Coastal Guitar-and-Voice Improv

Moclips Moth Attack 1 (8 megs)
Moclips Moth Attack 2 (4 megs)

Here are a couple of improvised guitar-and-voice clips from the first night of our recent family-trip to the Washington coast. We arrived at the house-on-the-beach that Tina's family had rented by mid-evening. And by about 9pm or so, we were settled in enough that I was able to escape to the sea-side porch for a few minutes of screwing around on the guitar. You can hear the steady surf in the background, but even with a ridiculously overpowered porch-floodlight aimed straight at the beach, a thick mist completely hid all but the first several yards of grassy dunes from view. However, above my head and stretching a hundred feet out behind the house, this crazy light created a giant conical glow in the fog, within which hundreds of moths flitted about in the night air. Eventually the swarm attracted at least 1 acrobatic species of small bird (swifts…?) who proceeded to unleash a circus of dramatic lurching sweeps through the cone, attempting to pick the insects out of mid-air.

You may notice that this isn't my most inspired lyrical improv, but there are some fun musics here … and the waves and ambient air are just a hair more interesting than uniform white-noise.

WEGO: August Enlighten Show

Set 1 (41 megs)
Set 2 (53 megs)

Here are the August recordings from WEGO's regular 2nd-Thursday gig at the Enlighten Cafe! The Orchestra for the evening included Woody Frank (guitar and voice), Ian McKagan (guitar and voice), Jesse Silvertrees (djembe, melodica, and voice) and Me Woods (bassbox and voice). We were also thrilled to have Patrick Lenon (assorted percussion) sitting in with us for the first set.

Even though I was still just about alone at 10-till-eight, by 8:15 the place was packed, and the hastily assembled group kicked right into an extra strong first-set. (I did clip out a short break early in the first set where we stopped to adjust the mix a bit … it turned out I had powered-down the left speaker at the end of sound-check and had forgotten to turn it back on again.)

The second set was perhaps a bit less consistent but still featured plenty of high-peaks of cohesion. And I have a suspicion that even the bits where the band may have felt a bit lost had their own peculiar musicality from the other side of the white-boards. In my view, the strongest aspect of our sound this particular evening was clearly the vocal harmonization. WOW, did the dense brassy harmonies all just seem to gel beyond the expected possibilities of improv at times!

(Obligatory bass-box tone-discussion paragraph:) This was my first mic'd show with the round-wound steel strings on the bass-box, and it was a heeee-yuuuuuge improvement. The tone was maybe still a little under-defined, but for once I had volume to spare! By the end of the night, I almost wished I hadn't ordered an electric pickup for it, but I think the pickup will probably give me even more of what I'm looking for. So I'll try to make a removable installation for that sometime before our September show.

Finally, apologies for the low-bitrate sound of the second set! … somehow in changing the batteries, the input levels got bumped down to the point where I'm needing to both compress and boost around 20db just to get it to roughly match the first set … sadness … though certainly better than losing it entirely.

(Special thanks to Marisa for the photos!)

WEGO: Planet Home

Planet Home Recording (53 megs)

Here is the recording of our all-acoustic trio set from Sustainable NE Seattle's August 6th "Planet Home" event! The micro-orchestra for the day included Woody Frank (guitar and voice), Jesse Silvertrees (djembe and voice) and Me Woods (bass-box and voice).

The weather was just about perfect, shifting from pleasantly overcast to sunny and sweat-inducingly-warm sometime during our set. We played from roughly 1:00-2:00pm on a partially screened little patch of gravel facing a small cluster of tables ringed by strawbale benches. And we had a great crowd at first, as visitors grabbed lunch from the taco stand or free tea from the local tea guy and sat down to watch for a bit. The set starts surprisingly strong for a trio doing what we're trying to do! We maybe fizzled out a little bit sometime after the halfway mark as it got hotter and many of the listeners headed out to the next round of workshops os just to say hi to the goats. (Though multiple people told me it sounded great from other parts of the property as they were milling around.)

