After some 15 years of actively surfing the internet as American’s new greatest pastime, and amid the many exotic, random, entertaining, and provoking displays I’ve found sprawled around everywhere, I can recommend this one single online video of one of the extraordinary TED lectures as the most relevant and necessary moment to experience in any 20 minute period of your choosing:

TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson

Click on this link sometime, sit back, and give it your precious time.  Only 20 minutes.

This is seriously waaaay cool, one of the most bangup shizzies i’ve seen in a looong time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3kyNGVK-hI

Two different artists.  Blazing talent.

They call them nathan flutebox lee and beardyman.  That’s right.

poem by Frank O’Hara

Blue windows, blue rooftops

and the blue light of the rain,

these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff

pouring into my enormous ears

and the tears falling into my blindness

for without him i do not play,

especially in the afternoon

on the day of his birthday.  Good

fortune, you would have been

my teacher and I your only pupil

and I would always play again.

Secrets of Liszt and Scriabin

whispered to me over the keyboard

on unsunny afternoons! and growing

still in my stormy heart.

Only my eyes would be blue as I played

and you rapped my knuckles,

dearest father of all the Russias,

placing my fingers

tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes.

Rachmaninoff died just three days short of his 70th birthday, which was April 1.  He remains a favorite of mine.


 

The sound clip below is an exercise to test all the possible resolutions I can justify from a major-minor 7th chord, a.k.a. the “dominant 7th chord (V7)”.  In all of music, probably no chord has had greater harmonic use over the centuries than this particular sonority.  It contains the interval of a tritone, which is quite unstable, giving it the forward-moving sound that the ear expects to resolve into a more stable harmony.

But what is it really capable of?

The vast majority of the music literature resolves this chord back to the tonic, a fifth below.  Thus a V7 built on G will resolve either to a C Major or c minor chord.

Also common are “deceptive” resolutions to the sixth scale degree… C Major allows a resolution to a minor, and c minor can substitute A-flat Major.  Also very traditional.  So, that’s four unique chords that can be resolved by the same major-minor seven chord.

The clip below uses the same seventh chord to resolve to twelve unique chords.

“Modal mixing”, a.k.a. borrowed chords helps to explain why a sound that is not part of the home key can be interjected effectively, as it has the same tonic and is merely borrowing the rest of the chord from the parallel key… C Major and c minor are parallel to each other; same tonic (c) but different harmonies.

So I considered taking the two deceptive resolutions above, and merely substituting the parallel sound.  This allowed a-flat minor and A Major into the mix.  That’s now six chords.

The other six came from the truly wonderful phenomenon of tritone substitution.  This splendid technique, taken to new heights (if not introduced by) the Romantic composers of the 19th century, and enhanced greatly by 20th century Jazz, suggests simply enough that any two chords with the same tritone may resolve identically.  In the dominant 7th case, a chord removed by one tritone thus shares the same tritone… i.e. a G7 chord has the tritone of B-F, and so does a C#7 chord.   The unstable tritone is still present, and thus a sense of resolve is accomplished regardless the other notes of the chord.  Thus the C#7 resolves to all the 6 chords already mentioned.  And our original G7 chord then resolves to a whole new set of 6 chords.

I first starting thinking about this last August when I studied a work by Chopin, and decided last night just to line all the resolutions up in a row to see if in fact they all work.  I think they do, and this opens up a lot of harmonic possibilities.  It basically means that any dominant seventh chord can resolve to half of the keys/chords in tonal existence.  Really, that’s quite amazing, and they don’t usually teach that in college. (There are, in fact, resolutions even beyond these 12 within the literature of Chopin and other Romantics, but I am unable to explain them theoretically at the moment.  One might be tempted to say that they can resolve to truly anything.)

Click here for the string of 12 resolutions using the same V7 chord.  Every other chord will be identical, but each resolution will be unique.

sigh. this is the tough part of trying to keep a decent site up and running, functional with all these gadgets. it can all work perfectly, then something outside your control, like Adobe releasing new Flash players to computers around the world, breaks all the hard work.

Anyway, i am almost disappointed that it is fixed, since i started working on another method of delivery that put things more in my control.  but it too was time consuming, so.. another day.  i’ll accept this bandage for now.

for the 6 of you that visit and listen to my website each decade, you should now be back in business!

the best of holidays to everyone,

Andrew

I have learned that the new Flash 10 player for web browsers has changed enough that it is not backwards compatible with the music streaming software on this site.  So, if you are trying to play music and see no controls, hear nothing, etc.. this is the reason.  I am not sure when this will be fixed; there are hundreds, if not more, web owners having the same problem recently.  Adobe is taking no blame, unfortunately, so the solution may be hard to come by in the near term.

Flash 9 still works, however.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

You can say that again.

From Despair, Inc.

What do you get when you cross a live all-night jazz club with a chess tournament?

Then of course, you must mix in a ping pong court.

Add a bar and a bunch of Scrabble playoffs.

Complete the concoction with a large pool hall.

Finally, put the odd creation underground, and adorn it with a very chilled out dog that sleeps next to you on big lounge sofas.  What do you end up with?

Anyone?

The answer, of course, is Fat Cat, one of New York’s more unique and enjoyable dwellings, located quite conveniently in Greenwich Village, near a fantastic Thai restaurant (Wild Ginger) and numerous other late-night getaways.

Fat Cat keeps the party going until 5am, 7 nights a week.

Oh, and did I mention shuffeboard?!  I don’t think I did!!

6 years ago today, I was sitting in an apartment just across the Hudson river from New York City, thinking about what had happened 7 years ago today.

click here for the improv

Kate and I share our office at the New York Institute of Finance, 17th floor of Tower 2.

The view from the Staten Island Ferry, just outside the terminal, during 2001.

more pix

I needed to compile a 15-minute mix of past music work for something, and it was an all-day event of decision after decision.   A representative sampling of many styles I’ve explored since 1994, this is what I came up with.  After hours of deliberation.  I had to exclude many favorites.

Click here!