We made this when the kid was a girl, she’s probably almost twenty by now (the age her mother was when I met her). Tempus fwiggin’ fugit, no?
Category Archives: music
Bonus Track
One of my favorite Frank Burrows tunes, The Place, very much a song for our current tight spot. The sublime C part of this rocker, for my money, is about the greatest — and most heartbreaking — I’ve ever heard.
As Frank emailed back in September 2009 (I’m looking for his lead sheet for I Wish in old emails):
I keep sending it because I keep feeling it.
“I thought today was Monday, I’ve not been keeping up. The TV says it’s Friday, and everyone’s in love. I’m trying not to listen, just staring at the door. But when I grab that doorknob, I’m headed there once more. Bumping into people, I really do not care. It’s not that I am evil, just slightly worse for wear. Frayed around the edges, and sick inside my gut. But I know where I’m going, and soon I’ve walked enough.”
An evocative song for our times
Here is a beauty by Frank Burrows, a comrade from high school I have embarrassed over the years by repeatedly, and without provocation, calling a genius. I Wish is unique among his works (as far as I know), both instrumentally and because it’s a waltz. My hat’s off to the guy. I love this tune. Take a few minutes, breathe, and take it in. You won’t regret it.
Masterpiece by a Modern Master
Dog on a string
Sit back and enjoy the groove of Paul Greenstein’s original track. Composition, arrangement, engineering and all instruments by Paul. This is the great tune I jammed to here, back in April, 2006.
Paul explains the title, in a way:
The only thing I might suggest would be an explanation of the title ‘Dog on a string’.
During the 70’s and early 80’s in the UK, there was a certain type of festival (for example Stonehenge and early Glastonbury), that attracted a certain type of festival-goer; a rebel, non-conformist, ‘free spirit’, counter-culture type of person. Dreads, grubby denim, beads etc. Sometimes referred to as a ‘Crusty’, due to a propensity to get covered in mud (think classic British Festival Weather), the mud would then dry, leaving a crust, gettit? Driving and often living in an old school bus, ex-post-office van, or similar (called a ‘bender’), this person would often have a canine companion, usually a skinny bitsa (bitsa this, bitsa that). Eschewing anything as conservative as a ‘proper’ dog lead, a piece of string would be used. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the track itself, and probably even less to do with the vocal, for which I still don’t have a translation.
Actual history – in 1985, Margaret Thatcher sent in the police to disperse a band of ‘new age travelers’ heading towards Stonehenge festival. The resulting brutality is known as the Battle of the Beanfield.
For a bit more of more recent Paul, clickez-vous Plague Mice. a 10,000 mile collaboration from May 2020.
Another collaboration, from around 2009: Now Before I Gliss (Paul with some evocative playing on fretless glissentar).
One from the vault (Sensitive Dog)
One from the Random Acts of Senseless Creativity files. After I thought about this track an hour ago I went looking for it, a journey through a labyrinth of old emails and various digital booby-traps. After a few small wrestling matches with the technology, I was able to place it here, where it can be found easily next time. I was happy to locate it and I’m glad to pass it on.
The underlying track for this is called Dog on a String, composed and performed by Paul Greenstein sometime after the turn of the twenty-first century, if memory serves. This was an improvisation I recorded, back on April 14, 2006, apparently. All parts were played for the love of making the track and for that reason alone.
For me this over-the-top jam captures the thrill of interactive invention — the joy of improvising over a groove you’re really digging.
Our ability to find joy and improvise has been sorely tested in the isolation of this COVID crisis. Mutual, playful improvisation, a vital part of human interaction, a free delight of life, fades during dark times, the habit of playing happily — another casualty of the pandemic. Playing together gives us joy, undeniable but easy to forget, sometimes. This track reminds me of how much fun play is.
Paul’s track was a delight, I greatly love that mysterious, soulful Indian singer, all of Paul’s parts are superb (if several lovely ones were drowned out by the overloud distorted guitar, sorry about that). It is also beautifully engineered, everything is exactly where you want it to be in the mix and the EQ. I’ll ask Paul for the original track, so I can post that beauty for you to hear.
Listening to this track I hear my excitement, the enthusiastic variations inspired by the sheer fun of following a wildly idiosyncratic groove.
Sensitive Dog starts with a dog lover’s question for Cesar Milan, who then considers the best way to interact with a dog who is very sensitive. Odd to say, I couldn’t tell you what key it’s in, I had no idea when I was playing it, most unusual for me, I followed the singer as best I could.
There are suboptimal notes, which I can’t begrudge someone inventing parts over a track he is greatly loving as he plays. If you don’t let yourself be distracted by the mistakes and take in the entire 1:56 as a piece, I think you’ll get what I’m talking about.
