A Buckaroo Spreading Love...

For reasons of nunya business type, I will keep my mouth shut about a certain crooked bastard and the deeds that will earn him and his cohort their place in hell. On an almost unrelated matter I congratulate Chuck Tingle wholeheartedly. Well played Doctor, well played indeed.

So, What Is The Purpose Of The Blues, Anyway?

So what is the purpose of the blues, anyway?

No silly, not the blues itself. That's like asking what the purpose of haiku is, or sonnets, or romance stories or symphonies or kittens or... On that level, it's too big.

No, what's the purpose of the blues scale? Now that I might be able to understand, if only a little.

First, remember that the "blue notes" have been around far longer than myth and legend tell. Bach knew of the blues, harmonically; take away the written scores and music itself, so far as we know it, has the blues. Built in, as it were.

But, what about that old devil itself, the blues scale? Flat the third, flat the fifth, flat the seventh, but keep the major third and major fifth and lose the major seventh. So, counting both notes of the octave, that's nine notes, as opposed to eight.

Pretty much the first true jazz improv class you get handed this. And, when you, I, ask what to do with it, you get told "Use it to solo the changes."

The blues changes. Four bars of the I, two of the IV, two more of the I. Then one bar on V, one bar on IV, and we turn around with one of I and one of V before starting it all over again. Or, at the end maybe we turn that last V to resolve on the I. V-IV-I-V.

In G, the I is G, the IV is C, and the V is D.

They tell you, the G blues scale lets you solo or compose a melody over all of these chords, the I the IV and the V, using just the nine notes of the blues scale. How does that make sense?

Well, if we flat the seventh of G, that's F (and we ditch the F sharp entirely). F natural is just the fourth of C, but it's the minor third of D.

If we flat the third of G, that's B flat (but we can keep the B itself, too). B flat is now the flat seventh of C, and it's now the minor sixth of D.

And finally, flat the fifth (or raise the fourth) of G (keep both the fourth and the fifth), that's C sharp. C sharp is the flat 9 of C, and it's the major seventh of D. Odd that last, because the V is almost always the V7, i.e. the flat/dominant seventh if we're keeping diatonic, but hold that thought.

Good lord, what have we done? I mean, it makes sense, once you hear it. Please, at this point, these harmonies are so embedded in our ears that we don't even have to think about it.

But now we are thinking about it. Look again at the V-IV-I-V, the final four bars of the sequence.

One trick the blues scale tells us we can do? Just play D-minor (the relative form) over the whole sequence. So (in D minor for the moment), emphasize the root (D) in the first bar, the flat seventh (C) in the second, the fourth (G) in the third, then back to the D and we're home.

And in the middle? That F natural tells us we're moving, and where, doesn't it? Hold it between bars one and two, and we're moving from the flat third of the V to the fourth of the IV. Or the B flat, from the minor sixth of V to the flat seventh of IV, similarly.

F natural, too, hold that over from the IV to the I and we're moving from the fourth of IV to the seventh of I. Bring in now the B flat and carry that to the last bar V and we're moving from the flat third of I to the flat sixth of V.

Ok, so it's a map. We could play chord tones only. An awful lot of melodies do just that.

Why the chromatic notes, then? Movement. They're signals, really. Ways of getting the ear from here to there in an interesting way.

It also hints at one more step we can do. Look at that C sharp again. Flat fifth of the I, flat ninth of the IV, major seventh of the D.

Look at the changes again in explicitly jazz terms: unless explicitly stated otherwise, they're always V7-IV7-I7-V7 in a jazz chart. So, C natural in the V, B flat in the IV, F natural in the I, flat sevenths the whole way through.

The flat ninth of D is E flat. Which is the flat third of C, and the flat sixth of G. Huh.

D minor 9, G minor 9. Hmm. Include the A flat (i.e, the flat ninth of G, the I) and we get C minor 9. v9, iv9, i9 in other notation. Take the hint the blues gives us, and now we have three minor 9 scales we can use to move around with.

Ok, that's a lot. But just remember that the chord tones need to hang around; melodies are hard enough to hold in your head as it is.

This looks for all the world like what we're really saying, then, is that if you keep chord tones anchoring, you can pretty much move between them however you want. And that is, for sure, what we're saying if we're playing jazz.

