|
--John Coltrane In an effort to convey the natural energy, sound, and spirit of the performance, GENERATIONS was recorded in a continuous hour-long take. There are no overdubs, no breaks, and no studio or electronic effects. The goal was to capture an hour of time on tape, and hear how that hour was filled with sound on one particular day. The hope is that the listener can feel the natural progression of a live performance. Someone expecting a "guitar" record may be suprised to find that, while there are a few guitar solos, the focus here is on group dynamics and interplay, rather than guitar technique or any particular notion of a "leader." The performance by seven musicians on this album represents one cycle of life of a handful of musical seeds, the birth and death of a organism with seven parents. The nature of improvised music ensures that each succeeding generation of this creature will have its own character and purpose.  "Opposition" Following are some thoughts on the music from GENERATIONS, accompanied by images from the album liner notes. Links to a few of the original sketches and notes for this project are included in the text. 1) "Overture" The opening begins with a contracting and expanding rhythmic phrase in the shape of an hourglass. The hoursglass represents time, both in duration (an hour, the length of this record), and in sense of setting the time in motion. In India, the Damaru is an hourglass shaped drum that is often pictured in the upper right hand of God Shiva. The double triangular form symbolizes the creation of world through the union of male and female energy, manifest as sound. Much of GENERATIONS is involved in seeing how musical forms look at different scales of magnification. The process of visually zooming out is somewhat similar to acceleration in music. In both cases, you lose detail, but gain a wider perspective. The hourglass drum phrase in this case speeds up and goes through several transformations as it is seen in less and less detail. The entrance of the horns introduces the harmonic theme for the rest of the album, which is a set of interlocking triads that together form the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Here, the melody is a made of symmetrically arranged pentatonic scales.  "Tapetum Lucidum" 2) "Sun" The Sun provides the energy for that allows life to exist. The rising of the sun signals the beginning of the song cycle, and the bringing to life of a single performance, or generation, of this cycle. Here the Damaru rhythmic figure leads into the entrance of the main composition, a rotating sphere of symmetrical tonality, which the other compositions orbit around. Any four consecutive triads make twelve tones. (Improvisation by Miles Okazaki)  "Wonder" 3) "Waves" Waves exist everywhere where there is cyclic activity: In the motion of water, in our heartbeat, in sound and light. In Quantum Mechanics, it is shown that particles have a wave-nature, and vice versa. In fact, any object that we think of as solid actually has a wavelength as well, but in large objects like humans, it is practically undetectable. This composition examines the dual nature of matter and waves. A fixed set of rhythmic tiles operating in time with a melodic wave-nature, phase through a 16 beat cycle until the final conjunction of the two orbiting structures signals the ending. The 16 beat cycle is made of four triads that make twelve tones. (Improvisations by Miguel Zenon, Christof Knoche, David Binney, in that order)  "Dream House" 4) "Magic" Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." While this idea usually refers to an encounter with something from an alien or futuristic civilization, it may be possible as well that humans in ancient civilizations had technologies that would seem like magic to us. The Chinese Lo Shu, or "Magic Square," is an arrangement of the numbers 1-9 in a square that, according to legend, was found approximately 5,000 years ago on the back of a turtle emerging from the river Lo by the emperor Yu. The numbers add up to 15 in each row, column, and diagonal. The rhythmic form of this song is nine phrases which are played in each of these eight directions, making 15 beats each time. Harmonically, any four triads in any direction make twelve tones. (Improvisations by Jen Shyu, Dan Weiss)  "Palouse with Mandala" 5) "Generations" "Generations" is a word with many meanings: the products of a creative or procreative act, the cycle in life of an organism, the revisions and improvements on a single idea or product, a group of people living at the same time or in the same culture. As improvising musicians, we learn our instruments and theory from earlier generations of players, we generate compositions based on this tradition and what our place is in it, and improvisations are the spontaneous generations of the mind and body in real time. This composition is generated by the interaction of two musical seeds, rhythmic and harmonic, as they grow together into one tangled organism. The rhythmic figure from "Magic" zooms out (accelerates) and becomes pulse for "Generations," as four bars become four beats. Drums and guitar form one rhythmic machine that plays a continuous polyrhythm of 3, 4 and 5. Chromatic voice leading from one triad to another creates accents, generating a structure that is rotating harmonically and rhythmically. The destination triads at the end of each voice-leading passage make twelve tones. This texture is the improvisational form. (Improvisation by Miguel Zenon)  "Conjunction" 6) "Ghosts" Ghosts lie on the boundary the visible and invisible. There are also musical ghosts, phantom melodies and rhythms, that are percieved but not necessarily heard by the ear. One example of this is the phenomena of combination tones, which produce a third pitch that is perceived as the difference of their two frequencies. Another example would be the ghost notes played within a melody or groove that serve to lock musicians to each other rhythmically. A bass introduction brings in the theme. Here the melody is a twelve-tone line which stacked on top of itself in canonic form makes major and minor triads, that are themselves twelve-tone collections in any direction. After the saxophone solo, the canon begins with three alto saxophones. Accents between the three horns in the texture generate a third "ghost" melody, doubled by guitar and voice. From this point until the end of the album, David Binney is heard on the left, Miguel Zenon on the right, and Christof Knoche in the middle. (Improvisations by Jon Flaugher, Christof Knoche, Miles Okazaki)  "Flammarion" 7) "Fractal" A fractal is an object that shows self-similarity at many levels of magnification. The musical version of this could be a melody that sounds the same in different speeds. In 1959, Composer Per Norgard began writing compositions based on his discovery of the "infinity series," a sequence of numbers that is self-similar on several levels. That is, small events and structures are contained within larger copies of themselves, and so on into infinity. The effect musically is something that changes depending on how you decide to listen to it, because there are several different clocks running at different speeds. Based on this idea, an infinite "series" was created for this song to use binary and ternary self-similarity. That is, when you play every second note of the original melody, it generates a melody the same as the original (at half the speed), playing every third note of the melody creates the same melody again (at one third the speed), every fourth note, sixth note, eighth note, twelfth note, and so on. After a slow exposition of the whole melody, it is played in time, and the overlapping speeds enter in turn, from slow speeds to fast. The harmony is a series of triads that make twelve tones in various ways. (lyrics by Jen Shyu, Group improvisation)  "After the Rain" 8) "Break" Twilight is the time of day just before sunrise and just after sunset when the sky is transitioning between light and dark. Existing on this border between day and night, twilight is another boundary area (see "Ghosts"). This time of day has many names (the blue hour, the gloaming, the crepuscule), and it is often associated with mysterious phenomena like will-o'-the-wisps and ghost lights. Our crepuscular animal friends (dogs, cats) are much better adapted than humans for this visually disorienting time of day. In the cycle of compositions that makes up this album, this is the onset of evening twilight, as we step over the boundary into the night. Musicians sometimes refer this point near the end of the set as the 11:00 spot, and play a ballad here. For this set we use a drum break. Continuing where "Overture" left off, this transition marks the end of the day, and the rising of the Moon. A single day is a cycle in the rotation of a planet, generations are cycles of life, and the song cycle that makes up this record is almost over. (Improvisation by Dan Weiss) "Opposition" 9) "Moon" The symbolism of Sun and Moon runs through every culture throughout all human history. Sun and Moon are cosmological symbols of the polarities that are all around us: positive/negative, male/female, light/dark, yang/yin. The rising of the moon signals the end of this generation of this music. The Moon is visible to us because it reflects light from the Sun, and the rotating twelve-tone harmony of "Sun" is reflected in this composition. 144 pulses are grouped into self-similar rhythmic golden proportions, played in wave-shaped melodies. The theme from "Sun" returns on top of this texture, and generates the hourglass rhythmic chant that continues to the end, winding down as time runs out. The figure slows down, "zooming in" so that we can hear more detail. The final phrase is the clave pattern that has been heard many times in the preceding compositions. This same phrase is also the rhythmic theme of the previous song cycle, MIRROR. (Improvisation by David Binney) To look at the music in more detail, see the score.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS SCORE |