Not sure how often I'll do this, but since it's easy for this one, here's a rough breakdown of what we played: Every Little Thing (Is Gonna Be Alright) --> Light My Fire (w' Disco Inferno) --> Crazy Train --> percussion breakdown --> Sustainable Dave --> Beyonce --> Eye of the Tiger --> Feel Like Makin' Love, Pour Some Sugar (1st verse only) --> Rehab.

Chez Amandes (Beezer and 5-Track Come to Town)!

Clip 1 (50 megs)
Clip 2 (79 megs)
Clip 3 (25 megs)

Here's as much as I was able to record of a beautiful all-afternoon jam at Gerry Amandes's's's studio on Sunday, July 31st. The event was timed to take advantage of the simultaneous local materialization of 5-track (LA) and John Beezer (NY, NY), but also drew heavily from a jumbo pool of local Seattle improvisers, including Ian, Woody, and me (all from WEGO). With my atrocious name-recall and the likelihood of forgetting or incriminating somebody, I won't even try to list all of the participants, but it was great to reconnect with those that I hadn't seen in years(!) and to meet a few new and bright faces. (If you were there and don't mind identifying yourself, please sign in in the comments down there at the bottom.)

Special huge thanks to Gerry for offering his studio for this!! It had been several years since I'd been there and I thought perhaps I'd overblown the perfection of the space in my interim memory, but WOW, if anything it was even warmer and more fully appointed than before. I won't get into specifics, but the whole space feels lovingly constructed for freakish sound-support and flexibility of configuration. With an average of 7-10 players at a time, frequently shifting stations, we were never isolated nor crowded. And the whole space just feeeels fantastic.

Music started bubbling up some-time around 3:30-ish(?) and it was still cooking along when Tina and Lucy picked me up at around 7:00pm. So this huge download may only be a fraction of the whole event…? However, this recording does capture just about everything that happened while I was there. The hard-drive on my little recorder ran out of space just as I was packing up to leave. And the breaks between tracks here were simply paranoid attempts to bracket off and preserve recordings. In each case, I started it up again immediately, so not much is lost (… hopefully the breaks make for less of a monolithic download as well).

As with most large-group improv, there's not a whole lot of chordal movement here (with a few dramatic exceptions!).  A sizeable percentage of it was variations on some flavor of modal minor. But the players were all adept enough to extend and imply changes with various dimensions of tension and release.

With how much material there is here, I'm tempted to cull out and present only a few 10-minute clips of the highest peaks of synergy. (… and I may still do that) But I suspect that most of the audience for these recordings will be the players that were there and the people that they send to this page, so for now I'm just posting the whole crazy soup in order to give everyone the best chance of finding the morsels that they remember most fondly.

WEGO: July 27th Rehearsal

Clip 1 (7 megs)
Clip 2 (2 megs)
Clip 3 (8 megs)
Clip 4 (27 megs)
Clip 5 (21 megs)

Here are the recordings from WEGO's July 27th 4-piece rehearsal for our upcoming all-acoustic performance at Sustainable NE Seattle's annual summer event on August 6th. In attendance was a quartet of Woody Frank (guitar and voice), Ian McKagan (guitar and voice), Jesse Silvertrees (keys, djembe, and voice), and Me Woods (bassbox and voice).

The vibe throughout was … well, let's just call it pleasantly disorganized. ;)) But the high-points were quite high indeed!

I don't think I fully appreciated the first third or so of this session, since a decent portion of my focus was on assessing the performance of the bass-box in its new steel-string (round-wound) configuration -- as well as the overall sound for the upcoming show. And things really *do* pick up noticeably as we go (I've even cut out a few signaling train-wrecks and such from early in the evening). But listening back, the first movements are great too in their own tentative way.

Here's a quick guide to what went down:

clip 1: Rehab, by Amy Winehouse (first time played)
clip 2: Rainbow Connection (just a shred of this is left here after removing various doldrums and signaling-trainwrecks)
clip 3: Droppin' the Deuce (don't ask me why I didn't cut this one out … it should be obvious! … actually, in all seriousness, this is probably the movement that loosened us up for what followed)
Between clips 3 and 4 I tuned up to standard 4-string bass tuning in an attempt to increase the volume. (I took out the bridge-bracing at the end of the evening, revealing an even louder bass-rich tone, but none of that is recorded. I don't think…)
Clip 4: Summertime, Sexy Back (probably my ballsiest, most-soulful delivery of this one yet), Eggplant (a tune by Woody … first time played and chock-full of swanky jazz vocal-harmonies!)
Clip 5: Ocean Waves, and something I'll just call "Free Dingy" for now (something that Jesse wrote by compiling the sleep-talking of his girlfriend).

