Friends often become collaborators and whenever I team up with someone, I like to push the boundaries.  This case, I wanted to see what could be done with a particular harmonic and rhythmic matrix.  The sky is the limit!  After much tweaking, a few hits and bowed pianos, I came up with this little gem.

The coolest part about this piece is that it is very intuitive to perform. This track is easily performed live, and is constructed so that no matter how hard you try it will sound different every time.   This opens up many ways to improvise and interact with additional instrumentalists…  As a bonus, all of the samples are acoustic.  The goal was to make a live, interactive patch that sounds as if it were a musicological field recording.

After now having seen a handful of her work, I am particularly inspired by how she employs counterpoint – her content is  so compositional and ripe with richness.  If you have the opportunity to catch a performance of hers, it will certainly not disappoint.  I look forward to next time already, and I have something new to study for it’s compositional content – choreology!

Here’s a little sample of her work with her company, a piece that I saw them work on intensively and worked on the touring production, it’s an excerpt of “Busk”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tim Gough - NYTimes

New York Times reporter Alex Williams caught wind of how I used the idea of ‘curating’ to add a sense of community to venue promotion,  people for recordings, and my overall ideals for production in general.  Clearly, as his article examines, the term “curate” is no longer reserved for museums, or at least not here in New York City:

“They’re young, discerning and enterprising, and they’ve got a code word to tout it.”

“They don’t simply put on an event, they have an eye for it.”

Curtis Macdonald, a Brooklyn musician, also says that “curate” precisely describes his job: hiring bands for a local site.

“When given to opportunity to curate an evening of music, choosing the right bands is very similar to curating a museum,” Mr. Macdonald explained in an e-mail message. “Since I, the ‘curator,’ choose personnel based on a particular aesthetic, I am able to think of creative ways of presenting music beyond the traditional ‘call-up a venue and ask for a gig’ way of presenting.”

Check out the Full Article.

I like seeing my old friends from school take necessary initiative and elevate their music to the next level.  Ever since graduation, I have been impressed with how much of a following my colleague,  RnB artist Jesse Boykins III has generated for himself.  He’s been busy all over the U.S. showcasing his music, touring with one of my best friends and outstanding drummer, Adam Jackson, has been featured on numerous blogs and rose to the near summit of the BETJ charts; not to mention fostering several noteworthy collaborations with producers such as JMost, who is also a hugely notable school chum.

Jesse and I have always talked about doing a track together but this summer we finally made it happen.  He gave me a scratch a capella vocal track and then I proceeded to mix in the rest.  Hopefully this will just be the beginning of a very warm series of collaborations.  You can follow Jesse on twitter: @Jb3Music

DOWNLOAD the entire remix album Here.

Every year, the Banff Centre releases a compilation album of all the best recordings from the International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, fittingly they  title it “Centre Pieces”.  And yes, that’s centre - the Canadian spelling of “center”  :-)

Artistic Director, composer and trumpeter extraordinaire Dave Douglas asked me to create a remix track as an addition to this year’s jazz compilation album.  In doing so, I recorded as many sounds as I could from the participants during my time at the workshop.  All in all, I sifted through approximately 8 gigs of source material all of which were recorded with nothing more than my pocket-sized field recorder (the Sony PCM-D50 to be exact).

Then the fun began!!
I loaded everything up in a session and played around with all the various individual sound bites.  Please note: everything on this track is ‘programmed’ – that is to say these clips were all live, acoustic, and improvised recordings.  They were then later re-sliced, effected and synced in an entirely new context quite unique from their original:

Featured on this track is original sound from these musicians:
(in order of appearance)

Adam Miller – Tablas
Michal Vanoucek – ‘Extended’ Piano
Brian Seligman – Acoustic Guitar
Ryan Butler – Electric Guitar
Anu Junnonen – Voice

click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

Last year I showed you all an excerpt of a piece I created for recorderist Terri Hron (to see the previous post, click here).  Well, I am happy to say that her album “bird on a wire” has  just been released throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S.,  It’s really a great example of several artistic collaborations on many levels.  The album’s music is comprised of several composers Terri commissioned for this project, and the audio production is of the highest, warmest quality possible – something that is difficult to achieve when electronics and real-time processing are so widely (or should I say wisely?) utilized.  This is a really unique and special album that I  am happy to be apart of and encourage you all to seek out.

Terri Hron – Recorder
Dan Porter – Engineering
Yours Truly – Producer/Composer

There have been a lot of questions lately about jazz, technology, composing, performing and what it takes (and means) to create music in this day and age.  The thoughts and questions in this post highlight a few interesting tidbits on music composition & production:

nothing new: ‘recorded’ jazz is much different than ‘live’ jazz.

Many jazz musicians today only record a live performance, it makes sense – the feeling of a performance is best suited on a stage in front of an audience.  The reasoning is simple: there is a special energy on stage.

