21st Century SpaceJazz

The internet winter that hit shortly after the turn of the century, destroyed mp3.com and the vast pool of international independant musicians. It put a damper on my internet collaborations. It was too much to keep up with anyway. After all, I had a day job. But I did develop my solo production skills in time, and enjoyed some new spacey explorations. These three tunes were composed and performed by myself playing guitar, flugelhorn and my synth. My intention in the tune "Bliss", was to create the feeling of building and maintaining in a tantric kind of way, which I thought related well to the joy of climbing a mountain.
I travelled to Cartagena, Columbia in the winter of 2006 and had a very exciting time in that very sexy city. I recorded an evening street party with my videocam and used two loops of the sounds of clapping and singing as a rhythmic base to my classical "spanish" guitar and trumpet.

Joelle Gilmour is a Calgary based singer/songwriter. I had the opportunity to arrange a collection of her songs, perform guitar, flugelhorn, and even sing on these arrangements and finally to produce these songs into a cd which she entitled: "Light of the Unknown". She included my tune "Siren's Song" on her cd:

Tokyo Time

Cari and I got along so well that he invited me to visit him in Tokyo, and so I did. He was a most gracious host. He is also an inspired fanatic about music. He showed me around much of Tokyo, Shinjuku and his favourite place, the electronic district called Akihabura. Also, he took me on an inspiring hike up a mountain to a Shintu shrine dedicated to the Wolf. As well, I met his Mother who lives in a small apartment where she cooked, and not so cooked, us some delicious but for me, very different Japanese food. We sat on the floor until my back got sore, and then she took me to her Acupuncturist. Amazing! Other days, the routine was that I got up reasonably early in the morning to walk around and explore the nearby streets and hill park complete with Buddhist and Shinto shrines. When Cari woke up closer to noon, we would visit, wander around or drive on the tour of the day, then come back to his studio/living space to record. When I was exhausted, I would crawl into my sleeping bag on the floor and he would continue long into the night mixing our daily recordings. Early on in the visit, at some point in the night, I remember looking around in the room and imagining I saw something ghostly pass by. I was at ease with it, as all of Tokyo seemed thorougly haunted with the past in spite of the forward thinking culture. Surrounded by so many shrines and temples, it was difficult not to think of spiritual presences floating around. When I awoke and our chatting came around to my mention of the apparition, Cari was quick to corroborate. He thinks that his studio has many visits from ghosts as he lives so close to a crematorium, Buddhist temple and Shinto shrines. He explains in this video: We never used written music in our recording sessions. It was purely improvised space jazz. Tokyo Time was recorded without editing or any overdubbing or additions: