... on my bachelor project. it pretty much takes up most of my free hours, I'm organising players, rehearsals and recording dates and trying to arrange at full speed. While I have lots of ideas for pieces which I try to blend into songs (or whatever the word is for these little tunes), I find it very hard to concentrate on the whole. I know that I want a good concert, which means: I want to show solid and somewhat idiomatic jazz piano playing, but I want the sparks too, I would like to take first steps in the direction of my own personal voice, whatever this may mean.
I would like to include strings, which sounds a little off, doesn't it - I'm a pianist and I already have a guitar on board, too! But still - the sound of a string quartet is very different, and I hope to combine all of those instruments in a convincing way.
It is also very hard, in my opinion, to include meaning, without it sounding cheesy or naive - it would just be nice to be able to express something. I guess you can't play well without some kind of an urge, but how to communicate this to people in the audience maybe not used to jazz, is at the moment beyond me.
So, lots of questions, as always, which will maybe dissolve by time, and of course, while thinking can't hurt, too much of it most definitely can.
But it's really fun, too! It's a project, my first real grown-up musical project! Any tips from anywhere very welcome!
I'm sure it will be fine. Moments stolen from the mundane will glisten and maybe be captured with a microphone.
ReplyDeleteI had this interesting epiphany about my friend Matthew Shipp after he sent me his latest release. He can work with the most primal melody kernals like Frere Jacques and make stunning structures of them.
I realized one new piece is really 'Rock a Bye Baby.... in the tree tops...' And yet it becomes some other thing but my primal music child memory still connected to that half buried memory of a most mundane lullaby.