Ryan Blotnick's Music Blog

Music Needs You Liner Notes 10/15/07

2011-05-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Here are the liner notes for my debut album "Music Needs You"

This group's first show was in a castle in Vic, Spain where we were lucky to play for an amazing audience. Instantly bonded by the experience, we booked a studio in Barcelona on a whim and made this album.

In improvised music, where most of the notes are composed in the moment of performance, the focus of the audience actually shapes the outcome. If the band knows that one person in the club that is hanging on every note, the bar is raised and there is no excuse for self-indulgent abstractions or attention-seeking dramatics. If the whole room listens with open ears, the notes fly off the page and there is nothing to be understood, only the immediate and obvious reality of human beings in a room communicating with closed mouths.

This is the experience that keeps musicians playing music, and audiences coming back to hear it. Without a set of ears, music is a bunch of weird waves with no purpose.

Music needs you.

The music on this album is the product of nine short handwritten sketches. Each musician sees the same chart, but deduces their part from it in a different way. Each piece sets a new tone for the improvised solos, which are the real focus of the music. Some pieces were inspired by specific places or experiences, others by musicians, or musical ideas. While music speaks its own language and should be interpreted first through the ears, I have included some of my thoughts here for your amusement.

Winter Melt is a portrait of a sunny February morning through a coffee shop window. The mercury rises and the neighborhood begins to shovel away at the sidewalk's snowy lining, pushing it into the street for the buses to crush. The early thaw usually triggers relief and the happy anticipation of spring, but this year has a different feeling. After such a mild, unfulfilled winter the sudden warmth seems out of place and somehow unjust.

Climbing a mountain, we reach the point where physical exhaustion begins to silence the brain's chatter. The highway noise becomes replaced with birdcalls and wind, and we are drawn out of ourselves into the world around us. In the city we experience the opposite when we sink into the underground subway. The bustle and flow of strangers creates a jumbled wash of noise, and the brain retreats into a dreamlike state, spinning on an overheard melody or conversation. Sketched out in the subway and finished at home, Thinning Air portrays the descent into the underground world of strangers, and the ascent into the realm of the imagination.

Written with Albert’s two-handed melodies in mind, Music Needs You presents a rhythmic dilemma. The alto saxophone and guitar play a slow melody in whole and half notes while piano and bass play an unrelated, upside-down sounding line in quarter and eighth note triplets. The drums groove away in an impartial double-time swing, which becomes the medium for the solos.

Barceloneta is a seaside neighborhood of Barcelona where the light barely pierces through the narrow streets and balconies. It retains some of the old coastal town feeling in the middle of a gigantic city. The melody is urban and cerebral, but still ebbs and flows.

Liberty is a musical collage whose divergent pieces are glued together with a rock beat. The first hints at a corrupted counterpoint- a single melody split into two voices, with an ominous gravity. The second is a vagrant riff, modulating recklessly yet stuck in the groove of too many repetitions. The third is an interpretation of the first, this time harmonized in call and response phrases. It leaves a hopeful question unanswered, segueing into the groove-based solo section.

I wrote this piece under the strange circumstance of being snowed in at a stranger's house near Liberty, New York where I took a job cat-sitting what to all appearances was just a neighborhood stray. The cat would disappear for days and come back weary to scarf down meal after meal. I think the cat's reckless wanderlust (and my own) contributed to the song's unusual form.

You Can Talk During This and Tired House were written when I was living in Copenhagen. They both capture the feeling of being holed up in a tiny wintry apartment with only a few hours of sun each day. In the outskirts of the city, the nights are completely silent except the echoed sound of someone smoking in the courtyard or shutting a window. The phrases float, linger, overlap, and mimic each other over mostly-diatonic chord progressions.

