"Elegy For My Father" released on ReverbNation! • November 27, 2014, 8:15 AM

As long-time fans may already be aware, today is the fourth anniversary of my dad's death. In the years since then I worked sporadically on an elegy tune for him, and it was one of our Cayenne Spice gigs that motivated me to finish it—a gig that was originally scheduled for this evening. (The gig later got moved back a week for budgetary reasons; as a result, "Elegy For My Father" will be debuting in public performance on the anniversary of Dad's funeral instead.) However, I also wanted to do a recording of the tune, which I've released today on ReverbNation.

Instrumentation

Right from day one I wanted the trumpet to be the primary lead instrument in the tune, as Dad used to play the trumpet in dance bands in his younger years, including in an ensemble called the Winnipeg Grenadiers. I also wanted to score the piece only for instruments that he owned, bought for us or helped me buy, and for this recording I played only those specific instruments:

Trumpet. This recording represents my trumpet debut after only nine and a half weeks or so of daily diligence in developing my chops on that instrument. While I could have gotten a professional trumpeter to play the trumpet part on his own horn, I felt that playing the part myself on Dad's horn, a 1940 Holton Collegiate, makes the tune more special—as far as I can tell, this trumpet is all that's left of Dad's musical voice.

Clarinet. Dad bought me my Bundy student model clarinet around September 1977 when I started taking music in middle school. It was my first exposure to the concept of transposing instruments in terms of keys other than C. Though I don't play my clarinet as regularly as I did in school, I believe my background on that instrument has helped me develop my trumpet chops. Arnold Schwarzenegger has written that if you've had muscle mass at one time, it's a lot easier to get it back than it is to develop it in the first place, and I believe this to be true of embouchure development.

Piano. Though the first piano I learned on was an old Weber piano that had once had a player piano mechanism, Dad replaced it around 1974 with the Baldwin console piano that we have today. You'll notice that it sounds a bit out of tune on some notes. I considered having the piano tuned for this track, but I decided to leave it the way it was, as it had already gone through long periods of time in between tunings.

Guitar. This is a B&S Grange student-model guitar that Dad bought for my siblings in the late 1960s. B&S Grange was a Toronto-based manufacturer known for their el-cheapo guitars (our guitar would have cost something like $25-40 in those days). My siblings never got very far with the instrument, and so it got passed on to me.

Keyboard 1: Roland JX-8P. This was the first keyboard that Dad helped me buy, back in the summer of 1985. Though it was state-of-the-art for its day, competing mainly with the Yamaha DX-7, its sounds might be somewhat primitive by today's standards, but it does still have a few warm pad sounds, such as the string-like patch that enters in the intro.

Keyboard 2: Technics SX-KN1600. Dad helped me buy this "MIDI workstation" keyboard in January 1999, mainly because some colleagues of mine felt that some of the sounds on the JX were out of date, particularly the piano and organ sounds. (Indeed, the piano sounds on the JX don't even sound like a piano in the sense that today's keyboards' piano sounds do, but that was the best the technology of the day was able to produce.) For "Elegy", I used the Technics keyboard mainly for a string sound that enters with the clarinet.

Initially I also had the idea to include a "hot potato"-type ocarina toward the end, which would double the trumpet melody after the second entry of the clarinet. Dad had kept a chest full of old stuff, including the ocarina, and ages ago he opened up the chest and showed its contents to me. At the last minute, though, I decided to keep the ocarina out of the final mix—first of all, I wasn't able to get it out in time, and second, I wasn't sure to what extent Dad would have actually played it himself. I don't even know if it plays in the range I had in mind!

Tune structure

The intro begins with a piano ostinato on D-A-D-D-E-A-D ("Dad dead") that is later sometimes used by the strings. This ostinato was the very seed from which the rest of the song sprang.