There is also another kind of energy that exists within a studio.  Instrumentalists spend years developing a ‘sound’ on their instrument, but  many seem to only spend hours when it comes to the sound of their music on album. Don’t these musicians realize that the studio is also an instrument?

The recording studio is, of course an artificial environment. Yet because it is artificial certain rules can be broken. Those musicians who ‘break the rules’ creatively gain an entirely new canvas on which to paint their music.

The studio is a place where time, space, pitch and timbre can be manipulated:
It’s a place where you can compose using sounds.

Classical music recordings undergo hundreds of tweaks to ensure the most flawless, virtuosic performance possible.  Jazz dogma states that this is a sin punishable by death, yet musicians have been utilizing current technology to broaden the scope of their music for centuries – example:  harpsichord -> piano.  I think people get scared of the word “edit”.

You can still be improvisatory, you can still be creative and compositional – the studio is just like any other instrument, all it needs is practice.

thoughts on ‘doing it live’

If the studio becomes your instrument, you too can use it live.

I had an email conversation not long ago when someone asked me about doing some of my studio stuff live, I confessed it was a topic that I have spent great deal of time contemplating but have not spent much time perfecting.  There are many good ways of incorporating audio production live, and below are a few common pitfalls:

Death by vamps:
If you want ‘background tracks’ on stage, the trick is not to generate loopy material but to create loads of composed sounds & forms that can develop and be interactive, the goal here is avoiding the trap of over-repetition.  If the musicians are playing to a click, the flavor of live spontaneity can go out the window very quickly.  However, if you give musicians something they can relate to, they will easily vibe to it:  Instead of click-based tracks, make whole parts for a band to play around with.

Death by quantization:
You can ‘program’ live-sounding bits and bites using real sounds, with a real, human rhythmic feel.  Jazz has always been about the groove, feeling time, feeling swing – you can actually make a computer groove, but it takes a helluva lot more thought and effort than a few quantization settings – in fact, quantization can be quite musically devastating by itself.

Instead, try sampling yourself.

To do all these sorts of things live, there has to be a strong focus on the composed/designed material.   Even the best electronic musicians start with ideas they have already spent much time polishing.  Improvisation will ensure if you build libraries of mini-forms and/or sounds that you can freely execute and arrange on-the-fly.  It’s just like building your own vocabulary.

]]> http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/05/using-technology-and-still-being-jazzy/feed/ 0 http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/04/music-for-television/ http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/04/music-for-television/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:42:52 +0000 Curtis http://curtismacdonald.com/?p=495 click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

Here’s a little concoction intended for some sort of television broadcast.  Who knows what may or may not come of these little mini demos, but they’re kinda fun to try. It’s neat thinking like a film composer especially when there is no film immediately in front of you.  In fact, that’s how they used to do it back in the day.

This one sounds like it has the flavor of something dark and tribal – kinda like a urban-exotic background theme or something else along those lines.  Check out this previous post, where I put on the same kind of ‘music for TV’ hat.
*thanks to Dan Porter for mastering this track!

Friend and composer Darren Miller recently wrote a series of several short pieces for the digital player piano – in fact, for the very same instrument I wrote something for last fall – (see previous post here).  This time, I asked Darren to give me the audio he recorded from the player piano – I felt driven to add drums and other misc percussion to his piece.  After many wakeful nights tucked away behind samplers, I constructed this little hybrid.

There are hundreds of samples used in this piece, some of which originated from the drums of Nasheet Waits , Eric MacPherson and Jim Black.  (see previous post “Nancarrow Arrangement” and This Mention on Post Classic).  I took it further this time, employing drummer Max Goldman in the studio one afternoon – I recorded him performing all sorts of techniques across 2 drum kits, plus additional percussion improvisations.   He is the drummer featured the most in this little experiment.

Look at this sort of thing like this: take a bundle of magazines, cut out letters from various attractive headlines and then piecing it all together to create a collage-like message.  Today, composers are able to utilize attractive “found-sound” audio bits in very much the same way as drawing notes to a page.  It’s the same process, different interface!  One helps the other.

]]> http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/04/carefully-programmed-drums-to-a-digital-piano/feed/ 4 http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/03/i-love-collaborations/ http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/03/i-love-collaborations/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:40:25 +0000 Curtis http://curtismacdonald.com/?p=404 click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

Remember the previous post involving the recorder?  Well, I promised you more, and here I am hyping it once again.  Terri Hron (recorder), Dan Porter (mixing/mastering engineer) and myself (remix composition / production) have been passing files back and forth all over north america to keep the flame alive when it comes to our little trio deluxe.  I have for you now, two new recorder remix pieces that are quite contrasting from each another.  One, is a startling recorder-distorto-drum-maniac-fantasia (drums samples performed by long-time friend and collaborator Alex Wyatt), and the other is a harmonic-retrospective-ballad.