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Guitarrasalto  [guitar assault]

Background

The Edge City Trilogy was "inspired" by experiences that had become commonplace in the 1990s: horrific suburban gridlock, mindless landscapes of box stores, strip malls and fast food joints, and the relentless soundtrack of sanitary, mass-merchandised music.  The latter came with the rest, and begged the question -- is this culture's sense of musical spirit dying along with the cities that created it?  The goal of this project was to help answer that by bringing together a group of folks willing to step outside the boxes imposed by a commoditized world.  Emerging technology created new possibilities for musical collaboration, and we'd take advantage.

People and Process

This is the team for part one of The Trilogy:

• Jon Madof guitars
• Michael Taylor double bass and bass guitar
• Jon Thompson tenor saxophone, flute and melodica
• Ranji Kumar accordion
• Scott Schaffer guitars, bass guitar and mandolin.

This isn’t a band, though ECC would go on to do a few performances in subsequent years.  Live music creates a particular kind of energy.  Recorded music creates a different kind, the chief advantage being that it is a permanent record of the composer’s and musician’s thoughts.  This album focused on using the recording process as our "canvas."

Each piece started with an idea and evolved – some quickly and others painfully slowly.  We tried to strike a balance between letting things happen on their own, and staying outside our own comfort zones.  We set out to preserve the rare moments when ideas germinate, bumping a piece into new territory.  The process was not a means to an end, as it is in nearly all recorded music, but part of the end itself.

Philosophy

The arrangements in Guitarrasalto are minimalist.  We typically used between two and four recording tracks at any given moment, and never use more than eight.  We added instruments to a given mix only if we felt the addition was necessary to flesh out an idea.

Most of the recorded tracks are acoustic.  We used electric guitar, bass or special effects when those sounds added to a piece.  I mixed this music to have wide dynamic range.  The contrasts between dynamic levels, instrumentation, meters, harmonic structure, compositional ideas and intensity form edges that (we hope) make this record an interesting journey.

I’m trying to stay away from describing the music itself here, and particularly from genre labels.  Music doesn’t translate easily into the abstraction of words.  So I'll stick to talking about how we made it and what we were thinking when we did.

Track Comments

1. Citron

This started as a simple meditation on the bass.  Jon M added a melodic, syncopated solo.  This is his only take and therefore, I think, an appropriate beginning to the series. 

2. Chesapeake Raga

This piece introduces Mike and  Jon T.  I composed some of the orchestration, but this is mostly improvised.

3. Osweetmoses

Still getting acquainted, this was the first piece JM and I recorded in the Guitarrasalto sessions.  It wasn't intended to be on the record, but in a curious way this swing tune broke a mold -- what an "improv" piece is supposed to be.  Despite the apparent structure, it was composed largely on the fly.

4. Nippon Theme

JM and Mike have played together for years and have a higher-order chemistry together.   This is a live first-time acoustic duet version of this tune.  Mike describes his typical method of writing as "stream of consciousness". 

5. Guitarrasalto

A study in contrasts, our title track evolved over a three-week period.   It’s a collage, mixing looped, sometimes self-referencing samples with "straight shot" performances.

6. Upekuzi

The title is Swahili for "the act of searching" or "curiosity", a pretty good theme for the entire project.  JM and I wrote this prior to recording -- one of very few Edge City pieces created that way.   JT adds melodica at the end.

7. Hologram

Another joint composition, and the album’s only electric duet.  The solo is a spontaneous mutation that stuck.

8. Rubber Sky

Mike and JM caught with a live mic.

9. Fanatango Primo

Ranji and I recorded a spontaneous jam late at night, and Mike added an energetic pulse.  JT then affected a sharp left turn with a surprising first-take flute solo.

10. The Portal

Named for the graphic image of the recording and the feeling of passing between realities evoked by the piece.  We use the digital delay as an instrument, creating a rhythm track with slight modulations that foresee changes to come.  The accordion improvisation, originally a solo, was inserted in a new context. 

11. AT Raga

Can something be created from nothing?  This piece suggests the answer is yes. I started by recording a free-form track in a modal tuning.  Without any instructions, I asked JM, JT and Mike, in succession, to take the ball and run somewhere.  The result is more a collective mood than a sum of parts.

12. Upaya (for Jonna)

I’ve heard several different versions of "Upaya", a Buddhist term meaning "skillful means".  Two of them were the work of the Taylor-Madof Quartet.  This version represents the bare essence of Jon’s piece.  He wrote it over a period of months, reworking it with many different variations.   It serves as a counterpoint to the more open-ended pieces before an after it.

13. Fanatango Secondo

Just what you hear.

14. Citron Vert

I asked Mike to add a second bass line to this familiar theme, and then added a different guitar variation, bookending the album.

15. Bootstraps

This is a duet by two players that haven’t met and weren’t playing together.  The original context for each part has been removed.  Yet they somehow play off each other with precision.  It’s neither live nor "sound on sound".  Proceeding from an absurd premise to an illogical conlusion, it’s a piece holding itself up by its own bootstraps, and an appropriate lead-in to part two of the Trilogy.

Questions?   Contact us.

-Scott