My "B" band has eclipsed my "A" band.

When I set out to record my debut CD, I hired the best jazz freelancers I knew, hotshots in the greater DC area who are constantly working, composing, running their own combos, teaching, etc. The record was made so much better simply because my sidemen are top-drawer, highly interactive players, extremely sensitive and appropriate in all their musical gestures. In most cases, we rehearsed a song for only a half-hour or so, and then recorded it in no more than two or three takes. Not only did they make me sound my best, they also saved me a ton of money in the studio....

These fantabulous players are constantly busy, as I mentioned. They seem to truly enjoy playing my music and performing with me, but they rarely are available for dates. They're booked solid, months and months in advance.

They're also the kind of musicians who are used to being paid a minimally decent amount, so I try not to even ask them to play unless I can give them $100 or $150 a player. But I am still in a position where I can't always say no to a gig just because it's offering far less than that. Basically (as many of jazz players understand), if it's a wedding or restaurant gig where we're going to be expected to play standards, I will not do it for less than $100/player, but if it's a scene where I can play my originals and possibly add some names to my email list or sell a CD or two, well hell, sure, I'll play for free or nearly free....

So for these reasons and a number of others, I started a "secondary" band last January. The guitarist is the same guy as in my "A" band--he's got a full-time day job as a producer in a local studio here, so he's willing to play for free or nearly free--but the bassist and drummer in this outfit have careers in other fields and are simply looking for more and better playing experiences.

At first, I didn't want to impose on these guys, so I didn't ask them to rehearse too much. They learned my existing book by listening to my CD and rehearsing once or twice before our earliest gigs. I've been writing about one new tune a month, so I'd just show up at events and throw new charts in front of them, and they'd sightread them the best they could.

Recently, though, the drummer came to me and said he'd really prefer it if we rehearsed, and worked toward creating real arrangements and a unique group sound for ourselves, rather than just treating every gig like a pick-up jazz hit. I agreed, and was relieved that he'd come to me with the suggestion. Luckily, my bassist and guitarist felt the same way. So for about two months now we've been rehearsing every other week.

And guess what? (as if it shouldn't be perfectly obvious). Although this band collectively has far less playing experience and far fewer chops than my recording band, we've become a tighter, deeper, much more interesting outfit. We played a gig at 49 West in Annapolis this past Wednesday, and it was simply amazing. The confidence we've gained by rehearsing the material enables us to be very highly interactive....there were incredible subtleties and nuances happening that night, and an overall feel and excitement as good as anything I've ever achieved with my "A listers." Afterwards, my newly hired, very music-knowledgeable publicist said to me, "You don't need Frank and Amy [i.e. the hotshot drummer and bassist from my CD]! Mike and David sounded terrific!"

This made me incredibly happy, but it must have truly thrilled Mike and David, the bassist and drummer in question, who were in earshot when Paula said it. Both of these guys are a little like me: talented folks who got very little support and tons of discouragement when they were young, and let themselves be sidetracked into other non-musical careers.

I'm so happy and grateful that I've been able to create this band, not just as a viable performance outfit with the possibility of getting somewhere on a local and regional basis, but as an opportunity for these two guys to Get Back To Where They Once Belonged.

Re-befriending the blues scale.

I have to confess something. By the second or third day of Camp MMW, it was starting to drive me crazy listening to so many pianists play almost nothing but blues scales. Or am I exaggerating? I suppose it just seemed to me that every time I wandered by a jam session or even just one of the many wildly out-of-tune old pianos scattered around the resort, somebody was hammering out some classic (perhaps even cliche) old blues licks. It struck me as weird and funny, although perhaps that's only because when I started to learn how to improvise, my first jazz band teacher pushed us hard to play/solo on the actual chord changes of the 12-bar blues form, rather than just bullshitting blues lines all over the place.



(For those without a whole lot of jazz theoretical knowledge, I'll explain: Let's say you're playing a 12-bar blues that goes from F7 to Bb7 to F7 to C7 and back finally to F7--or some variation thereof. You can actually muddle your way through by playing the F blues scale (F-Ab-Bb-B-C-Eb) the whole way through, without worrying about the underlying chord at that moment. But to move past that basic level and into a more sophisticated jazz sound, you actually play the F dominant scale over F7, then move to the Bb dominant scale over Bb7, and so on....)



