As we head to the final few weeks of the Duo Chronicles project, musically we have covered many different styles of jazz. This weeks tune, “Law Of Averages” has a meditative-gospel sound to my ears. Often music defies one singular category so descriptive terms are piled on and on like, acid-electronic-fusion-contemporary jazz, for example. At a certain point too many adjectives render musical description more confusing than useful. This descriptive process usually varies quite a bit from individual to individual.
The form is based around a repeated six bar chord progression that repeats and is varied somewhat to give a more through-composed feel. Subtle, but effective I think. Just to give a little bit of forward momentum. John and I both take short solos. The music doesn’t necessarily need virtuosic-type solo improvisations, shorter more thematic solos do just fine. Also, I added a track of organ, just to fill out the overall sound, a little bit of musical “glue.” John had a nice idea to trade soloing over the the final chords of the composition; some musical dialogue.
This New Orleans-inspired piece is a blues of sorts (in the Kind-of-Blue sense) with a second-line type groove. If I remember correctly, I wrote it just before a jam session, where I tried it out for the first time. Despite the simple sounding melody and chord changes, it can be a challenge to keep together on the first performance because of a time signature change in the middle of the piece. It makes perfect sense in context with the melody and the chord changes, but it can throw people for a loop the first time they read it.
Clay and I have been playing this song for a few years now, in a number of different formats, including in an acoustic combo (including with Clay’s group, the Upper Left trio), in an electric fusion group, and as a duo. In fact, we played this song on our first appearance on a podcast, when I we played on Strange Love Live for the first time.
For this performance, we rethought the form a bit, but all of the familiar elements are still there.
True North, is thought of as the direction along the earth’s surface towards the geographic North Pole. This the title for this weeks composition. Throughout this project it has been more challenging to write about the music than to work on the music. There is no time really for analysis in the moment, one can be more objective after the fact. Not to say that I haven’t found ideas in words and their combinations, because I have. I think of true north as a metaphor for looking for truth in a direct way. In this case, true north being the path and the North Pole the destination, or the direction of travel at least. In general my aim in composing to capture the essence of a time, place and thought, which also is what recording happens to do.
In thinking about the music from the music point of view, there are elements from classical, jazz and pop in this composition. The influence of jazz, in the harmonies and improvisation, classical, in the through-composed form, and pop, in the repetition of a musical “hook” throughout. That’s just me looking through the lens however, you the listener can draw your own conclusions, and decide what sound means to you.
In the bebop era, it was a common practice to take a popular song and write a new melody over the familiar chord changes. Charlie Parker wrote many of his tunes this way, including Donna Lee (the changes are from Indiana), Ornithology (on How High the Moon), and Koko (Cherokee). For “Affirmation,” I chose to write my own “contrafact” (the technical name for a song written using this method) on a tune of Charlie Parker’s called Confirmation.
The primary motivation for playing a song like this was to have a bebop song that we could play as a clarinet and piano duet — I wanted a challenge for myself (clarinet has never been my strongest instrument, although it is the woodwind I started on) as well as a new color for the Duo Chronicles project. It turned out simple and straightforward, but at the same time fun and exactly what I was going for.
