Kyle Gann posted (from his I'itoi Variations):

Once you understand how to count 2/3 and 7/12, etc., the above no longer totally incomprehensible. But with time shifts coming every bar, and no common underlying pulse, it's still bloody daunting -- at least for a jazzer such as myself who is used to hearing rhythms in relation to a steady pulse.

Kyle also posts some excerpts from scores by Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon's work. As Gann points out, Gordon doesn't use those Cowell-inspired "irrational" time signatures. Instead, he uses incomplete tuplets within conventional meters (like 4/4). This seemed much easier for me to wrap my head around than time signatures like 3/2 and 5/6.

Here's an example of how Gordon uses incomplete tuplets to create the illusion of "irrational" time signatures being superimposed over a regular beat. This is the bassline from Gordon's Trance (originally posted by Gann):

Now that looks like something I can relate to. Kyle disagrees, saying "I can't imagine maintaining a 4/4 beat through the Trance example above." But, at least to my usual way of thinking, the steady underlying pulse is exactly what's needed in such a situation. Even if, in measures 2-4, the only part of the bassline that lines up with the pulse is the downbeat, that still intuitively seems way easier than alternating bars of 2/4 and 2/3 (the notation Kyle prefers).

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Anyway, because I am a giant dork, I wanted to see whether I could recreate the Trance example in Finale (my weapon of choice) in such a way that it would play back accurately. No one seemed to know how to do this. I mean, if all you care about is how it looks on the page, notating the figure is trivial -- but where's the fun in that? I wanted to hear it. This would also allow me to test to see whether it was easier to feel in the original "incomplete tuplet" notation, or when renotated into "irrational" time signatures.

It took some doing but I finally figured out how to get this to work in Finale. The first measure is easy, of course, but as soon as you run into that incomplete triplet in m.2 things get tricky. Finale won't let you enter an incomplete triplet. And it also won't let you enter an "X in the space of Y" triplet where "Y" is a quarter note triplet.

I thought about trying to approximate the duration using sixty-fourth notes -- I mean, 11 sixty-fourth notes is almost the same thing as one quarter note triplet, and it would be really easy to create a tuplet that was "1 quater note in the space of 11 sixty-fourth notes" in Finale. But that was kludgy and awkward, not to mention inaccurate  -- I figured there must be a better solution.

Here's what I eventually worked out  -- for those measures with incomplete tuplets, just make the entire measure a tuplet.

Here, I'll show you what I mean:

First, just enter the notes as non-triplets -- you'll have to turn off "Jump To Next Measure" in Speedy, and Finale will warn you about "too many notes" -- just ignore that for now. When you're done, you'll get this mess:

Next, for measures 2-4, you need to use the Tuplet Tool on the first note of each measure, with these settings: "6 quarters in the space of 4 quarters." This creates a tuplet that spans the entire measure, turning every quarter note in the measure into a quarter note triplet (or, a "sixth note," if you insist). (Epic!) But it also turns all of the eighth notes in the measure into eighth notes triplets. (Brutal!)

But not to worry -- it's actually very easy to turn those triplet eighth notes ("twelfth notes," ugh) back into regular eighth notes, by applying a nested tuplet that lengthens them by the same amount we've already shortened them -- effectively canceling the tuplet.

In this example what we need to do is click on the first eighth note in measures 2, 3, and 4, and apply a "4 eighth notes in the space of 6 eighth notes" tuplet. Here's what we end up with:

I set the tuplet numbers to display ratios and note values for clarity's sake, but you don't have to do that -- in fact, we're going to hide them anyway.

Right-click or control-click on the handle of each tuplet in mm.2-4 and UNcheck "Show." Then create a "3" text expression that matches the tuplet number font (by default, it's Times bold italic 10 pt.), apply as needed, and you are good to go. When you're done, it should look like this:

Looks right, and plays back.

Or, if you want to get really fancy, you can create graphic incomplete triplet brackets instead of all the little 3's. It's a bit tricky (too fussy to explain here) and takes a bit longer, but I actually like this notation better:

So... after all that, how does this sucker sound? And is it even playable by humans?

Here is the Finale playback of the Trance bassline (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download) -- I added a quarter note click track to help you orient yourself.

And, as promised, I made a version with a different click track -- one that would correspond to the conducting pattern if the figure was notated in mixed 2/4 and 2/3 à la Kyle Gann. Here is the notation:

And here is the Finale playback with the mixed 2/4+2/3 click track. (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download)

Huh. I'll be damned.

I am curious which version everyone else finds easiest to feel.

Finally, for context (because how you feel the bassline obviously depends very much on what everyone else is doing), here's the first two minutes of the Icebreaker recording of Trance:

MP3: "Trance 1" (excerpt). (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download) Composed by Michael Gordon, performed by Icebreaker.

UPDATE: I have a followup post which talks about using compound meter (i.e. 12/8) as an alternative to both "irrational" time signatures and incomplete tuplets.

Hooks and The Third Man

I had my first lesson with John Hollenbeck yesterday. We got to talking about hooks -- not necessarily hooks in the pop sense, but in the sense of powerful and memorable musical ideas that are also a wellspring of related material for your piece. A hook is what you hang your piece from. For instance, the hook in Hollenbeck's "Abstinence" is the 10-note bass line generated from the pattern of letters in the word "Abstinence." The pitches and intervals in that bass line serve as generative material for the austere initial melody, and for every other element in the piece.

Finding a good hook, especially one that lends itself to transformation, often unleashes a torrent of compositional activity. One hook-related idea leads to another and you start to think, "Hey, I've really got something here." But when it comes to structuring the material, there's a strong tendency to want to present the initial "pure" version of the hook first, or at least very early in the tune. It's very tempting to make the order of events in your piece reflective of your compositional process. Sometimes, this is a good thing, as you want a clear initial presentation of your hook so you can guide the listener through the subsequent transformations. (In fact, this is exactly how "Abstience" works.) But, as John pointed out, the initial version of the hook is also often the strongest and most dramatic musical idea in the piece, and by placing the hook up front, you risk making everything that comes afterwards feel anticlimactic.

All of this reminded me of the famous Orson Welles entrance in Carol Reed's The Third Man. Welles's character, the notorious black marketeer Harry Lime, is the fillm's hook. Everything about the film revolves around him -- indeed, he seems to be all any of the other characters can talk about, despite the fact that he apparently died 10 minutes before the main action of the film begins.

Of course, as you know if you read the opening credits, Lime won't be staying dead the whole movie. But he doesn't appear onscreen until over an hour into the 104-minute film. Even then, the first thing we see of Harry Lime is his shoes -- he's standing in a darkened stone doorway, with a cat licking at his feet.

At this point, the audience doesn't know it's Lime in that doorway, and neither does the protagonist, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who's alerted to the presence of the man in the doorway by the cat's mewling. The big reveal comes later in the scene, when Harry's face is illuminated by the light from an upstairs window snapping on, and we finally get our first look at the infamous Mr. Lime.

Now that's the way to introduce your hook!