So I suppose my jazz snobbery was asserting itself a little bit. But then something happened. In keeping with all the other transformative moments we each experienced over the week, I had a little epiphany about how John Medeski manages to play things that are at once so "out there" and yet so grounded, and it has everything to do with the blues... Not only the blues scale, of course, but the whole sound, feeling, vibe of classic blues musicians.... And suddenly I realized that all those pianists playing blues licks were helping me reacquaint myself with a sound I'd been avoiding, for no good reason.

True, I think as a developing musician I was fortunate to have teachers who challenged me to learn other harmonic ideas, to KEEP learning and filling up my musical vocabulary, and not just get stuck in familiar sounds.

That said, I've been having so much fun practicing the F blues scale lately so I can wail on it in my new song, "Monster." On the piano, F blues is so easy, so comfortable under the fingers. A lot of my other tunes incorporate more modern chords and trickier, unexpected progressions...and I love playing on those, figuring out how to voice-lead on those, devising beautiful melodies over surprising harmonic movement. But last night we rehearsed "Monster," which is the closest thing I've ever written to a true headbanger rock song...and it's clearly going to be a great set-closer for us when we play 49 West in Annapolis and the Streetbeat Festival in Baltimore next week.

What fun it will be to send our love out to the audience one last time, and get down and dirty with the blues.

Every gig is a learning opportunity.

On Saturday I played an annual event I've been involved with for years, an Amnesty International benefit hosted by my friends Annie and Eric, who live on a small farm in Loudon County, Virginia. In years past, I've always wrangled up a group for a sort of pick-up jazz event with at least a drummer and bassist, if not also a guitarist and a few horn players. This year, nobody was available, so I did a two-set headliner performance all by myself. I and my friends were all a little worried about having a solo artist in the main slot (there was a trio before me and a duo afterward), but it turned out incredibly well.

As much as I love playing with a band, there was something very interesting and intimate about sitting up there on stage by myself, playing and singing and telling stories. It reminded me that what I do these days is not so different from what guitar-playing singer-songwriters do, and that therefore I should try to get more solo gigs.

But more importantly, it reminded me that I have a good deal of self-sufficience as a musician. I don't need a drummer to keep my time honest or a bassist to hold me to the harmonic form. I'm on top of it, all by myself. Playing and interacting with a band is nirvana, for sure, and I would never give it up. Rehearsing these past few weeks with Sandcastle, putting some of Billy's and John's and Chris's collaborative ideas into practice, has been terrific fun.

But playing solo for people is a kind of interaction, too. Their claps and cheers and laughter, and even just their silent sitting and listening, are part of a give-and-take. What a privilege to be able to do it, to be offered the chance to communicate with old friends and new ones in this manner....I hope to do more of it.

On a practical level...now I'm not nearly so nervous about the solo performance I'm doing at the New Haven Lounge this coming Saturday...

Steal from the best!

So....as I've mentioned, and as Cameron and a few others witnessed firsthand at camp after the very first master class, I got a little obsessed with John Medeski's explanation of how he plays C blues licks over alternating "inside" and "outside" harmonies (Cm and EMaj) on "The Lover."

Well, it's a little less outside than that, but I've been fooling around with playing F blues in my RH over an alternation between Fm and BMaj. F blues scale contains a lot of the notes of B Major 7, so as I said, it doesn't sound quite as dissonant and surprising as C blues over E Major, but it still has a kind of cool "wrong-but-right" flavor to it, especially if I catch a C natural in my RH while playing B in my LH. In any case, this "inside/outside" harmonic structure has become the bedrock of a brand new tune, called "Monster." I'll give you just the first part of the lyrics....

MONSTER by Sandy Asirvatham BMI (c) 2008 all rights reserved..

[verse 1]
I built a monster in my basement
and tried to teach him how to talk
But he never managed more than
an unintelligible sqawk.
I sent him up to the state college
to earn his history degree
But what he learned there was so gruesome
Back to the basement did he flee...He say,

[chorus]
Words, they fail me, they fail me, they fail me, he say,
Words, they fail me, they fail me.....every time.

[verse 2]
I got a parrot for my parlor
And waited long for her to speak.
But she preferred to perch in silence,
Patiently burnish her mystique.
I wondered if she was a goddess
Reincarnated here and now.
Does Polly really want a cracker,
Or does she want me to kow-tow? She say,

[chorus]
Words, they fail me, they fail me, they fail me, she say,
Words, they fail me, they fail me.....every time.

...more to come!

We'll be rehearsing this in my Sandcastle meeting tonight...after I put the guys through some heavy stridulations!

