Computers and Music
Friday, June 23, 2006
Presenting Mood Music, an online collection of some of my original piano compositions.
 
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Found an article (click here to read) by Charles J. Gans (Associated Press) about Japanese jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi. From the article:
Akiyoshi became the first Japanese jazz musician to make a significant mark on the U.S. jazz scene, winning acclaim as a composer and arranger with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, which garnered 14 Grammy nominations in its 30-year history.

[...]

Akiyoshi closed Thursday‘s concert with a solo version of a composition she originally wrote for her big band, titled "Hope," the last movement of her extended suite "Hiroshima: Rising From the Abyss," dedicated to victims of the 1945 atomic-bomb blast. Akiyoshi found the tune with its message of hope springing from tragedy and destruction a particularly appropriate choice to close her regular Monday-night big-band performances at New York‘s Birdland jazz club following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"We all should have hope," she said, before playing the encore.
More info about Toshiko Akiyoshi can be found at Wikipedia (click here).

To listen to some of Toshiko Akiyoshi's music for free on Pandora.com, visit Toshiko Akiyoshi Radio.
 
Monday, June 19, 2006
Last night I attended a concert given by the Third Stage Jazz Band, directed by Dave Fullerton. A recording of the concert is available (click here).
 
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Yesterday I was fortunate to attend a world-music concert given by the ensemble Silk Road, and Brazilian guitarist Celso Machado. Silk Road founder Qiu Xia He, a virtuoso performer on the Pipa (Chinese Lute), formed Silk Road Music 15 years ago to interpret the songs of her homeland, and to bridge cultural gaps. The concert was a special CD launch show for Silk Road's recording, Autumn Cloud. More info about Silk Road, and music samples, are available on their web site (click here). Celso Machado has made available lots of music samples on his web site as well (click here).
 
On May 28th I performed with the Sybaritic String Band at Northwest Folklife, a music and dance festival in Seattle, Washington. We performed at a contradance, a kind of participatory dance similar to square dancing. Listen to some music samples here (from a different dance).
 
Howard Kissel writes in the New York Daily News (click here) about 21-year-old jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti, who recently made his New York debut at the Blue Note, and whose latest album "Lucky to Be Me" was released on Concord in March 2006. From the article:
[Eigsti's] goal, he says, is to elicit emotion.

"It's possible to look at a painting and be moved to tears," he says. "But I think it happens more often in music, partly because the sense of hearing is closely tied to memory.

"The hardest thing to do as an instrumentalist is to involve the listener, especially when our collective culture reflects attention deficit disorder - we can't even buy whole CDs anymore; we download one tune at a time.

"Dancing used to play a role in jazz. When it was swing, people danced to it. When it was bebop, people danced to it. No one dances to improvised jazz, partly because it has odd time signatures.
Visit Taylor Eigsti's web site.

Listen to a recording of a live concert (click here) of Taylor Eigsti with jazz pianist Marian Mcpartland, courtesy of NPR JazzFest.

Taylor Eigsti's page at Concord Music (click here) has additional photos and information.
 
Today I created a highly experimental synthesized "music" track using some crazy synth sounds. I then combined the music with a reading of two of my recent Google Poetry Robot poems (here and here). The result is a noisy and chaotic track that is difficult to listen to. The glockenspiel is way too loud, and some of the words are obscured by the obnoxious synths. However, I would like to share it with anyone who is interested. The title of the first poem is "Sweet and Rosy", so I have named this spoken word/music track "Sweet and Rosy" as well. However, please be warned that the track is anything but sweet sounding. (Click here to listen to this track!)
 
Friday, June 16, 2006
Here is a live recording of the jazz standard All the Things You Are (click here), that we recorded on April 25th 2005, at a wedding. Geoff Peters (piano), Kevin Shan (tenor saxophone), Mark White (bass), Colin Defreitas (drums). I just found it on my computer!
 
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
For your listening pleasure, here is a recording I made of myself performing the jazz standard Stella by Starlight, solo piano (click here to listen). (Recorded in September 2005 on a Steinway D. I used a Sony Minidisc recorder.)

Click here to view more info on how to make your own recordings using Minidisc.
 
