Ok, so this one's a bit out there. I was coming back from Charlie Wrights on the bus, and this popped up on my phone courtesy of a pianist friend's Facebook feed. The silent young folk trudging their way back to the far reaches of East London must have wondered where the mirth was coming from; there wasn't much else about at -3C on a bus that smelt slightly ominously of disinfectant.
The reason I love this picture is not only that I admire breadcat's zen-like acceptance of his unusual circumstances. I quickly realised that this was actually one of the less ridiculous things I had seen on Facebook that day. Social media is more than a compulsion; for a musician or artist it can mean terror and paranoia. Make the right nods, salute the right things, make the right noises and if you're lucky a blogger might send you a friend request....if you don't, that nagging voice says, you'll be sitting at home responding to everyone else's gig invitations and sighing longingly at their humblebrags.
Some people can play the social media thing quite well. In order to float at the top, you have to shout continuously at or about as many people as possible, dive into every fatuous debate you can find (Lord knows there have been enough of them recently) and generally be on the best behaviour towards our proud cyber-nation, the 'online jazz community'.
The trouble is that the entire architecture of Facebook is built to share pictures of cats with their heads through slices of granary bread. Things like having an 'artist page' are supposed to help - your friends can then 'like' that and then, as my understanding goes, you can call yourself an artist. What you can't do on Facebook is communicate to the millions of people out there who have never heard of you and probably never will. The kind of people that traditional media would call an audience.
Now I have discovered lots of wonderful music through Facebook. I have heard about gigs, gotten gigs, and got people to come to my gigs through Facebook. I will continue to use it in this manner, because I have to. What I refuse to do is accept that this is something new; artists have always been able to reach their fans. Reaching new people is about talking, writing and offering content that says more than 'COME TO MY GIG'. Promoters need to realise that they have to do more than put their nights up on Facebook - there are other people out there, somewhere. I've often found that non-musician (but musically-minded) friends don't know about a great night that is just around the corner from them, just because they're not in the right online loop. 10 -15 more local punters at every small jazz gig in London would make a difference to the scene. That's got to be achievable in a city of 7 million, right?
Breadcat may be content with his head stuck in one particular slice of reality, but for me it's turning a bit stale.

(right, how am I going to get anyone to read this....?)

Last week was fun - beautiful autumnal weather, some good gigs....also, pianist John Turville and I had a little two-piano play, and John brought along a chart he'd done for 'Ice 9', a John Taylor piece from 'Requiem for a Dreamer'. I really like this tune, as it has some real 'JT' hallmarks - notably symmetrical harmonic patterns and a strong intervallic theme. There's definitely a 'quintal' (fifths) theme going on here - this sound is the basis for much of the tune:


It has a lovely open character, but with a little grit in the middle thanks to the semitone in-between the hands. You don't get the semitone when it's over a major chord though:

For the 'sus' chords in the sequence I've taken the quintal voicing from their minor counterparts and then changed the root:

There would be other ways of doing it, but I think this way preserves a consistent sonic character.

What I wanted to do is to try and convert these rooted/two-handed voicings into rootless left-hand voicings that kept some of the 'quintal' character of the sound of the originals. When a tune has such a specific sound voicing-wise, it seems like a good idea to develop that further into the improvisational language used, rather than just take a more general approach.
So, first of all, here is a chorus of the solo section, voiced out in full quintal harmony for two hands:


And here's how I've tried to compress the sound. To my ears, keeping the 9th and the 3rd next to each other is important, as is having the 11th in the voicing and keeping an interval of a fifth in there somewhere. You can do this by leaving the root and 5th off the bottom and rearranging the notes starting with the 9th on the bottom: (on Em11 here)


It's useful to have another 'position' to play in so that you can voice in a consistent range. Here I've rearranged it slightly so that it's based on the 7th:


That gives you two positions to voice in. I've used this method for the major chords too.

By compressing the sus chords into rootless voicings you get identical shapes as before, just based on the 4th or 6th of the chord:


So, here's what a whole chorus could look like (there would be other 'routes')


What to do with it now? Well I'm going to really try and get them under my fingers in 12 keys and see if they start popping up anywhere else...I like their sound as they keep some of the cool, quite detached sound of the full voicings but you have some fingers left to do other things with!

Friday was a sad day as we found out about the death of trumpeter Rich Turner, a friend to lots of us on the London jazz scene and the main force behind the gigs at Con Cellar Bar. It was at the beginning of our first big band meetup that we heard, sitting with lots of his friends as we were waiting for Rich to come and play. Rich would make things happen totally selflessly and with a great sense of ambition - the work he put into the Con Cellar really showed, with some major international musicians coming to play there alongside lots of the country's top young bands. Round Trip, his long-standing quartet, were one of the bands I've enjoyed hearing most in London over the last few years. He'll be missed.

There have been a couple of interesting takes on my post of a few weeks here from over the pond (then up a bit) - from Peter Hum at the Ottowa Citizen and John Wertheim of A Devout Musician . Both good reads, check them out.