33. Worlds Apart

Aside from revising past works and composing new ones I also managed to get a good deal of recording done in California in a variety of styles, genres and formats.

My first collaborative recording project consisted of a jazz quartet recording I call Campbell Soup which refers to the town where we rehearsed. After months of rehearsal, a sax/flute player, bass player, drummer and myself gathered at the drummer's home studio for two days to record some jazz standards with the goal of using the recording as a marketing tool. We completed some fine recordings but unfortunately, just when I felt things were starting to gel, the bass player and drummer decided to move on when paid rehearsals and gigs were not forthcoming. The recording however still remains as a tangible statement of our efforts.

In dramatic contrast to Campbell Soup was a recording of twelve pieces I call Songs of Reason collaborated on by myself and a composition student of mine who was an engineer at Google. The compositions are his with me acting in a guiding and contributing role, and the compositions are recorded using a software program called Reason. Most of the music was entered and recorded using a computer keyboard and computer generated sounds. Occasionally one of us recorded a live track in real time using a digital piano keyboard, but my student almost always insisted on quantizing the human variables out of it. I was, and still am really proud of that recording even though I have never used computer generated or sequenced tracks in my own music, always preferring to record tracks of my own music live in real time. Even though I was the teacher in this instance, I learned a lot about some of the technologically based alternatives that are so prevalent in music today.

In California I produced eight other recording projects on my own of solo jazz and classical piano, original songs, original instrumentals, and incidental music for my 2014 play Debussy's Daughter. Many of these recordings can be heard on my Soundcloud page which was also created while I was in California.