16. Under the Peregrine’s Wing
The rain’s rush has eased into a moderate staccato, sounding now like the convivial pecking of birds at a tweet-and-greet.
You stand at a bus stop, sheltered from sky by an oversized fiberglass wing, impressively contoured with the likeness of a falcon’s plumage. The bird of prey looks friendly but disheveled, its wings a faded green-blue, its cartoonish body perched roadside here for probably . . . decades?
Below the other wing: stacked pyramids of tree trunks, cut into cinnamon-roll cross-sections, possibly for firewood.
You try fishing out a map-and-schedule from your soaked backpack. The folded paper falls apart in clumps.
Suddenly, your peripheral vision signals: you’re not alone.
[ Look up from your hands, covered in pebbles of multicolored pulp ] —
A porcupine walks gaily down the street, left to right, on a promenade of no hurry.
Sans umbrella!
In fact, its strut belies royal heritage: this fashion-runway stroll features glistening, iridescent quills, waving elegantly with each step, even as the porcupine putters on tiny — no doubt velvet-padded — paws.
Omnidirectional spikes jutting from its body ensure zero interference as The Emperor approaches you, then passes on towards the pile of logs — searching and sniffing.
// Side B //
So happy you’ve tuned in! That song was “the peregrine and the porcupine”1, excerpted from 20 June 2022’s morning composition and titled today, for this issue2.
It’s been seventy-one immense days of the year so far — I have two epic announcements queued up for you. But hold up, one moment: I’m humming and spinning like a gyroscope in gratitude, for your readership + listenership . . . so first, I want to say thank you for being here, and I’d love to hear what you’re noticing, getting up to, and feeling excited about lately.
Let me know in the comments or in a reply to this issue via email — I’m excited to hear from you!
Piano Liberation Workshop — All Aboard!
Ten years into teaching jazz piano privately, I’m inviting you to join me for a thrilling new chapter. Are you interested in improvising on the piano or keyboard? I’d love to introduce you to the most fun (and simplest) path that I’ve found.
I believe exploring the piano should be as intuitive as when we were given crayons and paints as kids.
The Piano Liberation Workshop is cohort-based course, open online to the public in small groups at a time. It’s for . . .
total beginners who’ve never played an instrument
intermediate players exploring new ways to create
classical musicians who want to develop impro + groove
music-lovers who once took lessons, then stopped (that was me 🙋🏻♂️)
unsure if you’d fit? head to PianoLiberation.com or send a message 📮
The first five-week course takes place in April, with our first intro meeting on Wednesday, March 27th.
If you’d like to know all the details — pricing, teaching credentials, my exact plan to tailor the workshop to your needs — visit PianoLiberation.com. Your questions might be answered there; if they’re not, I’m just an email or substack-chat away.
Proof of Play
Today marks the grand opening of a new project — it’s my 🍩 Theory of Everything Bagel 🥯, so crazy it just might “work” — called Proof of Play. Every day (!) I’m posting a clip of music from the studio, plus a photograph that I took On This Day in the current or previous year, plus notes on my writing time (music and words), and . . . soon I’ll pack in a few more ingredients too, to expand the scope of the project into a well-rounded package with a bow wrapped around just-so.
Why do this?
Readers of these behind-the-scenes Side Bs might know that I’ve wondered incessantly about what to do with the music composed near-daily. The same question has grown louder for photos I’ve taken, and words written, too.
Simultaneous to these inquiries: each week I believe more strongly that the process is the art more than the art is the art. In other words, what if what we think of as art — the end result, the painting or album or movie — is more a byproduct of all the art where it truly happens: all the elbow grease, all the decisions made, all the insights unveiled?
When it comes to music, the way that a song changes its essential character, over different performances, clarifies for me the idea that art is the process of making it.
This is especially true for highly improvised music.
And even more, if one’s intent is to create an improvisatory language — which is what’s happening for my next album, The Tributary . . . which, in turn, presents its own challenge: “Um, how do I make the album show the language?”
