COMPOSER'S NOTES
For "Corky Siegel's Traveling Chamber Blues Show" CD
Opus 17.2
This composition offers a juxtaposition of the blues
and classical flavors with a melodic 16th note figure on the first
violin and a Born in Chicago kind of rhythm on the harmonica.
If you listen closely you can hear a bluesy riffing in the string
quartet. The live performance style of the piece is more blues than
classical. This is because our first violinist Jeff Yang, stands and wails. Also the
work ends with a blues harmonica cadenza with stops which are performed in
a very traditional blues style. The ending also includes some grunting on the down
beats by the members of the string quartet. Sometimes I get a little crazy and carried
away on this tune ... which I think is a good thing.
Five Planets In Harmonica Convergence
5/4 time, Pentatonic scale
(5 notes), 5 musicians and a blues harmonica player with five fingers on each hand. This piece
features some tongue blocking techniques. I am learning these from Joe Filisko
who also prepares and tunes my harmonicas. I thought the tongue
blocking techniques would work
very well with Chamber Blues to help contrast the clean classical flavor
with a more funky blues feel -- more like that of Little Walter and a
little less like the clean single note style that I am known for.
Learning this technique is like learning a new instrument for me. But I
have always been in love with this sound. As Holly explains in the MY TRAVELS ... article,
this work was commissioned by the Adler Planetarium and was premiered in the Zeiss Sky
Theater. This place has a history of people reclining in silence and looking up at the
sky. All the vibes of silence resonate intensely in that room. What an amazing place
to play music.
Manhattan Island
As my wife Holly said in the MY TRAVELS ... article,
this was written and arranged well before 9/11. But the lyrics
are hauntingly reflective of that time i.e. and spot the
signal smoking from my suffocated fire. Randy and the rest of us
were listening to Dr. L. Subramanium the great East Indian violin
master, on the way to our gig at Chautauqua. It is not surprising that
Randy's improvisation on this tune came out with quite a lot of tandori
flavor. The drone in the piece was composed as an inspiration from the
tours I was honored to do with Dr. L. Subramanium. So this recording of
Manhattan Island just fell together on it's own in a number of ways.
The arrangement brings visions of Manhattan Island on a dark raining
night. I play the part of a broken heart sitting on a curb in Manhattan
feeling like the world is about to end in a puff of loneliness.
Serenade
The great Richard Halajian composed this work - this
beautiful work. In MY TRAVELS ... Holly offers some very interesting
background about how this piece was written from an old folk song
Richard had played for his dad as a kid. The piece is very classically oriented with flashes of
blues and jazz wonderfully cooked together. The end of the piece gets very
jazzy ... then bluesy. Richard let me play a blues harmonica solo toward the end.
But the piece features Nell Flanders with a
cool pizzicato blues feeling riff backing me up for a bit and then Nell takes off on a drive-by
viola solo. You need to see Nell play this piece ... so close your
eyes.
The Woofy Girl Stroll
I call this the Blues Bolero. This piece
was very much fun to compose. It is basically a 13 minute 2 chord work
that focuses entirely on the blues shuffle. The changes go from the
Tonic to Sub-Tonic, or I to IV, or in this case from G to C to G to C to
G to C and then once in a while I throw in a diminished chord just to
have mercy. So there is not much to the harmonic structure. But blues
is very melodic. The contrapuntal blues melodies running parallel to
each other in blues arrangements create a unique harmonic structure spontaneously and
coincidentally on their own. For instance you have a bass line, a
rhythm guitar line, a vocal line and a lead guitar line that all
interweave with each other. The harmonies are not planned like in
choral music. They just happen on there own because of the melodic
paths of each instrument. On paper it doesn't look like it is going to
sound good because it breaks so many rules for tonal music. But boy does
the ear love it! I wanted to see what kind of melodies would
be revealed even if I stuck to only the I and IV chords with emphasis on
the 6th on the piano accompaniment for the standard shuffle pattern.
Even though the harmonic structure was very limited and rigid, I
loved the melodies that came out. The next level in this composition
was the rhythm aspect. I wanted to experiment with multiple and varying
rhythms that one would normally expect to be in perfect unison and
steady. But instead I took many opportunities to juxtapose, not just
different rhythms as such, but to juxtapose different ways of
playing those rhythms. I.e. rhythms that are even against rhythms that are uneven,
triplet against sixteenth feel... and so on. And then there are places where the players move
independently from even to uneven, triplet feel to sixteenth to dotted
to doubly dotted figures. What fun this was to write and what fun this
is to play. The harmonica solo further continues this vacillation of
rhythmic interpretation. You will notice how the change in rhythm
approach from one phrase to another keeps the rhythmic excitement going.
I really love playing this piece. A number of traditions in music use
this concept but it is not talked about very much for some reason.
Train
Well. What can I say. Rollo Radford wrote and arranged
this piece. I helped a little with the arrangement. This is a hip-hop
song in waltz time. How about that? I think the words to this song are
really special. Somehow Rollo can sing about a mugger and make it fun.
He plays the mugger in this song. You must read the lyrics on the liner
notes on the CD. There is no one like Rollo. Listen to Train
as much as you like. Get your hit of Rollo and be happy!
Food for thought: We have been watching people murder each other on stage for centuries, in movies, on TV and now in video games. Yet when people sing about it some people forget it is only drama and that it is supposed to be entertaining and compelling. A friend of mine said; "You can show the most horrid murders when people kill police and innocent people on TV but if you say the word gun in a song you are in trouble." So if there was any better person to sing a song with the words gun, smash, snatch, and jail and get the right vibe across and make it fun ... it is Rollo!
Opus 4 (1/2 of Opus 8)
This is a live version of the second half
of Opus 8 that was originally recorded on our first Alligator record
just called; Corky Siegel's Chamber Blues. This is one of the works
that involved some improvisation in the strings. So the work is played
differently each night. In this case the violins go at each other in a
kind of musical argument. We allow the 2nd violin to win. But
everything works out fine because the blues harmonica takes over for
about 10 minutes and everyone forgets there was ever an argument. This is because
everyone is afraid I am going to have a heart attack any minute. The prevailing
bass line (on the cello) was originally played by Chuck DeMeyer at the
fade out section of the song on my Solo Flight recording called Midnight
Radio. I liked the bass line so much that I wrote one of the first
(actually the third) Chamber Blues piece around it. I chose this piece
for the project because it is very friendly to a Corky style
of playing. I don't have to think about bar lines and chord changes.
I don't have to think at all. I just go.
Let this be the first interactive artist notes. Any questions? Write to me.
Yours,
Corky Siegel
