How I Won The Song Lottery, Part I
At each show of the Spectacular War Museum June residency at LIC Bar, Anthony Cekay, the project’s creator and leader, raffled away a prize to one audience member who contributed money to the tip bucket. The prizes included autographed posters, CDs, and a song request for the final live show and streaming video broadcast. The prize at the final SWM residency concert was a personal composition lesson with Cekay. Cekay and band would perform the music the winner wrote at the band’s July 15th show at the Ra Café in Sunnyside. After a couple of draws from the raffle pot, my number was picked.
I was excited, but I was also amused: I studied music theory and composition as an undergrad, so I wasn’t exactly what Anthony had in mind for the project. When Gus Rodriguez, LIC Bar’s indefatigable booker and a talented musician in his own right, was passing the tip bucket around and giving out raffle tickets, I joked that if my number came up, I would offer the prize to someone who really needed it: maybe Gus himself? He’s already a songwriter with a confident voice, and Anthony was trying to show someone who had no experience writing music what it was like to compose a song.
But when I did win, there was no way I was actually going to pass up the chance to work with a group of musicians as talented as this. I’m not a jazz musician myself, but I am something of an amateur of the genre. I’ve been in bands with very capable jazz players and I have more than a few friends who love the stuff. But it’s not my game exactly, so this would be a great opportunity to stretch myself a little bit further. It was far from clear initially how Anthony and I would write a tune together and still have it belong to both of our musical worlds. We met up and figured out how we were going to go about this.
Before the band can play the piece, it needs a melody. In jazz, the melody is usually played at least twice in a song – at the very beginning and at the very end. Along with the chord progression that accompanies it, the melody sets the tone of the piece and informs everything that the soloists come up with as they improvise. To keep things interesting, we decided that Anthony would write the chord changes to go along with the melody I came up with. From here, we needed to figure out what role each of the instrumentalists would play in the piece. To add a little bit more of a collaborative flavor, we decided that I should play along for this one. I do a lot of work with electronics in my own music, and we thought it might be interesting to add some live electronic manipulation to Anthony’s performance. So in addition to working out the details of the instrumentation, we will be building up a bevy of samples and effects for me to use during the show.
As you can see, doing this the right way will take a bit of effort. But dealing with this sort of musical challenge is never a chore. One of my favorite aspects of writing, and I’d bet that many other musicians would agree with me on this one, is learning to accommodate the unforeseeable challenges that the material inevitably presents. Because of my association with LICNotes, and because Anthony still has the ongoing Spectacular War Museum project on Rockethub.com to promote, we thought we’d use this chance to share a little bit of our working process with you all.
Anthony actually has some experience with sort of thing. The Sunday before each night of the Spectacular War Museum residency, he hosted a live streaming seminar analyzing the pieces the band was to play. The music of the SWM is fairly dense in structure and its execution had been spread out over a month of performances, so he had plenty to talk about in his seminars. He addressed the themes of individual tunes and how they fit into the larger context of the piece, as well as what inspired him to write the work as he did. I've included a recording of one of his pieces below, and you can find a clip of the seminar where he discusses it here. I encourage you to check out his page on Rockethub if you’re interested in learning more.
Our current project is just one tune, so let’s look in detail at how all of this happens. Over the next week, I’m going to be documenting the development of the song and the final results at the performance. I’ll talk about several aspects of our working methods, and I’ll include examples of what the music looks and sounds like at different stages of the process I talked about above. The tune is coming along right now, and there’s still a long way to go before the premiere next Thursday. We’re sure to encounter some unexpected developments and we hope you’ll join us to see where we’re headed.
(For an interesting discussion on writing music and how the process relates to inspiration, check out this post and comments on composer Kyle Gann’s blog.)
Photos by Isaiah Singer.
Drew Jaegle is an LIC resident and musician. He is currently working on a new rock-oriented project with his band, The Icons, and on material with a hip-hop group that is still to be named.