My only regret is the mix. If someone had been sitting at the controls (there were no controls, the overdub was recorded off the small amp that was also playing Dog on A String) and adjusting the volume on the distorted guitar, to allow Dog on A String’s many subtle nuances to be appreciated, the track would be infinitely better.
To me, the track is still cool, instant time-travel to a moment of great fun. A reminder of a vital thing, sadly easy to forget during dark days — the joy of carefree play with someone you enjoy. I hope you find it so too.
Musical Interlude
This early pandemic recording (May 2020) seems a good Christmas offering, something about Tony Bennett, the singer who made this lush pop tune popular back in the Eisenhower days, even before my time. [1]
To me this tune is a great example of a great arrangement, you really can’t do the proper accompaniment without playing the two main parts. The chords are basic and provide a pleasing harmony to the melody. But it’s the line the piano is playing against the chords (a clever arpeggio of the chord), it turns out, that gives the song its swing, its groove. The melody, applied over the top, even loosely, cannot help but be at its most beautiful, set off this way by the other two parts. My Christmas elf’s hat is off to the arranger of this great tune.
To the musically hip, check out a fatal flaw in the underlying loop, every time the top comes around (and dig the riff from Santana’s first album in the bluesy final chorus, and a guest vocal from Sekhnet at the very end).
[1]
“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is a popular song, written in the fall of 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, with music by George Cory and lyrics by Douglass Cross and best known as the signature song of Tony Bennett. Wikipedia
interlude
Reprise: Plague Mice
featuring Paul Greenstein, May 17, 2020
Take Care of Yourself, friend
There are things you love to do. You should do them. When things are at their worst, at their scariest, when life on our planet is teetering on the brink of extinction, it is imperative to remember to cherish the things we love and to do them often.
The people we love too, of course, of course, we have to try extra hard to take good care of them. It is more important now than at other times to show them as much mercy and kindness as you have in your heart, and that goes for mercy and kindness toward yourself too in this terrifying, aggravating time. But what I am talking about now is doing the things that make us happiest, that restore us to ourselves. It is super important now to remember them, and do them often.
I love to play music. I am a good guitar player and a limited, though functional piano player. Few things I know compare to the pure joyful relaxation that takes over once the guitar is staying in tune (cold weather, and sudden changes in temperature, can really mess with the strings), the instrument is warm in your hands and the musical sounds emerge as beautifully as you can make them. Take a beat, if you like, swing another beat against it. It’s probably as close as I’ll ever come to taking off and soaring on thermals, or gliding a mile under a perfect ocean.
The words you are reading now, something else that gives me great pleasure to put together. Obviously, I spend time every day doing this. I am compelled, but, also, I love to do it.
Cooking a tasty, healthy meal, something I’ve always liked to do, has taken on more meaning to me during this lockdown as Sekhnet feels up against the daily horrors and it is a comfort to us both to share a fresh meal that is actually good for us. I am starting to love the whole process of making a pot or pan of something good.
Walking is something I’ve always liked to do. Now that I have arthritis in both knees, it has become a necessity for me to walk throughout the day, to avoid pain. An hour or two in nature, breathing in the trees, is always a beautiful thing. I love certain moments of my long daily walk. There is a time, after walking long enough, when the stiffness and soreness in my knees melts away. The pleasure of sitting on a bench after thirty minutes of purposefully striding along — I love it.
Odd to say, though I’ve always loved to draw, and make all kinds of marks on paper, have always carried a drawing book with me, and several of my favorite pens and pencils, I’ve done virtually no drawing or calligraphy during this pandemic nightmare.
I showed a friend’s super-talented granddaughter how to do simple stop frame animation the other day. Under the mounted camera I drew a simple face and quickly showed her the principle of making animation out of two or more carefully registered drawings (or in this case, two stages of the same drawing).
I explained to her that you can later make the drawing as colorful or detailed as you like, photograph it and add the changes to the animation. (We were working outside in a park, so our art supplies were quite limited). At home afterwards I decided to refine the drawing above to demonstrate this idea to her. You will understand at once, I think, why I decided not to send her the drawing.
Who wants to look into those bizarre, hopeless, death-haunted eyes? Certainly not a sensitive seven year-old who is living through one of the worst periods in recent human history.
Shoot, maybe that’s why I’m not drawing these days. More than in anything else I do, my subconscious emerges most freely in drawings. I can play a stiff version of a beautiful tune on the piano, it’s not great music, but it doesn’t have even a hint of the terror in the face above. Perhaps I’ll try a bit of calligraphy later.
For now, do yourself a kindness. Think of something you love to do, maybe have forgotten about in your overwhelmed concern about the simultaneous and intrusive plagues that are upon us now, and do it. You will thank yourself afterwards, I’m pretty sure. Even if you don’t thank yourself (ingrate!) time is never wasted doing something you love to do.
