“Water Magic”: Finding Music in the Notes
“Would there be enough common ground to result in coherent music of a refreshingly different sort? Or would it sound like random chaos?”
You give your players a tempo, key, meter and a short story, then ask them to hit record and play whatever they feel. The catch? They aren’t in the same room, or listening to one another remotely, or even playing along to a scratch take. Each is on their own, in their home studio, improvising based upon what the story inspires.
The Inspiration
A veteran of Broadway pits and pretty much every other musical setting under the sun, Emily’s fluency with multiple styles prompted me to put down the music staff paper and pick up a legal pad. I wrote a short narrative that set a scene derived from the song’s/poem’s story line and sent it to her along with a tempo, meter, and key. Her job: perform whatever the narrative inspired her to play, within the musical guardrails I had provided.
Emily’s resulting improv swirls and swoops in unexpected and breathtaking ways. Treating her recording as a gold mine, I extracted phrases and pasted them into a new, composite ‘Emily Cello’ track in my editing software.
The effect of combining elements of her improv with those of players who’d followed my charts was stunning. You think her part is going to zig when it suddenly zags, and the occasional extra beat in a phrase creates all sorts of interesting sub-rhythms that always seem to end up OK — kind of like the lyrics themselves, which Katherine McCanless Ruffin had written to stand on their own, rather than as song lyrics. You could say that their work is irregular yet balanced.
I had just completed an album that tested the limits of poetry as the basis for music, lyrics, and song arrangements themselves. Still energized by the thrill of producing a record during COVID thanks to laid-up pro players who otherwise wouldn’t have had the time of day for me, I began considering my next project.
I found it in the arrangement of the album’s 13-minute centerpiece, ‘Coffee’.
It involves the song’s cello part. Back when I was getting the song arrangement squared away, I found myself craving something more and different than what I’d sketched out for cellist Emily Brausa. All I had come up with were guitar phrases assigned to a cello.
Fast-forward to the followup. The cello improv prompted me to wonder what would happen if an entire piece, from lead vocals to piano, bass, guitar – everything – were constructed the same way: What if the players were given a story – or, for the singer, lyrics – along with the key, meter, and tempo, and then simply played what they felt, and I assembled the results into a whole? Would there be enough common ground to result in coherent music of a refreshingly different sort? Or would it sound like random chaos?
I think the answer is vividly evident in WATER MAGIC. A three-part suite that unfolds like musical Cubism, the arrangements combine different musical perspectives on the same narrative source material. And if you want to know just how far it is from traditional pop/rock, I have an answer for that, too – but in a moment.
The Recording Process
I began by writing a two-page story about returning to a place of childhood wonder: a cottage in the woods of New England. Poet Katherine McCanless Ruffin (whose seven-part poetry cycle was the basis for ’Tracks’, the 2022 album) then authored three poems based on the tale.
Meanwhile, I explained to the players, most of whom had worked on the 2022 album, what I was after. King Crimson drummer Pat Mastelotto, a newbie to our group, said he’d been asked to do all kinds of things over the course of his 40+-year career. But nobody had ever asked him to do what I’d requested.
Theirs ended up being a two-part mission. First, the players would improvise just as Emily the cellist had done on ‘Coffee’. This involved giving them Katherine’s three-part version of my story along with the key, meter, and tempo for each part. They’d then record – separately, on their own – whatever the story inspired. Vocal duties on this improv version, using the lyrics composed by Katherine but, crucially, without any prescribed melody, were handled by Berklee College of Music alum and blues/jazz multi-instrumentalist Trina Hamlin. With a rich and smoky tone that she delivers with the conviction of experience, I thought she’d mesh well with players like Jim Levy (piano) and Scott Colberg (acoustic bass), whose improvs would likely be complex and jazz-inflected.
Once I’d gotten the parts, all that remained was for me to weave it together. Daunting! But because I just cannot resist the opportunity to craft a catchy tune, I put what I’d come to refer to as “the jazz version” on hold as the players joined me on a second mission: a pop/rock version of the suite based on melodies and chord progressions I’d written for Katherine’s lyrics. A suite of “normal” songs, you could say; I called this the ‘pop version’ (duh).
