Sparks from the Fire

Short.

Keep it short.

No one has time anymore.

So keep it short.

Not sure I can…

Just not my style.

Never took to writing music for commercials.

60 seconds?

30 seconds??

No time to stretch my wings.

Yeah, I’m probably a bit long winded.

But I love to tell a good story.

Weave a good yarn.

I tend to put the problem on the other guy’s shoulders – the reader, the listener – the world.  Not my fault if they can’t hang in there.  Can’t slow down enough to consider something a little deeper.  Things are just going faster.  It’s a throw-away society.  No time to stop and think, to pause and pray, to sit back and dream, to lie down and do nothing.  We’re all trying to get somewhere when really we’re already there – only we just don’t know it.  Baba Ram Dass said, “Be here now.”  Eckart Tolle wrote The Power Of Now.  A best-seller.  Who had time to read it?  It appears that many did, so where are they and what are they doing about it?  Can’t we slow down enough to just sit and read?  Just sit and listen?  Does music have to get relegated to the background?  Someone said to me the other day, “I listened to your album while making dinner the other evening…”  I was crushed.  I hoped they liked the tunes…  Now I’m supposed to break this paragraph up into several for my blog post so that people will be more inclined to read it.  Long paragraphs will scare you away.  Did you know that?  Are you afraid?

There.

Fear gone?

Feeling better.

Want to read on?

OK, perhaps tomorrow…

This is Part 3.  If you haven’t yet read Part 1 & 2, I highly suggest you do so first.

For a little more than five years when I was in my late 20s and early 30s I was composer-in-residence at the NY Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theater) working with producer Joseph Papp in what was, at the time, the most creative theatrical hot spot in the country.  Joe Papp and his plays and musicals had an amazing run of success during the 70s that we haven’t seen the likes of from a theatrical producer since.

It was at The Public where I learned my craft having the opportunity to work on some 40 shows in those 5+ years working as composer for Joe.  Besides many other theaters in The Public complex, the NYSF also produced two Shakespeare plays per summer at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park.  I created incidental music for a number of these productions and I remember one particular production of Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors where I was backstage standing in the wings one night.

An older actor was on stage in a scene with one other actor one night when the older actor simply stopped in the middle of one line and kind of slumped over, still standing, into a frozen position.  The long pause brought us all to quick alert.  His fellow actor fed him his cue again to no response.  The stage manager in the wings downstage of me also fed him his lines in a stage whisper several times to no avail.  The audience began to buzz and we all quickly realized that there was something very wrong with the older actor.

Truth is, he had had a small stroke.

The stage manager, taking charge, simply walked out on stage calmly, and taking the arm of the older actor, led him slowly off stage.  Then the stage manager went back on stage and announced to the audience that we would take a short intermission and resume the play after 15 minutes.  The audience, still abuzz, did as they were told to do peacefully.

Backstage it was anything but peaceful.  Rather, it was a pretty wild scene as the older actor was addressed and cared for, an ambulance was called and his understudy was frantically preparing to go on in the older actor’s place.

The costume mistresses scurried about preparing the understudy’s costume changes, I got in his face discussing his musical cues and the stage manager ran through a litany of reminders for the young, inexperienced understudy. (more…)

I’ve had the great pleasure of working with some pretty amazing performers in my life – both stage and concert hall.  My chosen spot has always been to watch (or work) from the back of the house – usually just about as far from the stage as one can get.  After a short, but most successful career as an actor, the lead in Hair on Broadway, the lead in my own Salvation Off-Broadway and a leading role in TV’s soap, As The World Turns, I decided that acting was not my thing and retired to the more comfortable confines of director/composer.

There, I had the opportunity to watch both my own work and the work of some pretty fabulous performers over the years.  There, from the back of the house.  The greatest of stars figuratively pull those in the back of the house on to the stage – their magnetism or charisma is so great that you feel that you’ve got the best seat in the house no matter where you stand.

But occasionally, when someone gave a performance that was so electrifying as to just bowl me over, I have snuck around backstage, where as a composer or director I was always permitted, and watched, up close and personal, from the wings.

Very early in my career, just out of college, I spent two summers working as a chorus boy of the St. Louis Municipal Opera, probably the largest summer stock theater in the country.  For one one-week run they brought in Nureyev and Fontaine, at the time, the two most popular ballet dancers in the world.  I, with two years of ballet under my belt and at least knowing first position from second position, was asked to be an extra in their famous productions of Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.

One of my claims to fame was that I was actually pinched on the butt by none other than Rudolph Nureyev on stage.  Seems I got too wrapped up in my role as dice player far up-stage and did not see Mr. Nureyev behind me trying to make an entrance.  Rather than push me out of the way, he simply reached down and gave the surprised young extra a sweet pinch.

But already I stray from my point…

At the end of each performance I would rush around after the company bows and stand enchanted in an isolated spot in the wings and watch Nureyev and Fontaine take their bows.  It was there that I learned the purpose of bows and got a terrific lesson from the masters on just how to perform ‘the bow’. (more…)

I’ve been working on a song – a song for an outside client whose album I’ve been producing and orchestrating.  It hasn’t been working.  I’ve tried several different approaches – woodwinds, guitar based, drums/no drums, stronger/lighter, and nothing I did seemed to bring the song to its musical realization supporting the lyric, content and intent of the song.

