In homage, here’s a piece of original music Joel Zimmerman and I have been collaborating on, which is built in part around a sample from one of my favorite Coltrane recordings (with Duke Ellington, who wrote the song, on piano).
Enjoy!
The Third Coast Festival (the South By Southwest of public radio) interviewed Nick van der Kolk, Nick Williams, and I about how we developed and produced our radio story The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt for Nick vd K’s show, Love and Radio.
I know, I know. I promised I’d write more about how we put the piece together back in April, and then quickly got swamped with other work. BUT Thanks to Third Coast, you can read everything I would have written here on their site.
Follow the link and click “extra.”
Eh. What the hell. Or you can read the mirrored interview, below.
Hey lookee here at this thing I produced/scored/remixed in collaboration with Nick van der Kolk for his intrepid radio show/podcast, Love and Radio. Heads up: this episode is intended for mature audiences listening with headphones.
I’d like to tell you more about how we put it together sometime soon, but for now I’ve got to focus on finishing those durn taxes.
I’m at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.
Come track me down and say “hi!”
Also, please take a listen to my experimental submission to the Book Odds ShortDocs challenge and tell me what you think.
El Pajaro Volador (The Flying Bird)
I composed all the music in this piece using samples provided by the band, The Books, manipulated in various ways along with other sounds from my interview tape. My goal was to try to help augment the excitement and enthusiasm that Rosalia Roio, my interviewee, expresses as she plays her instrument. I also wanted the music to creep into the interview bit by bit, eventually overtaking the dialogue. (I’m not sure how well this worked, in retrospect.)
I added a lot of textural layers and sonic gestures that are difficult to hear in my final “radio” mix. So for anyone who’s interested, here’s a special “music only” version:
In addition to editing an audio tour this weekend, I also engineered a concert at El Taller. People usually hang around for hours after the concerts end, drinking wine, strumming guitars, and singing folk songs. This Saturday, I left my flash recorder on a table and joined in on the drums (empty water cooler jugs). Here’s an excerpt from around 2:30 in the morning:
I haven’t been playing as much guitar lately, so tonight I dug out my acoustic. After playing around with a new chord progression for a while, I decided to record and improvise some layers on top of it.