But look again at the way, say, B.B. King uses his "blue" notes. Emotively. Powerfully. The melodies are chordally driven, melodic, rhythmic, but then harmonically the King hits you between the ears with a flat sixth (13th if he's playing or singing way up there). Not randomly, purposefully. He's moving somewhere, sure.

But there, in that moment, sonically you're hanging forever in the blue between, in that space where the heart is forever lost. So yeah.

Maybe we have come back to the purpose of the blues.

One fool, a hill of my own making, assembly in progress

One fool, a hill of my own making, assembly in progress

I feel like I should be returning here to tell of deep, dark secrets. Of how I've spent the past few doing dangerous things, learning of intimate and disturbing knowledge.

Mostly, I've been reorganizing myself. That's the start of the year, right? That's what we do when we turn to resolutions. Or, as I said here a few months ago, in my case examining more generally how I spend my time.

Reading habits, music habits, writing habits. My day gig takes its share of time, a great deal of it what might be termed prep work. That's a lot of reading.

I'd like to say I'm a great note taker. I can't though, I've always had a poor habit. But my journals have been getting a bit more of a workout than they had been. Just like my feet have. I've put in a few miles walking lately.

More prep work, that. For the days ahead and behind, for the time I'd like to see. I found myself thanking Flea the other day.

I read his biography last year, though fair warning, that particular book is not what you might think. Oh, there's the musician's story, but only up to a certain point. Flea has a bit of the Zen fool's view of how he wants his story to unfold.

He makes a statement of purpose there along his way. Regarding the groove. Bassists, drummers, rhythm players know what he means.

Friday, I was about a mile into a cold walk around one of our little town parks when I hear a groove. Side effect, really, I thought at first, of a little bit more guitar practice lately.

A moment of rhythm that I'd bring back to Friday's guitar moments. A beat that resonated with my walk.

And washed away thoughts of the day gig, and this writing thing, and all those moments that rise up and demand you think of them now damnit. Like you can do something about them now, other than let them take over the circuit and drown out the world and the moment you're actually in.

It wasn't so much clarity, as just... a groove. A sound a noise and then the walk. There's a little duck pond, the park's along a creek and when they built the park, they cut out a little pond and retaining wall next to the creek.

It was cold except where the sun gave such a brief respite there. The ducks waved their tales at me, and the couple of other folks out braving the temperatures of the walk.

Shorts and a hoodie just barely did it. I felt a bit like the other shorebirds,white feathers and long thin orange legs and hooked beaks they the twenty of them sorted through the grass with. They ambled down to the water as I passed and bothered whatever lunch swam there.

What then does it mean to miss the forest for the trees? I made a late walk Wednesday evening, late enough that the sun chased its way to elsewhere while the softball teams did work, one kid shagging flys just about hit the back fence whenever she wanted to, a good level swing with an easy pull to left field just as pure as could be.

I never notice when it looks easy. Just the hard parts, the way the garbage cans don't get taken away because the guys never came back down our half of the street, or the way the fence always seems to need a repair just when there's something else to do.

Work days and days I can't get to the keyboard and days where I have to ask myself if I've ever even seen a guitar why can't my fingers find this shit anymore?

It never feels easy.

Until it does. For some random reason a few hundred words get up there on the sccreen and they look kind of good, don't they? Kind of like the way that pattern felt under my fingers, the little arpeggiated passage that ran chromatic through only one simple shift and then another.

Nobody notices? Ok. But I will be nobody today and someday, I say it, feel it, sing it, write it, play it.

Semi-Random Thoughts

Semi-random thoughts on coming up on the end of the year.

I'm fortunate that I can look around at this time of year and look for folks that can use a few bucks; not yet anywhere close to the point of one of my heroes, the gentleman around these parts that yearly manages to slip a double-eagle coin (i.e. one Troy ounce of solid gold) into a red kettle without being 'caught', but I'll get there someday. This year, due to the tornadoes in the U.S. that started this month, and the floods in Malaysia as I write, I'm reminded that, whatever my personal concerns about the International Red Cross and the Salvation Army, what those organizations do in the immediacy of a crisis is peerless, necessary, and a blessing. I can save my gripes about them for encouraging both organizations to strive for always getting better, not for getting in their way when they're doing the work.

That said, there are also many other folks involved in both crises, and the others besetting our little world. If you're able, seek out and give where you can. May any such blessings you are able to give, especially the good voice in your heart, be multiplied a thousand-fold.