(I guess speaking it makes more sense than describing the grammar.)
Though today’s the ribbon-cutting for Proof of Play, I’ve already been doing it (publishing a daily photo scored with music) for 12 days, and I’ve already been describing “the words and music I’ve been writing” for 51 days.
I needed to try it for a while, to know that I could keep it up sustainably. Indeed, it started without any plan: the writer Dickie Bush began publishing a log of his daily writing since the new year, inspiring me to ponder: what the heck, I’ll give that a shot, and log music too. Three days in, I began seeing how it could unify my efforts to:
show process,
show myself in a way that doesn’t interfere with creation or sprout expectations (i.e., mostly stuff I’m already doing),
practice publishing more effectively, reduce perfectionism, etc., and
combine my loves for creating music, photos, and words.
Why — that’s more evidence that art is process!
The journey of daily publication has weathered hardship. I spent the month of February in South Africa on-the-road, and though it was already difficult to journal each day, keeping up with composition each day was the thorniest. Yamaha Reface CPs are fine travel keyboards, but zero-music days proved unavoidable. On the 17th, I posted my only double-zero (so far) —
Day 48 log: What I played + wrote today — Sat, 17 Feb 2024
Total studio time: 0 hours words + 0 hours music
First day of zeroes across the board! The day would come, to not be able to make studio time at all — I feared it, then saw its inevitable arrival, then found how to embrace the challenge of its existence.
I went from resenting the idea of breaking the streak I’d worked to build, to contemplating extreme measures to make time and post the log — this would have involved a lengthy trek into civilization, leaving the company of people I’d traveled across the world to see — to clarifying a more wholesome ordering of priorities for myself.
What I realized: being scared of hiccups, interruptions, or . . . living . . . isn’t a good heuristic for making choices.
. . .
In the end, I’m happy to surface this “failure” — it’s part of the voyage.
There’s lots more to say about Proof of Play, and constant puzzles to puzzle — for instance, where and how to publish the entries? You, treasured reader, deserve front-row access to whatever I’m up to — in particular, a privileged seat relative to the instagrams and twitters of the world — so ideally they go on substack first.
But I don’t envision publishing Campfire Sparks daily. So the happy medium for now is probably a recap of the entries from the previous week, at the bottom of each issue . . . like the current Issue 16.
one more thing . . .
I’m mulling ways for you to vote for entries that you like + you’d like me to develop further, record and put on an album, and other possibilities. The idea: if clips go on to do something — make it onto a record, get synced to a short film, etc. — all of its supporters receive credit and monetary royalties, if there are any, in return.
Above are Proof of Play music postcards March 4–10; you can check out the four days prior to those on youtube, where I’ve just started catch-up broadcasting.
(I believe the term of art process for that is “reruns”.)
Comment with your thoughts — and catch me up on what you’re up to also 💌
Does anyone hear the Coldplay reference?
Scored with a splendid rain soundscape, recorded by Frenkfurth in Slovenia.
Even if they aren't up to your usual standards, your pieces are quite interesting (I like how you incorporated the 7th chords with the repeating motifs), and certainly better than what I can muster on a weekly basis. So I'd say your grind is already paying off.
By the way, I agree with your notion that art is the process rather than the end result. See, the weird thing about creation is that when you create something, it doesn't always turn out exactly as you'd pictured it in your head. Maybe that's a headache for some people, but I prefer to think that those obstacles end up making your art stronger, even if it can get really frustrating.
As an example of what I mean, think about writing a novel and gradually seeing your own characters make decisions that you never would have thought they could've. Or struggling with a musical piece until you take a melody from your previous work doodles, smash it in and then suddenly, you've got a fully fledged song in your hands.
That process of making something and trying to make it work -- it may not be of any value to the end consumer, but it is infinitely more valuable to the person making the art.
Anyway, all the best with Proof of Play.