Wrong Turns was an experiment in what could happen if a song made a critical mistake right at the very beginning. I wrote the first bar on piano as kind of a classical ‘air’ and realized that it couldn't continue much further that way. I changed its direction entirely with a grace note down to the bluesy minor sub-dominant region to create a conflict of interests and let it find its way back to the center through all kinds of different paths. Despite moments of major buoyancy, the melody keeps turning to minor as if torn between extremes.

Pete’s tune, the Quiet Space Left Behind, is a "hook-based tune, anchored in 16-bar sections, with deceptively un-diatonic chord changes." Other than being an incredible melody, I think it creates a distinct ambience that complements the other tunes, some of which were directly influenced by Pete’s writing.

The musicians on this album are all composers and have brought the music to life through their generous interpretations. I hope you enjoy their spirit and artistry as much as I do, and continue to keep the music alive with your minds and ears open.

Ryan Blotnick, October 15, 2007

Everything Forgets Interview w/ Tony Reif 7/19/09

2011-05-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

1. The music on Everything Forgets is played by two different groups, a NY based quartet featuring (NOT FRETLESS) electric bass and an international trio that's 3/5 of the group on your first CD Music Needs You. Could you tell us how this came about, and what you learned about producing and recording your own music in the process?

The original concept for this album started with some gigs I did in London with Peter Van Huffel, Robin Fincker, Jeff Williams and Simon Jermyn. It was my first time playing with Jeff and he was thrashing away on a borrowed rock kit. Simon would lay down all kinds of loops and samples and then groove out and it had this kind of 70s rock vibe mixed with a more modern ’Icelandic’ soundscape kind of thing. I had met Joachim in Copenhagen and was floored by his clarinet sound, and his whole circular breathing concept, so I put the quartet together and we made a demo with mostly free-form stuff.

Meanwhile I had a weekly trio gig in Brooklyn with James Ilgenfritz and John O’Brien and we were rehearsing a lot and I wrote some music for that band where I could play the melody and chords at the same time. When I brought some of those tunes to the quartet session it became apparent that it was really meant for trio, so we ended up doing a lot of improv in the first quartet sessions, and then recording the trio stuff at the end of a Spain tour with the ’Music Needs You’ rhythm section.

2. In your quite philosophical liner note for this record (which can be read here and on your website but was left out of the CD packaging so as not to affect listeners' first impressions) you write:

"When the melody is restated after the solos, it takes on a new meaning based on what's been established in the improvised section. This push-and-pull of statement, abstraction or forgetting, and restatement gives us the sensation of movement in music. It is this kind of movement that conveys thoughts and feelings to the listener, the feeling of being moved.....The process of selecting the best takes, editing and mixing them, and weaving them together to tell a story was an experience not unlike what the brain does as we form memories. Moments in time can’t be repeated in real life; but the ability of music to recreate thought, emotions and the feeling of movement through time is truly astounding.”

It's always interesting to consider the perceived "content" of music, the images and associations that surface as people listen to and make sense of a piece and give it some positive or negative meaning or value for them (or perhaps it leaves them indifferent). These responses of course can involve relating it to other music or artistic creations, as well as personal experience of any kind. It’s a fascinatingly subjective topic, and because your music really touches me I’m curious to know more about how you think about emotion and storytelling in music. So here are some questions:

a) How more specifically did these ideas about music and memory affect the story you were going for in the long process of sequencing the record, including the break between side A and side B?

I listen to a lot of music on vinyl and one of the things I really like is that at the end of a side you are left with this absence of music and it puts you in touch with the fact that you want (or need) to hear more. Then you have to physically get up and flip the disc and basically say “I want some more music now.” I think this makes the B side that much more interesting, and there is also a certain kind of commitment involved. Usually the A-side is flashier and meant to draw you in, and then the B-side is more adventurous. A lot of the music on Everything Forgets is very demanding on the listener, so I have shortened some of the freer pieces to a minute or two, and offset them with the lighter, more rational trio compositions. When I hear live music I am content to sit through long pieces with no apparent direction, but I think an album should be more concise and structured, even if it is presenting free music. As [engineer] John Raham said while we were mixing, ‘the act of pressing eject on a CD is so destructive,’ so I wanted to organize the music in a way that people could listen to a half hour of intense music and feel like they had completed something, like a chapter. I want people to think of Everything Forgets as two albums really, and maybe even take the time to really absorb Side A before moving on to Side B.