Dave Arntsen is all grown-up, but feels like a baby.

Oh, he’s a full-fledged adult, no doubt about it: hard-working litigation attorney, responsible father of five, devoted husband of nineteen years. But Dave Arntsen’s experience at Camp MMW reduced the 6-foot-something New Yorker to a spiritual infant—soft-skinned, eager to learn, immensely vulnerable, and always a breath away from either crying or grinning.

This sensation of being a baby hit Dave hardest during John Medeski’s Thursday master class on music and the collective unconscious.

“I left that class in tears,” Dave told me, when I got a chance to speak with him about two weeks after camp. “I took me literally an hour and a half of walking by the brook and hearing the dirt under my feet—you know, listening to everything as Medeski had taught us—[to regain my composure].”

Medeski’s class was the pinnacle of his experience at camp, Dave says. He’ll never forget the moment toward the end of the class, when Medeski asked everyone to close their eyes, and you could the wind in the trees and hear the roof expanding and contracting…and then into that beautiful peacefulness, John began to introduce a few new sounds—the sruti box, the melodica….
“At a certain point, part of the music shifted,” Dave remembers. “It went from something a little discordant to a brief passage of something very pretty, melodic, moody. Johnny Sneed was sitting behind me, and I heard Johnny gutterally go, Uhhh…, a totally visceral response. And I just started crying. It was such an epiphany for me.”

He’d had plenty of similar moments of sudden enlightenment throughout the week. Dave says he remembers arriving and feeling this tremendous urge to jam, to get in there with the guys in the café and play…and then for a moment being a little irritated by how it was turning out, with some of the younger campers constantly putting themselves front and center.

“But then I realized, for some of these young guys, this may be their first opportunity to play with other people in this kind of situation. When I realized that, it became all good. And I also realized, I’ve got a lot to learn from these guys, too.”

Dave’s pre-camp expectations were pretty modest. He wanted at a minimum to come back home as a better bass player, and to bring his band some new ideas for rehearsing and composing.

But the effect of the experience has been a lot deeper and broader than anticipated. Although he’s been basically a “rock guy" for decades, and a pop-oriented singer-songwriter, Dave came away from camp saying he doesn’t care if he ever gets to perform again—he really just wants to compose. “Now I totally see a connection between some of the pretty structured melodic ideas I like to rely on when I compose a song, and the completely random and the cataclysmic way” that MMW invents music on the spot, he says.

The changes taking place inside him were immediately obvious the first time Dave got together to play with other people after camp. One evening his very talented, high-caliber band-mates got together to hang out and drink a little and play—it was Dave and one of his best friends, a fantastic guitar player, along with a drummer and another blues guitar player. Someone picked up an acoustic bass and started playing it, and Dave (perhaps thinking back to all the drum circles Billy had spawned with his stridulations exercises) was inspired to start banging on the aluminum Budweiser bottle in his hand. Then he picked up a stack of poker chips and started beating a nice little percussion pattern on the table. “My buddies were laughing at first, but one guy was looking at me and seeing it. He kept saying, ‘You guys, look. Dave’s not laughing. Dave’s not laughing.’ And it’s true, I wasn’t laughing, I was trying to get into it. And then everyone started to get into it, started to feel it.”

Eventually the laughter petered out and everyone really started improvising. “This is real for me now,” Dave says. “I used to watch MMW when they did their thing, and I couldn’t always connect to it. I always respected it, but now I understand it from the inside.”

That’s not to say the process has been demystified for Dave—far from it. If anything, he says, he’s even more in awe of the depth and spirituality and freshness possible in this music. “That’s why I say, I feel like a baby.”

I asked Dave whether he had any thoughts about returning to Camp MMW next year, and he had some fascinating things to say. First of all, he says he wonders whether the trio will even want to have the same campers back. He thinks it’s entirely possible that John, Billy, and Chris will deliberately hunt for a whole new crop of musicians with whom they can share their skills and vision.

But beyond that, Dave says, he feels almost as if he’s been initiated into something of a religious experience…that he was among the lucky seventy-six people disciples first invited into the temple.

And so now, what’s his job, his mission? Is it to return again and again, year after year, trying to do the impossible, i.e., recreate that amazing first-time-ever experience? No, Dave says. Although the baby in him may want to stay young forever, the grown-up in him knows that you can never go backward in life, only forward.

So it’s his mission now to go out and spread the word. Spread the music.