Right from day one I had the idea to play the trumpet part myself, but at the time I wrote the trumpet part I had a limited playing range of about written middle C to the D an octave above it (and at the time my intonation was, as you might guess, absolutely terrible by professional standards), and I wanted to write the melody with that range limitation in mind.

If the basic melodic contour of the clarinet lines sounds familiar, it should be. At Dad's funeral I played "Wind Beneath My Wings" as part of the eulogy. While I didn't want to out-and-out quote the song here, I wanted to write a line that would be at least reminiscent of its chorus.

The trumpet does the actual quoting, beginning with "Concierto de Aranjuez" at the beginning of the trumpet solo. This quote doesn't have any special sigificance in terms of Dad, but I decided to include it because Miles Davis had played it on his album Sketches of Spain. The solo ends with a quote from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which I suppose could be a link to Dad in that an abridged version of the suite appears in Disney's first Fantasia film, which Dad would have taken me to see in the early 1970s.

For each phrase of the clarinet's second entry, the trumpet continues to quote material, this time presenting snippets of material that collectively represent Dad's involvement in my early development as a musician. The response to the first phrase is a quote from a Mary Hopkin song from 1968 called "Those Were the Days", not to be confused with the song done by Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton for the opening title sequence of All in the Family. Hopkin's song was credited to Gene Raskin, who wrote an English set of lyrics to the Russian romance song "Дорогой длинною", composed by Boris Fomin with lyrics by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii that deal with reminiscence upon youth and romantic idealism. The earliest recordings of the song, both in the original Russian, date from the 1920s. In its Russian form it was featured in the 1953 British/French movie Innocents in Paris. When Hopkin's version was released, it became what I consider to be the first song for which I was able to pick out the melody and play at least part of on the piano. Perhaps it was at least partly because of this that Dad started having me take music lessons.

The response to the second phrase is a quote from an Al Hirt tune called "Java", which was written by Allen Toussaint, Alvin Tyler and Freddy Friday and appears on Hirt's 1963 album Honey in the Horn. Dad had a few Al Hirt albums in his library, including Honey in the Horn, and the CBC's Ottawa affiliate sometimes played the song on their broadcasts in the early 1970s. While it might seem a bit anachronistic to place the "Java" quote after "Those Were the Days", I wasn't exposed to "Java" until well after I started taking music lessons in the early 1970s.

The response to the third phrase is a quote from my own tune "A Little Song", a solo piano piece I wrote when I was about ten or eleven years old and gave to Dad as a birthday present or something. Since the tune is pretty short in its original form, I played it at Dad's funeral in a "theme and variations" version.

For the final instance of the main theme, the clarinet doubles the trumpet. This is where I originally intended to use the ocarina. For the time being I substituted a tenor recorder, which Dad had also given me. But, as I noted above, I decided at the last minute not to include the ocarina. In addition to the reasons I listed above, there was the artistic aspect to consider. Here the ocarina would have come, late in the tune, when ideally it should be introduced earlier in the tune if I'm going to use it at all, just as a writer doesn't leave the introduction of an important character to the end of a story. So I started thinking about the clarinet. From day one I had included it as a secondary lead instrument, and it didn't really make sense that I should move it aside in favor of the ocarina in the last part of the tune. Instead, I decided to double the melody on the clarinet rather than on the ocarina to create something of a "passing the torch" effect—with Dad gone, I'm pretty well carrying the musical torch in the family.

I used to be co-administrator for the fan website of the now-retired German singer-songwriter Kira, who once said of songwriting: "If you write your own material, there's a personal meaning and the greatest sense of credibility behind every word and every note. And that's also the most important factor for me—it doesn't matter whether I'm listening to music or writing it. A song has to say something to me, be honest and touch me." And I think that with "Elegy", I've written in that way to a greater degree than I usually do. Dad is in my thoughts every day, and on this anniversary of his death I think of him even more. Rest in peace, Dad...