Mark Fefer writes on Bloomberg.com (click here) about Cuban drummer Ignacio Berroa and his debut recording as a leader, "Codes". From the review:
``Codes'' is a smart, exuberant reworking of classic tunes from many traditions. With a group of mostly Latin American players, Berroa creates a febrile, never-forced synthesis of Brazilian, Cuban and American jazz that's harmonically rich and rhythmically unpredictable. Where much Latin jazz lurches into a stiff swing, Berroa's band moves easily and nimbly.
After studying music in Havana and playing music professionally for 10 years in Cuba, Berroa moved to New York:
Berroa won recording and performing gigs with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Charlie Haden, and the late Latin-jazz showman and percussionist Tito Puente, among many others. His bread-and- butter gig, he says, has been with fellow-Cuban Rubalcaba, who was also first promoted by Gillespie.

Berroa was brought to the great trumpeter's attention by Mario Bauza, who helped launch an early Latin-jazz movement with Gillespie in the 1940s. When a Boston snowstorm delayed Gillespie's regular drummer one night, Berroa got his big break. He toured and recorded with ``the Diz'' for much of the following decade until the trumpeter's death.
Another review of the CD "Codes" is available at All About Jazz (click here). Online music samples from "Codes" can be found at Ignacio Berroa's web site (click here).
 
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Joseph Leichman writes in The Record (North Jersey) about Israeli bassist/composer Avishai Cohen, who will be giving a concert this Thursday at Irving Place in Manhattan (click here to read article). From the article:
"I feel very spiritual or even mystical from being in this world," Cohen said. "Through music and nature -- which are one -- I feel the most spiritual. It comes out in my music, which is a blessing. Because it not only means that it's real, but I've found a channel to express it back."

But Cohen is not all clouds and cherubs. He writes songs about heartbreak ("Emotional Storm"), his bandmates ("For Mark") and lost loved ones ("Elli"). He calls himself a "self-taught freak" whose playing and writing grew from hours and hours of practice. He talks fondly of Paris and Spain, and one of his favorite things about professional music is traveling the world.

[...]

"I like to make records that tell a defined, carved story," Cohen said. "I think that's part of what makes a good record, just like a good book. In general, jazz records are getting to be more improvisational than they used to be.

"Sometimes people make jazz records that are so improvised that you feel like you're in such a mess. You have to realize that in order to set yourself free you have to not be free."
Avishai Cohen's page at Golden Land agency (click here) has some online music samples from his latest CD, Continuo, which was just released on May 23rd, 2006. Avishai Cohen's web site is also worth a visit (click here), where he provides details about his upcoming shows around the world.
 
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
I've been experimenting with some computer-assisted music composition ideas.

My idea is to have people tap a melody's rhythm on their space bar, and then the computer will compose the rest of the song based on this rhythm.

My goal is to program several different algorithms so that the computer can generate music in various styles. So far I have only done one algorithm, a "weird" music style.

Feel free to give my "work in progress" a try, and let me know what you think! Click here to visit the Music Maker by Tapping website.
 
Monday, June 05, 2006
John Pitcher writes an article about jazz pianist Cedar Walton in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (click here), regarding Cedar Walton's upcoming solo piano appearance in the Rochester International Jazz Festival, this coming Saturday. From the article:
[...] Yet as a soloist and leader, Walton has always been unfairly underrated. Despite having preceded pianist McCoy Tyner in Coltrane's band and having played with saxophonist Shorter during what is indisputably the greatest incarnation of the Jazz Messengers, Walton's name rarely seems to share the same exalted space on the marquee with either Tyner or Shorter (both of whom, unlike Walton, are headlining Eastman Theatre shows at the Rochester jazz fest).

Perhaps Walton missed his bid for immortality when he declined to play on most of the main tracks for Coltrane's classic 1960 Giant Steps. Tyner, on the other hand, played on all of Coltrane's 1965 A Love Supreme, and it cemented his reputation.

"I had to pass on a lot of the songs on Giant Steps because Trane was playing too fast and I couldn't match him," Walton recalls. "Trane worked like an obsessed man who was in pursuit of something, and in the process it turned him into a virtuoso."
Gallery 41 has an online audio interview with Cedar Walton (click here), and Jazztimes has another online audio interview with Cedar, including a discussion of music clips (click here).
 
Thoughts of an aspiring jazz musician and computer programmer.

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