Towards Liner Notes

The journey of releasing an album of original compositions in the Jazz tradition

By the time I released my previous album, Jazz Combustion Uprising - Self-Immolation in 2013, I learned that CDs were already dead.

It sunk in was when was attending a secret Logic Pro X class at Apple. I offered the instructor a copy and he looked at me funny and noted that computers no longer had CD drives.

Yet, here we are, releasing another CD.

This is because there is no still no better way to organize a recorded music project than creating an album. At its core, it is a sequence of songs sufficiently long to offer a breadth of perspectives, and we have such a batch on offer. While no one really listens to CDs, they are a calling card, and must usefully as a token of appreciation for a large tip.

So, now that this is happening, I feel the need to describe what to expect, why I was motivated to make it, and how it emerged in the form in which is exists.

Preliminary Catalog

The concept for treating my work in batches emerged when I needed to come up with a way to describe my catalog, as a requirement for a manager I hired to help obtain commissions and residencies for new music composition. While the management engagement was essentially a scam, it was useful insofar as it challenged me to make sense of and summarize the extent of my output, and I did end up with a first version of my catalog.

The approach that worked best for me was to organize works into albums, according to a combination of chronology and genre. This amounts to 11 albums, each with roughly 10 works.

I realized that I had been largely ignoring my early material. While most of it had been successfully produced and performed in its day, doing so didn’t catapult me into any life-changing opportunities.

My way of reckoning with the lack of commercial and professional success was to ignore it, and move on, throwing myself into new efforts, growing, and using composition as a way to engage with the present, to enjoy the journey and transformation, rather than beating a dead horse.

Which kind of left a lot of things unresolved.

However, during the introspective pandemic, I was able to challenge these attitudes of detachment from my earlier work. I became curious about this work again, which required effort to resurrect it from filing cabinets.

Video Documentation

I set out to document my work, starting from the album of 11 songs I published when I graduated High School in 1989.

Most of these songs got fleshed out in arrangements for larger ensembles, and produced and performed during my years at the Institute and the few years after, before leaving the greater Cambridge area.

For each song, I created a video where I described the song structure, described the ensembles that performed the works, and paged through the original handwritten score and parts, all to a soundtrack of excerpts from performances of the song. This first batch of videos is published in a youtube playlist called Inaugural Jazz.

I was able to produce a second playlist of videos that similarly documented my compositions in the Classical genre. After that, however, the project ground to a halt.

I was not ready to take on the next one chronologically, a Jazz Symphony called A Last Look at Love. Since, in addition to it having had a thorough debut performance at MIT’s Killian Hall in October 1991, I have had success adapting material to other projects, including the Jazz waltz This Unmemorable Evening on the Self-Immolation album, the ballad Listening as played by alt.musica, and the song Faith performed but not recorded by the Alt Tal trio as well as the punk fusion band Little Effie’s Head.

Since the motivation for the documentation project was to engage with material I have not engaged with for a while, I figured I would come back to the Symphony.

Unsung Heroines

So, I next started down the path of producing the videos for a Musical Theatre album, which was a collaboration on a piece of musical theatre called Anonymous New Yorkers by librettist Jill Mackavey.

I was able to work on the project over the summer of 1990, thanks to having applied for and been awarded an Eloranta Fellowship for undergraduate research from MIT. We performed a reading of most of the work during the 1992-1993 school year, but there were many issues with those performances. Which meant that I had very little good recorded evidence of it.

There was only one song from the album that I had reproduced, called Waiting For The Magic, which it seems I have yet to release anywhere, not even on soundcloud.

I made an effort to recruit a band to produce demo versions, but when that did not turn out to have legs, I abandoned the effort.

That stopped the momentum of the video documentation project, but it led me to the next phase.

Modernization

Instead of abandoning the overall project, I pivoted to a related project: publishing all my songs that can be represented in a Jazz lead sheet format, which accounts for 9 of the 11 albums.

Technically, this involved preparing PDF versions, since my earliest compositions predated that invention. Even after PDF became king, I had continued to write with pencil on paper for the next 20 years, since it was faster and the results better than desktop music engraving programs of the time.

I was really pleased with how rapidly I could create lead sheets. The success of this was due to already having a good workfIow, based on a half-dozen years of producing scores and parts for the alt.musica chamber orchestra. Since lead sheets are considerably less complicated, each album of lead sheets took about as much time as a single arrangement for the chamber orchestra.

In short order, I prepared charts for not just the Inaugural Jazz, Jazz Symphony, Traditional and Modern Jazz albums, as well as for two first albums of material I wrote shortly after moving to San Francisco in 1997.

While completing lead sheets for the remaining three albums would take another few months, as we approached 2023, I realized that I was all ready to do something with this music, and was eager for the rubber to meet the road. So, the next phase of the project commenced, while the lead sheets initiative continued.

Workshopping

For the 2023 year, I commenced three different series of reading sessions, with three different sets of musicians, to play through the material.

The main purpose of the workshops was to try to assess the quality of the work. I felt that my own opinions were not reliable, since I had so many memories and associations with it, as well as blind spots. I felt like I needed to learn what other musicians thought about it, as well as assess how challenging it was, and whether the relevant information was actually on the page.

However, almost as soon as we started, I realized that the most valuable part of these workshops was the opportunity to improve the compositions.