And it’s a good song.  I know it is, because it’s been running around in my mind for several weeks now.  I wake up singing it and wonder for a moment where it came from and then realize, “Oh yeah, that’s that song!”

The client keeps coming in when I’m finished with my latest iteration and she sits and listens and nods her head as I play it for her and then when it’s through we nod and agree that we’re not there yet.

In the original session, her pianist and writing partner came in and recorded the piano and she the scratch vocal.  They were kind of ornery with each other when usually they’re a happy team.  I stayed pretty quiet as he kind of ran roughshod over her as they worked and he laid down the piano part and she sang the scratch vocal.  It was not an inspired session.  At one point I remember exclaiming kind of in fun, “Boy, you two are like an old married couple.”  The session was more about their momentary troubles than the song itself and the song was basically a love song!

As he got more and more depressed and actually meaner to her, she became nervous and hurt, embarrassed and withdrew into an uncustomary quiet.  But we were getting the work done.  He’s a fine pianist and though he was not particularly inspired that day, his playing was solid and mistake free.

When the session was over I was relieved to move on in life.  I began, several days later to orchestrate the song using his piano track and her scratch vocal as a base and it all seemed to go downhill from there. (more…)

When I was a kid and would buy an album, one of my favorite things in life to do, I couldn’t wait to rush home, plunk myself down in front of our Hi-Fi and give it a thorough listen – and, of course, while listening the first time, read the liner notes.

Back then, LPs were large enough – approximately 12”x12” – so that the cardboard cover they came in could have all kinds of information about the music and the artist.  I remember to this day literally paragraphs of my Ellington At Newport (Jazz Festival) that I played and read until the grooves wore out.

Back then they even gave a Grammy for “Best Liner Notes” each year.

Then the medium began to shrink – first to the size of a CD and now to nothing more than a digital download of the cover and the names of the songs if you’re lucky.  Lost along the way were other pictures besides the cover, lyrics and especially my beloved liner notes.

Several years back when I started producing CDs regularly I tried to keep the time-honored traditions by releasing CDs with 8 to 24 page booklet inserts.  Inspirational music depends a lot on its lyrical content and I always felt it necessary to include those lyrics and especially give credit to all the musicians, singers, designers, etc. who worked to complete the project.  But the cost of the booklet became prohibitive.

Today a 4 panel booklet CD will cost $1.14 per unit from the manufacturer if I buy at least 1000.  Take that booklet to 18-24 pages and the cost soars to over $3.00 per unit.  There go the profits.

So Watchfire Music and a few other artists turned to the Digi-Book.  What is a Digi-Book?  “A Digi-Book is an electronic version of an album’s liner notes and vital information.  This downloadable digital booklet contains photos, lyrics, and notes written by the artists and producers of the album as well as all sorts of information pertinent to the experience.” (more…)

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

Alan Smallwood

In an earlier marriage my wife at the time chanted the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  She was going through a particularly rough stretch in her life and she would go off and chant in our guest bedroom every day for a couple of hours.  She would always emerge from these sessions a different person – calm, centered, and quietly joyful.

I supported this practice at first because I saw that it worked wonders for her and over the couple of years that she chanted, I grew to love the sound of her voice pealing through the house, its mellifluous vibrations casting its positive spell over both our lives and probably even helping our plants to grow and be happy as well.

I think it was the thing I missed about her most when we parted.

Several years afterwards I began to work with a young musician named Alan Smallwood who came into my life at just the perfect time and brought to me in musical terms exactly what I seemed to be missing in my life.

As a musician, I had no real formal training.  Most of what I knew came from playing in bands, singing in folk groups and conducting student choirs.  I did study drums for several years with a fine teacher as a kid, but that was about it.

So there were many holes in my understanding and knowledge of this amazing world of music and consequently there were many holes in my music.  Alan Smallwood, several years younger than I, filled these holes with his genius, his fascination with the then developing new technology of synthesis and became my musical director and arranger/orchestrator for many of the musical projects that I created. (more…)

Barry Danielian - Trumpeter

Yesterday I had a blast.  Inspirational music took on new meaning as I recorded virtuoso trumpeter, Barry Danielian, here in NYC at Link Recording Studios.  I needed a 16 bar trumpet solo for the song, In That Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ which is the climax song on my forthcoming CD, Goin’ Home – A Gospel Cantata – On Heaven and Beyond.

I had lost my precious musician phone book last year with all its numbers and so I called my friend, guitarist, Chieli Minucci and asked him for a recommendation of a great trumpet player who could play like the angel, Gabriel.  Chieli recommended Barry Danielian.  When Chieli speaks; I listen.  I hired Barry for the gig.

I wrote the first 4 bars of the trumpet solo for Barry to get him started and then gave him the direction to improvise the rest, to keep it Gospel, make it hot, iconic, hotter, joyful, timeless and apocalyptic.  Think, in the climax of the solo, Gabriel on acid trying to blow the roof off the moon.  I sent him home to listen to the track for a couple of days and he showed up yesterday afternoon ready to go at it, trumpet in hand.

We did 6 takes – each one discussed relating to shape, development and mood.  Barry was the perfect partner in crime.  He listened, but also brought his great ideas and mastery of his horn to the moment. (more…)