With the exception of improvs from Emily (cello) and Raphael McGregor (steel guitar) – which just couldn’t be bettered – the musicians got charts and a backing track on which I strummed acoustic guitar and sang. They each played along and sent me the resulting WAV file of their isolated part.
Finding the Music
Given the subject matter – a return to childhood – and being a child of the 60s and 70s, I wanted the pop version of WATER MAGIC to shimmer and soar. Ideally, the result would dazzle with colorful exuberance found in work like The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and the Stones’ psychedelic pop masterpiece ‘Dandelion’. Bassist Colberg jumped right in, using his Hofner Beatle Bass in creating parts that sound straight out of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, while drummer/percussionist Pat Mastelotto’s work on Part 3 – which I’d lifted from his improvs and stitched into a fairly straightforward, single part – evokes a ‘Side 3 of the White Album’ intimacy. Flautist Karmen Gould channels classic Moody Blues albums like ‘In Search of the Lost Chord’, which isn’t surprising given that she plays in Justin Hayward’s band!
Vocals on this pop/rock version – which I’ve titled ‘Water Magic in Santa Barbara’, an homage to sun-drenched, endless-summer California – are handled by longtime collaborator Manjula Dias, whose gorgeous and often witty arrangements evoke the best of girl-group pop tradition when they don’t sound like an angelic choir, albeit one that can somersault and pirouette. In addition to Emily’s improv cello, several other parts (including Pat’s drums & percussion and Raphael McGregor’s steel guitar) are also derived from their improvs. Combined with delights like Jim Levy’s choppy piano on Part 1 (a nod to Three Dog Night’s 1968 hit ‘One’), the pop/rock version of WATER MAGIC is a luscious confection that I hope you’ll want to blast with the top down as you cruise whatever passes for the Pacific Coast Highway in your neighborhood.
With that buttoned up, I returned to compiling the jazz version, which I’ve titled ‘Water Magic In Pine Orchard’, after a woodsy Connecticut village that, for me, epitomizes flinty New England. It was the most challenging musical project I’ve ever attempted, with a comparison to Cubism feeling apt. Such artwork depicts recognizable objects – think ‘still life’ – from multiple points of view, simultaneously. The edges of the planes that convey the ‘chair’ or ‘vase’ or ‘person’ – that is, the place where the constituent perspectives come together – generates an unsettling yet powerful energy. The same is true in the jazz version of WATER MAGIC, the instrumental and melodic combinations as engrossing as the individual parts themselves. One listener describes the result as more than ‘Cubist’. He hears it as ‘Cubism Squared”: multiperspectival and originating from multiple artists.
The Result
With so much inspired playing, I had trouble deciding what to leave on the cutting-room floor. Speaking of which, you might ask whether I did any editing of the jazz version’s parts; that is, did I simply paste the players’ improvs into the mix, like wallpaper, and live with the result? I admit to a fair amount of deleting and sliding around, but not because I was trying to create, say, a Gmaj7 chord at a certain point because that’s what harmonic or formal tradition would have called for, or what my habits of mind might have led me to. The alterations I made are like alterations your tailor would make to provide a good fit, while leaving in place the odd cargo pocket, ascot, or third sleeve (!) that the ‘suit’ came with. I also note that a Cubist painting doesn’t present every element of every perspective; or, to use a gardening metaphor, even the wildest flower garden gets weeded as its plants are divided and otherwise trimmed here and there.
The jazz version of WATER MAGIC, then, is not an academic exercise. It’s an artistic exploration of chance, but in a managed setting informed by objective forces — key, tempo, meter — as well as subjective forces — the narrative.
An exciting opportunity to get outside my own creative head by depriving myself of the prescriptive control of charts, it shows what happens when a songwriter embraces their experience with a traditional idiom (= the pop version), and then deprives himself of the control – and, in turn, options – that this same wisdom can bring (= the jazz version).
That said, a listen to the two versions back-to-back reveals that they may have more in common than one might expect. Turns out that Beatle-esque savvy about good pop music is applicable to an entirely new and different approach to songwriting. You just need to be open to the unexpected, and willing to let the sometimes strange and always surprising interim result stand as you apply your songwriting talents to the process of editing.
Combining, reducing, and repositioning phrases I would have never come up with on my own, into arrangements I’d never create from scratch, has been a refreshing and deeply fulfilling songwriting experience.