b) By “the feeling of being moved” do you mean to include (by analogy at least) a sense of physical movement and places associated with different mind-states – walking in the Maine woods say, as opposed to walking in Manhattan – or do you mean the kinds of dramatic/narrative movement and forgetting/remembering/anticipation that for example sonata form is working with, involving modulation away from and a final return to the home key? And if so, are you working with structures and harmonic development used by classical and romantic composers as well as jazz in your own composing? Have you studied George Russell’s harmonic theory?

I meant to suggest the feeling of being brought to a different emotional state, like at the end of a book or movie. But I think this kind of movement is also closely related to physical movement and vibration. Music is one of the most subtle types of movement that we can pick up on, and it can be used to evoke other kinds of movement in the brain and in the body. Just like some music makes you want to dance, other music makes you think or feel a certain way. I think good music engages all the different Chakras, or energy levels in the body. Even if it isn’t dance music you are dancing in your head to it. It is building up expectation on a bunch of different levels, within the beat, the bar, the form. I never got too involved with Sonata Allegro form but I don’t think it is too far from the typical jazz form, with the improvised solo sections taking the place of the Development. My music is written pretty instinctively, using the sense of form I have picked up from playing jazz and other styles.

c) When you perform these tunes now do they still conjure up the “residue of experience” of the events and feelings involved in their creation, and if so how do those memories affect your interpretation and playing? Do different pieces have different emotional states that in some way you’re trying to evoke in the listener, or are you operating on a more abstract – or maybe I should say concrete - musical level (especially when you’re improvising)? You also write in the liner note that playing with great musicians you experience a release from the world, a feeling of hurtling through time – similar I think to what Jerry Granelli calls “this wonderful sonic adventure always on the edge, and always in the wonderful world of nowness.” How do you, as a performer working with other musicians performing your music, immerse yourself in the now while maintaining some direction and control (or ideally, as everyone internalizes the music, would that become unnecessary)? Does remembering or thinking about anything while you’re playing just get in the way?

Some of the compositions on this album are very personal. I will write a song when I am feeling a certain way, and playing it usually brings be back to that state. Sometimes the way you feel about things changes though, and then you have to find a new personal connection to the song. As long as you connect to the song and play honestly what it makes you feel, I think you are doing it justice. So a song starts from a certain emotional state, but isn’t confined to that- it keeps on changing.

For me, it helps to have a starting and ending point, and a chord structure, to make the music clearer to the listener, and to maintain direction. As the bandleader I am responsible for making sure that the overall form of the tunes comes through. But once I have communicated it to the band in rehearsal, and they have internalized it, it is a shared responsibility. During a solo, you get to drift a little further out into your own world, and then you come back in and support the rest of the band. I guess you have to think just hard enough that you don’t mess up, but not more that that.

d) When you listen to performances or recordings of other music (whether jazz, rock, classical, world or whatever), what typically is happening to you – are you more an analytical listener or a free association one? And listening to other improvisers at work, what’s it like as a musician to identify with that feeling of freedom and openness in the moment - does it mainly or only happen at live performances, where you’re participating in the space and time of an event? And how does that feeling mesh with other, content-related emotions that the music evokes?

I listen to a lot of recorded music very impulsively. I use it to control my emotions and sometimes I just need to hear Aretha Franklin or Neil Young at a certain moment. Live music is completely different, because you don’t know what you are going to get. You just have to go with an open mind and hope for the best. Last month I was at the Village Vanguard for four sets of Bill McHenry’s group with Paul Motian, Ben Street, Andrew D’Angelo and Duane Eubanks. You couldn’t help but hear all the beauty of those great musicians. The other show that was like that for me recently was Søren Kjærgaard’s trio with Ben Street and Andrew Cyrille. When I see musicians play with that much grace and openess it is really uplifting; it makes me feel good about being a human being.