On other subjects:

I couldn't help thinking of the Big Chill when I read Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Which means soundtrack. Which, for me at least, for this story I think the sountrack lies somewhere between, on the one hand, New Order, Depeche Mode, and Ministry, and on the other hand 30 Seconds to Mars, Linkin Park, and Evanescence? Maybe something more EDM, Prodigy? I dunno, there's a thousand threads here, which I know all seem like Shirley Manson's territory, but either way Nothing But Blackened Teeth just seems to demand music from this stream.

A mentor/hero/idol figure will always fuck you if you let the relationship stay that way for too long. There's a certain point where, if they're doing their job right, you're supposed to become their peer, not their employee/sidekick/follower perpetual. This I think is where the "Never meet your heroes/Never revisit your faves" bit comes from. We all have that moment where we see the feet of clay, whether it's a book the suck-fairy hit up while we weren't looking, or a person we 'should' have learned to treat with a little more distance. It's hard though, isn't it? There's almost always a reason we never wanted to think of them as just another member of this poor fallen mortal choir...

Working definition of a peer: not Reviewer 2. Nor really Rev 1. Rev 3, the one who kicks your ass and tells you what you did right, that's the magic combination.

Rev 2 just pisses me off, they're picking a fight just to pick one. Rev 1 I never know whether to trust someone who blows smoke up my ass; that, or I recognized the reviewer's writing and discounted it due the friendship. Rev 3, on the other hand, is where I always tried to land: here are the things I'm worried about, here's how to fix them, and here's where I think you really hit the good stuff.

Outside of an explicit peer setting, and my real and total life friends and family, how often have I encountered this?

Approximately never. Real collaborations are a rare and precious thing. I dunno, maybe I just have a different view of what collaboration means; more likely though is that, just like real love or real friendship, there are only a few people out there that we can really and truly work with on a peer-to-peer basis for extended periods. The literature examples I know of seem to bear this out.

Mark Lawrence's Red/Grey/Holy Sister trilogy was a fun ride. So too the autobiographies of Keith Richards, Dave Grohl, and Mel Brooks.

Holy crap did I read a lot of LitRPG/GameLit fiction this year. To the point of forgetting, which is normal for me when I find a new story niche to explore. Will I write any? No, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything from my sojourn here. A lot of fun stuff, but I'll be honest, there's so much here that I did read that I'm not really seeing any titles that I'd say "You've got to read this". Instead I'd have to say, just dive in, if you pick a "book 1" and can handle the conventions, and persist a little, you'll find your way I think. The genre definitely seems to have found its space, that's for sure.

A friend at work turned me onto a band called The Warning, from Monterey, Mexico, they're an absolute blast. A sister trio, imagine Heart if they'd had a sister on the drums and you're in the right ballpark. Very real chops here, and their songwriting approach is going in some really fun sonic directions as the sisters grow into their world. I really look forward to seeing where they're headed.

I'm looking forward to next year, and hoping that it comes up well for you all, dear readers, as well. We'll get there, I promise.

Sure it's a bumpy ride, but that's what we pay our nickles for, isn't it? I'm up for the ride if you are. Come with me, let's see what they've got.

Winter's Creeping

I keep trying to re-do some of my daily reading habits. Trying and failing, a little better each time.

Some years ago, I realized just how many web sites I had in my everyday bookmarks folder, and how much time I spent each day reading the whole lot. Even the ones that were updated only weekly or what have you.

So I pared them back quite a bit. Plus, over the past couple of years, I've even eliminated web browsing from the computer almost entirely. But there's the phone. Oy.

Even without setting up favorites or anything, thanks to autocomplete all I need to spend hours of web browsing is to have a vague memory of the web address, and autocomplete does the rest.

The problem isn't all of the wonderful writers that I visit, the problem is that I've only so many hours a day, and so much time for conversations that I'm actually part of.

So that's working about as well as you can imagine. Ah well, I'll get there.

So other than the oh so transient web, what have I been reading that's interesting? I've got quite a list of reads according to my electronic library, and the majority of them were well worth the hours of enjoyment.

But of those hours I've really enjoyed lately, the ones that I keep returning to are those I spent watching Michaela DePrince and company in a really wild and interesting version of Coppelia.

I won't get much into it, other than to say that melding animation with live ballet wasn't what I expected when I tuned in. I also wasn't expecting what is, if I understand the history correctly, traditionally a comedy ballet to have been turned into a Grimm Brothers version.