When I first started composing, it felt more like discovery than construction. Composition involved honoring a liminal state of being, and finding and revealing the sounds that emerged from that place. I tended to trust the initial instinct, and rarely tried to tweak or restructure songs once they came forth, even if there were moments of ambiguity.

In the intervening decades, however, I have become a much better editor, with less attachment to my previous impulses. This is in part due to a recognizing how much better a song can become when you eliminate the imperfections and friction, and how much easier it is to read charts that use best practice rhythmic notation.

Most of these were small changes: slight rhythmic variations, clarifying the length of notes and articulations, melody note tweaks, and chord substitutions and respellings. However, in a few cases this involved substantially new melodic content.

These reading sessions also highlighted what was missing from the lead sheets. Lead sheets are intentionally sparse, since it is normal and expected that Jazz musicians will interpret what is notated and make up their own part. However, they need enough detail to convey what is essential. Sometimes, it is only by hearing several groups of people play the song without those elements, that you recognize the need to clarify things like rhythmic hits or patterns, specific chord extensions, or accents.

Ensembles

By the end of the year, one of the sets of musicians played through 7 albums, and another had both completed the first 4 albums and performed on a monthly basis. I learned enough about both the material and the musicians to know that it would be fruitful to start making choices, have different groups diverge, and each focus on different songs.

I decided to pick material from albums 1, 3, and 4, omitting the the 2nd album, the Jazz Symphony.

Rather than having any group attempting any complete album, it seemed better to split the material up, giving each group a few songs from each album. This would give each group more variation in repertoire, and allow each group to choose focus on material that played to its strengths.

Since these ensembles were organized around this body of work, but there was no obvious way to distinguish them, I decided to name them Corpus X and Corpus Y.

Viva Les Differences

Both groups, Corpus X and Corpus Y, have the same instrumentation of piano, bass, drums, and saxophone, yet they have very different character. The differences between the groups were somewhat contradictory: Corpus X has more experienced players, but a more traditional aesthetic. Corpus Y has more developing players, but a bigger appetite for variety the avant garde.

The repertoire I chose for Corpus X largely consists of songs in standard song forms like 32-bar AABA, 12-bar blues, and 16-bar forms, in straight-ahead Jazz styles, with the focus of the arrangements on the individual soloists. We did wade a little into the modern album, but quickly reached our limits.

Whereas, the Corpus Y repertoire features songs that are more quirky, with changing time signatures, non-standard forms, and a variety of styles including Latin Jazz and Funk in addition to Swing and Bebop, sometimes changing back and forth between styles within a song. The arrangements focus on the compositions, the innovative styles of the soloists, and group improvisation.

The Corpus Y group had consistent personnel between last year and this year, rehearsed more frequently, and performed regularly. Corpus X was reconfigured at the start of the year, after consolidating the two other reading session groups, rehearsed less, and did not perform in public.

Both groups rehearsed their respective setlists, each about a dozen songs, from January through May, with the goal of recording the material.

Recording Sessions

The differences between the ensembles came to the fore during the recording sessions. The sessions were about 2 weeks apart, with each group recording over 2 days.

Both groups were very productive, with the Corpus X ensemble recording 12 songs in 10 hours, and the Corpus Y ensemble recording 10 songs in 8 hours (plus one song by Benjamin Paul). But that is where the similarities ended.

During the Corpus Y sessions, before we ended up with full takes, we would often have to stop a few times to clarify arrangements or individual parts, and usually the 1st, 2nd, and sometimes 3rd takes often contained mistakes or inconsistent performances. We did end up with renditions of all our material, but usually only the final take of each song was the only complete and satisfying take.

So, the Corpus Y sessions were more like a developmental step in the journey of the band, than they were sessions producing a definitive document of a finished process. Indeed, the Corpus Y ensemble behaves and feels much more like a band, as it meets more frequently, performs regularly, and most importantly, our process of working out material is heavily influenced by the particular personalities, opinions, and differing musical approaches of the players.

Another factor that complicated my own ability to perform was splitting my focus between playing and doing the recording engineering. I did not ask anyone to help with wither setup, or especially during the session to operate the computer and pay attention to levels. Whereas on the Corpus X sessions, which occurred first, I did hire a recording engineer to operate the computer, so I could focus on playing saxophone.

Corpus X Sessions

In contrast, the Corpus X sessions were the most professional I have ever been a part of. We did several complete takes of each song, and it was often difficult to choose among the takes since each one was a solid performance. The wildest thing was that, in cases where, for example, different soloists had better solos on different takes, it was always possible to splice between takes effortlessly. This is almost unheard of in improvised music.

The is because the level of consistency was remarkable. Even if you start at the same tempo—which we did religiously by listening to the metronome before each take—if you are not tracking to a click, tempos will usually diverge, and it is rare that the tempos will be close enough that you can splice them. but our tempos remained remarkably consistent across all sections of all takes.

The same can be said for both dynamics and texture: if the volume differs at the point where you want to splice, by even a little, a splice will sound unnatural, or require a lot of editing work to adjust the levels so they match. Likewise, if the density of material differs, or the patterns even of one player follows a different concept, a splice will not work.

The other side of the coin, opposite consistency, is spontaneity and innovation. Both during the sessions, and when I was evaluating material to pick final takes, I was always hoping to find a little more urgency and magic. However, I think this is a tradeoff, and I think we had the right approach, since the main purpose of these sessions was to render the compositions.