When I see a great show it will often stay with me for some days, and I will reflect on it after the fact and learn a lot. I try to incorporate what I have learned into my practicing and playing somehow. Like right now I am working on a certain kind of phrasing that I got from listening to Andrew Cyrille. He plays phrases that sound so natural, kind of like speech. I also transcribe and learn other people’s music to figure out what is going on there.

3. Getting back to the specifics of this record, are there any tunes here that have interesting stories connected with their composition (like your notes for Music Needs You go into)? And what about the Benoit Delbecq dedication, “Dark Matter”?

I don’t really think the stories are of that much importance, but I would say that a lot of the tunes were inspired by concepts I heard in other people’s music, to which I am very much indebted. I can hear Michael Blake and Eivind Opsvik in Mansell, Bill McHenry in Mainstream I, Ned Ferm and Rob Stillman in Ned Ferm, Benoit Delbecq in Dark Matter, Sonny Rollins in Sonny Song and the Ballad, and Skúli Sverrisson in Business Class.

4. You’ve used the term postjazz to refer to your music (on the analogy with postrock). As a (post)jazzer, what do you think about the current state of jazz - where it’s going, what’s good or bad about the music and the business that the term “jazz” is used to categorize and valorize. In the end is it more of a help or a hindrance for young musicians today?

I think genres are used to turn music into a product, which is a necessary evil if musicians are going to reach a larger audience than their friends and family. Thanks to the term ’jazz’ I have been able to bring my music all over Europe to clubs where people will pay money to see someone they might never have never heard of, based on the fact that it is supposed to be ’good jazz’. So that term seems to be working in my favor. I am only hesitant to call Everything Forgets a jazz album because of the composed tunes there is only one with a swing feel, and the improvisation concept on the freer stuff has very little to do with jazz and more to do with avant rock or new music. I feel like the vibe on this album is almost closer to a Led Zeppelin album than a Charlie Parker album, although it is clearly coming out of the jazz tradition. I have a lot of friends that don’t listen to jazz but have gotten into my music so that gives me hope that I might be able to reach a broader audience with this album.

5. What are some of the directions you’re exploring currently in your music, where do you want to take it next?

I want to write some stuff that has that really heavy group hypnosis vibe, like when you hear some of Mingus’s bands. I also want to explore the other direction toward more spaciousness and air in the music, and also a kind of trancelike bluesy Mali thing, like Ali Farka Touré. I want to put together a really dynamic show that the band has completely memorized and tour the world without sheet music.

Everything Forgets Liner Notes

2011-05-23T11:13:00.001-07:00

I wrote these liner notes for Everything Forgets and then decided that I didn't want to actually include them in the physical CD. I wanted people to be able to experience the music first and then download the notes if they were interested. I imagine probably almost no one actually downloaded them, so I will share them here in case anyone is interested:

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." – Confucius

Forgetting is incredibly vital to our everyday experience of life. Our mind records so many memories; but when we go to retrieve them they are always colored by our own personal narrative. We capture memories in the form of words, photos, paintings and video; but music captures things in a different way, leaving out the details of people, places, words, things and smells. Often times all that remains are the qualities that might have gone unnoticed in even the most detailed description of events. We are left with the essence of that narrative spin the mind puts on things, the rhythm of human thought; and the rest is discarded and forgotten.