Unexpected. But absolutely delightful. My poor wife was traumatized, though, the dolls of the animation were far too much for her. Me I was enraptured; I suspect this is one of those that I will stop for whenever it comes around again.

The story itself came across in a way that I don't usually have in ballet. For me, like with most classical music, ballet is impressionistic, rather than the more direct realism of written or spoken text with respect to story.

The combination of live action ballet and animation here absolutely reached through my normal sort of broad focus taking it in viewing and came alive in the immediate sense of story, here and now. And without the sort of old-guy narrator that Nuryev and Baryshnikov's various appearences used to require to let us know what they were up to besides the obvious.

First time for me seeing Michaela DePrince dance as an adult, as well. I'd heard so many wonderful things about her since she came to the public attention, and I absolutely fell in love with her dancework.

Hers and the rest of the team, both the company itself and some of the marquis names that guested with Michaela.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying, if you like your fairytales and your ballet, seek out Coppelia from PBS/Great Performances, it's an absolutely must-see.

Am I Doing Alright?

Am I Doing Alright?

Always with the existential questions, Moriarty...

Yeah, I'm doing pretty ok. So what happened then?

Burnout, that's all. A little more than a year ago, I had one of "Those" calls from work. The kind where I have to tell my family I'm headed out on the road and I don't know when I'll be back. In this case, it was a fortnight and done, but by the time we managed it I'd reached the point where I was ready to ask the hotel what kind of rate they'd give me if I booked a month at a time.

I was kind of burnt out on the day job after that one. Fortunately, I recognized it for what it was and so, by the time I got a similar phone call a couple months back, I was both prepared in wellness and mind and body, and able to pace myself a little better over the weeks I was on the road. These sorts of emergencies are part of the gig, I get it.

Which is why much of the past year, for me, has been spent looking at my daily and re-working my mind. I've been through it before, you see. I'm susceptible to it, I spend years at a time focused on technical, difficult questions of the kind that require that kind of focus and thought.

When it catches up to me, I tend to lose a year or so before I get my head on straight again. At least this time I didn't run off to join the circus.

Ok, and what's that got to do with writing, then?

Well, dear reader, I thought I could plow straight on through with the writing. More or less anyway, I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't put out any books over that time period, just the short stories I posted here. So I did know that I needed to address myself to myself on the writing front, as well.

I just put it off, you see. Until I couldn't.

Or, rather, not the writing. But my writing was the most obvious symptom. The act of it is still just as joyous.

When I can drag myself to the chair. And there I finally recognized the problem. I couldn't get to the chair to write, except under pain of posting here.

I couldn't get to a chair to play guitar, either. And then it hit my reading again. See, that's what happened the second time I burnt myself out completely.

I couldn't read fiction anymore. A book a day reader, and I couldn't finish a goddamned one of them. Up against the wall, you bastards... and if it's never happened to you, I can't even begin to tell you how broken that can make you feel.

I went for years like that, only able to read a couple fiction books a year, and those only from authors I knew and trusted that I could sit with and get lost for hours. New voices were too hard a lift for me.

I got better. But now I'm not just reading, I'm writing. So I have to figure out what makes it fun.

The start of it was realizing that publishing a story here once a week had run its course for me. I've always had a problem with practicing; I can't do it. Not the way "normal" folks do it, anyway.

I have to play games with myself. And once a game becomes work or a habit, I have to change what I do and quick.

Or I'll quit and lose all progress. The grey matter's a funky old place where it sits between my ears I admit.

For now, what that means is that I will be going back to a much more free form of posting for a while. I'll need to be able to tell myself that I don't have to do anything that I don't want to.

Note well, that doesn't at all mean that I don't have story projects I want to do. Oh, no, dear reader, you're not getting away from me that easy. Keep the faith, all. Be well. Take care of yourselves, please, and when the voices in your head start warning you of trouble pay attention.

And thank you for sticking around.

Gone Fishin'

Nothing exciting going on, me and mine are doing ok. What's happened for story this week?

One of the perils of a day job, dear reader. My schedule has been drifting in some subtle ways the past couple months, year really now that I look at it. And it caught up to me this week.

No worries. I've actually already done most of the work involved in working out where I'm losing hours. So, expect a couple of weeks of hit or miss and we'll be back to whatever counts as normal around here.

Take care and be well.