On Thursday, January 9th, polymath Terri Kapsalis invited me to join her at Experimental Sound Studio…
On Thursday, January 9th, polymath Terri Kapsalis invited me to join her at Experimental Sound Studio to begin work on a recording project that will also involve Damon Locks. Based on her book, “Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit” (which is organized something like a series of museum didactics, containing information that intersects with the content and forensic investigation of Addams’ kit which is housed at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago), Terri is developing an audio art piece that incorporates the text, compositions connected to the text (from rebetika, an early Chicago jazz recording, as well as a protest song by Eleanor Smith who founded the Hull House Music School, and the first commercially successful anti-war recording, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier”), short improvisational “gestures” guided by Terri’s verbal cues, and material that Damon will develop utilizing some of these components and building his own. On January 21st, the three of us will get together at ESS and combine elements in real time.
My work in advance was to come up with transcriptions and arrangements of the rebetika piece, “Mountains of Alonistaina”, Smith’s “The Land of Noonday Night”, Johnny Dodds’ “Lonesome Blues”, and “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier” by Bryan and Piantadosi. The original recording for “Mountains of Alonistaina” came from a film link that Terri sent me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERB6YDkA_OM) which is a call and response melody between wood flute and voices. By chance I had just heard a beautiful arrangement of “Manoir de mes rêves” while listening to the music of Django Reinhardt, where the clarinet melody is doubled (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG9vbKcWDE0). I lifted the idea when arranging the rebetika composition and added static dissonances to create tension since this new version was instrumental and without lyrics. A structural idea from the source material in the text was derived from the four vials in the travel medicine kit. This led me to the thought of writing a four-part fugue when arranging “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier”. Much of Terri’s book indicates the relationships between mental and physical health. When I mentioned the idea of writing a fugue, she thought of the condition of a cognitive fugue state. After building a three-part based on one of the song’s 12-bar verses, I added a fourth voice that was completely improvised, then I reverse sequenced a series of improvisations overlapped as a fugue to sonically mirror the phycological state. The 12-bars of the verse suggested selecting a 12-bar blues for the Johnny Dodds piece. It was possible to transform “The Land of Noonday Night” into an Ayler-like hymn, and Terri requested that I take the tempo down to 40 beats a minute, which made the piece beautiful and at one of the slowest tempos I’ve ever played.
Following the paths that the source material suggested, both in the text and in the music, created a multi-leveled and clear amalgamation of ideas. These will lead to further coherence as the project moves forward, surely to be impacted greatly by Damon’s contributions and our meeting as a group next week. Many thanks to Alex Inglizian for the fine engineering work, he always makes it very easy to focus on the sounds and music since he handles the technical details with absolute skill.
[photo by Alex Inglizian]
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