New Tomorrows CD RELEASE PARTY!

It’s been a long time coming but the “New Tomorrows” CD is finally officially coming out! On Friday, July 20th at the Zinc Bar (82 West 3rd St., NYC, www.zincbar.com) sets at 7pm and 8:30pm I’ll be augmenting the original duo of myself and Adam Rafferty on guitar with Kahlil Kwame Bell on percussion and the string quartet of Alan Gruber (violin), Patrisa Tomassini (violin), Ina Paris (viola), and Sujari Britt (cello). Cover is $20. We’ll be playing selections from the new CD and some surprise fun ones!

As some of you know this recording was intended to be my debut recording but many other (successful) projects came my way and this always ended up on the backburner. Finally I determined this had to happen and I was going to do whatever it takes to see it through. The first recording sessions I did with Adam Rafferty were in my basement in the summer of 2008. When it was clear that what we were doing was quality and my engineering skills were not capturing or doing justice to the music we were playing I decided we had to move the project to a regular studio.

Engineer Halsey Quemere became my right-hand man as we finished all the duo tracks between two different studios over the next few months. Being that I was an active producer producing recordings for other artists I wanted to try some things that I hadn’t dared try on a client’s record. I loved the tracks that Adam and I had recorded but I kept hearing so much more. After doing a short tour as a sideman with Kahlil Kwame Bell’s band, and since he is a dear friend and one of my favorite percussionists, I asked Kahlil if he could step into the studio and add his brilliant playing to side of the tracks that we recorded. What he did was nothing short of amazing as he was able to lay percussion tracks on top of a bass + guitar duo that hadn’t played along with a click, metronome, or any other sort of timekeeper and the natural rhythm between Adam and I in places had moved around quite a bit.

I was still hearing more. Vocalist, Maya Azucena, and I had become friends having worked with Allan Harris’ Cross That River project. I knew she had the right voice to make the outro of “Lugano” just perfect which she absolutely nailed it. But I was still hearing more. I called violinist, Alan Grubner, another Cross That River alum and we talked about what we could do to add some strings on a few of the songs. The string parts that Alan and I started with went through several revisions before finally there were some arrangements that worked out. I asked Earl Rose to arrange the strings on his original “When Do I Think About You” that Adam and I had recorded. And Adam had written a gem of a song in “America” originally written as an ode to 9/11. For that I went to the master, Gil Goldstein. Gil not only did the “America” arrangement but gave additional advice on the arrangements of “Lugano” and “What Are You Doing” about a week before the string quartet (Chala Yancy, Patrisa Tomassini, Beth Meyers, and Rubin Kodheli) went into the studio to lay everything down with the latest drafts. That session went really well. I was still hearing a little bit more. I wrote a new violin 3 part and asked Grubner to come in and lay down some extra parts. Yes, we’re getting there.

Finally at the mixing phase one tune kept bothering me. There was something missing on “I’ll Always Miss You” which I had actually recorded on Eric Lewis’ debut CD. I called in Gary Versace to add some accordion to give it some mystery and depth. It worked.

Between the mixing, editing, and mastering efforts of John Kilgore, Bennett Paster, and Gene Paul we finally got it done. Here it is! And on July 20th at the Zinc Bar we do it live. I hope you can make it! It will have been a journey worth making. Hope to see you there!

 

Inspiration vs. Intellect in Improvisation

Hearing vs. Seeing – Trusting Your Ear

 
After a standing ovation concert with Clifton Anderson’s Quintet in Schenectady, NY the band went back to the hotel to have some food, drink and cool off before the evening was done. A friend of Clifton was asking saxophonist, Eric Wyatt, and myself questions about how to learn jazz and improvisation.

It made me think about some the biggest challenges I went through and what my students have to go through to be able to get a handle on the experience of jazz improvisation. I’ve noticed that when we go to school almost everything we’re taught relies on memorizing something or seeing something. In math, writing, science, reading, history, etc. almost all the information input is originally presented as visual (funny enough except for foreign language and even that is 90% visual at the beginning – looking at words, reading them and writing them out). I experienced as a teacher (bass teacher, band director, or teaching workshops) that most of my students had almost a complete disconnection with being open to sound as a way of learning something or as a reliable information input.

So the biggest challenge for the student learning jazz improvisation is how do you get to opening up more of your ear and trusting yourself with what you are hearing? You can learn all the scales and chords you want but at the end of the day that’s only the mechanics, that’s not the music. The most important part of the music is what you can’t see, what you can’t write out. Even if you write out the notes you can only approximate how that particular passage is played. Even with the all the correct notes on paper the “right notes” are only about 25% of the music that you’re trying to make with those notes.

I’ll never forget the moment I learned to stop thinking and just trust my ear. I was at a period where I was practicing about 2-4 hours a day depending on the day in addition to performing and going to music school. I was playing all the right notes but I wasn’t really making any music yet. One Sunday afternoon I was on a church concert with a jazz quartet. The bandleader, saxophonist Leonard Hochman, was known in the Boston area (I was at Berklee College of Music at the time). We had rehearsed the music earlier that week and everything in the concert was going well and smoothly. Then near the end of the concert we played an original composition that Lennie had recently written. The chart (sheet music) was a little hard to follow and the piece was new so we barely knew it. Somehow at end of the saxophone solo I got totally lost trying to read the chart and I didn’t know where we were. Then the bandleader turned around and said “bass solo”.

I freaked. But of course taking the advice of the old deodorant commercials –  “Never let them see you sweat”. It was a sold out concert with about 150 people or more in attendance at the church and all eyes and ears we on me. I didn’t know where we were. And there was no backing out. The chart was useless to me at that point and the guitar player started to accompany my solo. I had to listen to my inner inspiration and to the guitar player to figure out what to do. I couldn’t stop, thinking about it wouldn’t have done anything, there was nothing on the paper to analyze or think – I didn’t know where we were. So it was the guitar player, me, a sold out house, and my inspiration – that was it. So I played. I don’t know what I played. I played what I heard for the first time because there was nothing visual to follow. At the end of the solo it got a huge applause.

We did one more song and the concert was over. I was totally embarrassed. Before I had a chance to apologize to the band, people were coming up to me and saying that bass solo was the best moment of the whole concert. One after the other, compliment after compliment, and even the band members were saying saying, “Wow, I’ve never heard you play like that. You outdid yourself!”. i admitted to the guitar player I was totally lost. He turned to me with a smile and said maybe I should do that more often.

Lucky for me the song was a ballad. As it turned out I had played it perfectly or at least I had covered my mistakes extremely well. That moment made me think. That was the first time I trusted my ear. My ear was so much better than what I would have played if I knew where I was. My ear was on a completely different level than what I was normally doing when I “knew” every note that I was playing. I took the guitar players advice. I tried to find more moments of going with the ear and not thinking. My playing completely opened up.

It’s a fine line because you still have to follow the music and play the “right notes” that go along with the music. But what happens is you get heightened inner instincts so you can “let go” more often. Over time music-making becomes an interplay of thinking and non-thinking/sound-only inspiration. The less you can think and still follow and be in the music the better. This takes time. This takes listening to a lot of recordings too. This takes bandstand experience. This takes letting go in the practice room too. I doesn’t happen overnight. But it can happen and little more every night and every day.

Trust your inner ear. Refine the “grey area” that you’re hearing in your head into the notes on your instrument. Always listen. Listen to recordings, listen to the other band members on the bandstand, and listen to yourself. That’s where the music is. It’s not on the paper. The paper can help but it can never really give you the music. And at the end of the day the audience responds to the music, not the notes 🙂

Keep listening and practicing!

Paul