Monk said, "the inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good." A jazz tune is a structure involving the repetition of a main theme, with a bridge somewhere in between. After the bridge, the initial theme is restated, but it takes on a different meaning because coming back to a theme gives a different feeling than getting hit with one out of the blue. It is now colored by the information we have gathered from the bridge. The same process happens on a larger scale within a tune. When the melody is restated after the solos, it takes on a new meaning based on what's been established in the improvised section. This push-and-pull of statement, abstraction or forgetting, and restatement gives us the sensation of movement in music. It is this kind of movement that conveys thoughts and feelings to the listener, the feeling of being moved.

To feel a certain way about something in the past is to have a simplified memory of what it was. Simplified in the sense that it was a series of events over time and now it is flattened into the past. The way these memories are stored has a lot to do with our emotional thought process. In "Funes the Memorious," Borges writes about a man, Funes, who perceives everything in vivid detail, and forgets nothing:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one's mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the sharply defined houses that surrounded him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.) Towards the east, along a stretch not yet divided into blocks, there were new houses, unknown to Funes. He imagined them to be black, compact, made of homogenous darkness; in that direction he would turn his face in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, rocked and annihilated by the current. . . . To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

Every living creature filters the world in its own distinct way, and that process is directly tied to what ends up getting left behind as the residue of experience. A big part of why music is so important to me is that it is a way of practicing the art of how things are experienced and forgotten. Everything forgets. Playing with great musicians, there is an amazing feeling of levity. Everything unimportant is quickly forgotten, giving one the sensation of being alive and hurtling through time. It is a release from the world somewhat like Funes at the bottom of the river of his imagination, "rocked and annihilated by the current." This is the feeling I am going for in music. I hear and I forget.

This album was made during a time of extreme catharsis, and the two sessions represented on this CD reflect two very different and important periods of my life. The process of selecting the best takes, editing and mixing them, and weaving them together to tell a story was an experience not unlike what the brain does as we form memories. Moments in time can't be repeated in real life; but the ability of music to recreate thoughts, emotions and the feeling of movement through time is truly astounding.

You are holding in your hands the distilled spirits of a year of my life, shaped by the musical contributions of some of my closest friends. Drink up.

Ryan Blotnick

What Are You Listening To?

2010-09-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

My press agent Cary Goldberg asked me if I would write a paragraph for a new project that Patrick Jarenwattananon from NPR's A Blog Supreme (www.npr.org/blogsupreme) is working on. He is asking musicians to write about as song they are listening to. So I wrote this and figured it would make a good first blog entry:

I am digging through my roomate's vinyl right now and found this great album: Les McCann and Eddie Harris, Swiss Movement, Live at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. The first thing I noticed when I put it on following Miles Davis' Nefertiti on CD was how REAL it sounded. Then I realized it was because it has that stage feeling, the feeling of playing for an audience, which was a stark contrast to Miles' masterpiece where they are basically workshopping tunes in the studio. Nefertiti is like the best rehearsal ever. Anyway, the Les McCann and Eddie Harris album just kind of reminds you of what is so great about jazz. Some great musicians find themselves in Europe at the same festival and throw some music together, and then play it for thousands of people and make it sound amazing. Les McCann anounces one of the songs,

"Alright, we gonna try a new song. This song was written by Eddie Harris, and today was the first time we ever saw it, so with your help, we might do it. It's called Cold Duck Time."

The entire band is completely grooving and in their element. My friend comes down the stairs during Eddie Harris' solo on Kathleen's Theme and starts making saxophone motions with his hands with a look on his face the like "What the?" "It's so relaxed" I say, and he quips back "It's like Trane without the stress," and we both crack up. This is the way jazz is supposed to sound: spontaneous, thrown together, a special feast for whoever is lucky enough to hear it.

Now that music is a product that can be bought and sold there is too much importance placed on the ability to create the same experience over and over again, which is impossible. It is impossible, but it is every producer, promoter, agent, or label's wet dream. I saw a hip-hop show with Big Boi this summer and he was playing along to his own music video. Seriously? Is that what we are headed toward? If you ever see me on a stage playing along with a recording of myself please shoot me in the head and burn all my recordings.

Cold Duck Time.