Perpetual Momentum

[furtwaengler]

Man, it's been a while since I've checked in, but I'm happy to see there is still activity in this space. I throw out my own sparse recorded activity so far this year...nothing too serious, and not something that could not be improved with a little more focus...but ah, it's just nice to let the fingers out of the box for a change, and I enjoy sharing it. 

It's funny that I had just seen a good production of Marlow's Dr. Faustus which left me pretty spent, but these recordings came away far from what had just been on my mind - the mystery of music.

[ted]

Good to see you posting here again Dave. There are new qualities in these, it seems to me; differences in content and execution. It is intriguing how certain playing forms are absorbed almost by osmosis into the general improvisational vocabulary of many players over many genres. The rhythmic use of left hand bare fifths, or octaves with central fifths, has been around since the early days of stride; Morton and Waller used them to great effect all the time. They produce a wonderful growling sound. Maybe physical convenience has a lot to do with it I suppose, because they are rather easy to execute, unlike certain other more melodious forms such as filled tenths.

The ostinato one attracts me a great deal, and I listened a few times. Interest is held because you don't just bang away in incessant repetition, but enter and leave various cell sections and types for variety, while preserving the general psychic impression of ostinato. I am more convinced than ever that "almost periodic" is much more vital than strictly periodic in music. There is something fundamentally attractive about variation within species, like biological analogy, leaves on a tree, stones in a wall and so on. The same but different. I also hear several syncopations of a sort I have not detected in your playing before. Have you been listening to a lot of syncopated stuff since your last posts ? Whatever it is, keep it going.

In the second piece, I assume you use whole hand grips for scalar figures, i.e. all five fingers, jumping between positions ? Can't see how you would get the speed otherwise. That's a trick I found when very young, and I've used it frequently in very rapid figures all my life. The gaps aren't heard anyway and don't matter; in fact they enhance rhythmic power.

Speed is a funny thing. You reach a velocity threshold in improvisation, where perceived accents cannot be assigned to individual notes, and the brain starts chunking groups of notes, each event being an envelope. It's a mesmerising process, for which I coined the term "surge cells". Too thoughtlessly fast and it's just like a classical student playing scales. Smoothness is boring. There have to be perceived accents within the surges.

So I do really hear one or two features in your playing here I had not heard before - and long may they thrive.

Improvisation is going into one of its slack periods here and on other forums at present, not that it bothers me.

[lostinidlewonder]

I listened to the first recording, to me it sounds like someone walking to work then doing some tough physical work. An image of building a railroad the old way breaking stones into small pieces. Sounds like pouring out rocks from a wheel barrow when scale runs occur. Certain effects reminded me of Rzewski.