Around the turn of the century, the internet was a very exciting place to be. For musicians, the place to be was mp3.com. An amazing thing sprang from that site. There was a lot of networking going on with fellow independant musicians and at some point we started jamming with each other. Commonly, it would involve sending mp3s back and forth of each other's music, adding parts, glueing them together to make finished productions. My first cyber collaboration was with Tapani Suomela, a tuba player in Finland. Ironically, through the internet I also connected with musicians to collaborate with right here in my hometown of Calgary: Darren Morley, Judee Plourdee and Bob Doble. Within a short time I had jammed with dozens of people around the world, including Mathias Claus in Germany, Minoru and Cari (Shigero Toonoka) in Japan, Bill Farrish and "Nool" in New York and this one with a group in Los Angeles led by Al Daniels:
One of my favourite mp3.com collaborations was with Cari in Japan. We really "resonated" with each other musically. I had recorded a rather spacey little fanfare which I overlaid and looped, creating these spacey echoes that harmonized with themselves in a kind of canon. I sent this to Cari and he very sensitively added his guitar chord progressions, slightly altered each time the loop repeated bringing out a wonderful new dimension and creating a wonderful feeling of harmonic movement. I loved what he did:
We continued to collaborate, sharing music files back and forth through the internet. In this collaboration he first sent me a track of his playing an Oud (an Arabic instrument). I responded with a lot of improvised phrases on my flugel which he arranged and produced back in his studio in Japan to come up with this very spacey peace piece:
No comments:
Post a Comment