While we probably won't go as far as to "drop a deuce", some of the sound and harmony from the later movements here have me thinking that next week's set should be a lot of fun.  (Send me your suggestions for 'Lyrical Standards' suited to a day of sustainability workshops!)

WEGO: July 14th Enlighten Show!

Woody's Set (32 megs)
WEGO Set (82 megs)

Here are the recordings from WEGO's July show (and Woody's opening set) at the Enlighten Cafe! The full six-piece lineup was in effect for this one, including Woody Frank (acoustic steel-string, tamborine, and voice), Jenny Freeling (djembe), Dennis Jolin (uke, percussion, voice), Ian McKagen (electric guitar and voice), Jesse Silvertrees (djembe, dumbek, voice, etc…), and Me Woods (electric bass, leg percussion, and voice).

Woody played another fantastic and diverse set to kick things off, including a couple of favorites, a couple of surprising covers and at least a couple of other tunes that I'd never heard before. I think he has an acoustic album coming out soon! If it has half of the breadth, power, and ease of his live work, this should be one to pick up. (Unfortunately, I mistakenly thought I had already started the recording before his set, but it turned out it was just in standby mode until I double-checked near the beginning of his second tune … so there's a bit missing here.)

After that we launched a solid 70-minutes-or-so of WEGO. I slept on my homeward bus while listening to this set get started the other night, and my first impressions were that it was an unusually relaxed and dreamy show. Tentative beats built shifting vistas as Ian's rhythmic and spiraling guitar melodies wound their way into the morphing voices of my half-conscious mind.

It was my second show with the electric 5-string that I had borrowed from work, and for some reason a bunch of us decided to stand up to play. This combo seemed extra conducive to a certain danceable funk, but also seemed to revive my difficulties with playing bass and singing (not to mention limiting my ability to rock the foot-percussion as consistently). Part of it might be that the bass was actually loud enough that it seemed important that I maintain a consistent loop to my lines … which maybe encourages me to fit the words in around the bass, as opposed to the other way around.

Listening back, I'm enjoying the percussion variety throughout the sonic field and the grooves and changes are rich as ever. But I'm also noticing that there just wasn't much vocal cohesion on this one … perhaps it was the standing…? For whatever reason, we very rarely built up any kind of harmonization or even our usual cascading 'rounds'. So, not a bad show by any stretch, but perhaps a little light on one of the major elements that makes us unique.

But man was it good to play with this group again! Five weeks is too long. I'm glad to see some increased frequency on the horizon.

Solstice-Proximal Guitar-and-Voice Improv

Giraffe (4 megs)
Battery Plan (4 megs)
Sweeping Up (3 megs)

Here's some late-night guitar-and-voice improv from this past Sunday night. I was only out in the shed for about 15 minutes, so the musical events here happened in pretty quick succession. But I've broken them up along the loose boundaries between themes. (…because I like to force people to download multiple files for no real reason) Should I go into the origins of the lyrics? … I think it might be more fun if I don't at this point.

But will that stop me…? mmmmaybe

for now…

The top photo up there is the last bit of sunlight bleeding over the horizon from our west-facing backyard at 10:10-ish PM. At the left is our 5-year-old cob wall, and at the right is the newly renovated version of what I used to call the "rat shack". Although the extree-gnarly vibe of yore was a lot of fun to play music in, the newer and less-porous vibe is better in just about every other way. And it still sounds pretty okay in there!

more clues:

later in the summer, I'll probably try some recording in the workshop space that's walled off behind the wall holding up those ladders over there ... it still has more of the original un-painted, hyper-distressed wood vibe (though now encased in some less permeable siding) ... so far, I've just been setting up on the gravel in front of the wheelbarrow, facing into the other leg of the storage-"L" on the left back there.