I got together with my "Loving Friends" co-lyricist and co-performer and very dear friend Mary Panacci last week and talked to her about posting the song to ReverbNation, and she gave me the green light. I posted it there last week, and it's available here.

While I was on my vacation in Toronto last week I got a call from one of the saxophone players in Afrodiction, the Afrobeat band I had been playing in last year. He has some keyboard ability and was asked to sub for the regular pianist in doing the music for a Presbyterian service in Barrhaven, but didn't think he could learn the material in the amount of time he had, and so he called me. As it turned out, I already knew half the material he sent me, and would easily be able to sight-read the rest. There will be times when both the regular pianist and our sax player will not be available for future services, and for those our sax player offered me the opportunity to fill in. Because our Hotter than Ice rehearsals are on Sunday afternoons, I won't always be able to do those gigs, but I'm looking forward to those times when I can fill in.

As for the choral project, I finished compiling the Sunday-specific choral music suggestion data from the NPM website into a 192-page alphabetical listing of choral pieces, only to find that there is very little of the material in our library that matches what is contained in the NPM listings. So now that I'm back from Toronto I'm starting the same process, only this time using the listings on the Cantica Nova website. This time around I'm not going to be processing the material at as breakneck a pace as I did the NPM stuff—first of all, the Cantica Nova site appears to have less material to key, and once I get the data all keyed I'm planning to spread the sorting process over several days rather than the four and a half that I spent on the NPM sort. However, I want to get the choir started on their choral material, and so I just had them begin work on the Healey Willan arrangement of "Sing to the Lord of Harvest" last night.

So it's back to the regular grind for the most part—and with new solo gigs on the horizon, and me climbing the ReverbNation charts little by little, things are starting to look up. Stay tuned!

Well, as those of you who have been checking out my ReverbNation page over the last week or two may have noticed, I've been climbing the ReverbNation pop charts in the Ottawa area lately—from well outside the #30 spot as late as June 18 to the #13 spot as of today (July 7). Currently, among ReverbNation users, I'm ranked #212 nationally (up from #272 last week), #4,257 globally in the pop genre (up from #5,199), and #82,459 globally across all genres (up from #102,135).

And this isn't the result of things just "happening". When I first established my ReverbNation page in March 2011, I was in a sort of "testing the waters" mode. Back then, I had only one tune, "Horizons", posted, and while I started out in the #87 position, I left the page unmaintained for about three years, and my rank dropped to hovering in the #100-125 range. Then in the middle of this past May I decided to pull out some songs that I had partially written, plus others that I had completely written but whose productions I felt needed to be tweaked or completely redone from scratch, and spend a month and a half or so getting them ready to post to public forums. In rough order of composition, here's the material I currently have posted:

• "We'll Be Proud of You" (written circa 1988; lyrics slightly revised May 2014). I wrote this one in the summer of 1988, while I was living in Toronto. My brother was engaged at the time, but there was some uncertainty as to whether I was going to be able to get home for his wedding. I ended up becoming one of the ushers at the wedding, but I had already jotted down some ideas for a song that became this one. In it the narrator praises a bride and groom on their wedding day.

• "Maniac Driver" (music written circa 1989, lyrics written May 2014). After I got my first batch of professional audio equipment in October 1989, this is one of the first songs I wrote and partially recorded. However, the lyrics ended up remaining incomplete for years, and I wasn't exactly satisfied with the backing track as I had recorded it back then. In May 2014 I finally bit the bullet and hammered out a complete set of lyrics, which maintained the theme I'd had from day one: the narrator in the song admonishes an acquaintance of his for driving too fast—and driving drunk. References are made to R.I.D.E., an anti-drunk driving campaign called Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere; and to the LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

• "Summer's Day" (written in the mid-1990s). The makers of the Intel chip were the inspiration behind this one. The first four notes of the ostinato were borrowed right from their little audio logo, which I always felt to be incomplete by itself. C-F-C-G, in my mind, always wanted to resolve to A. So I made it resolve—and the rest is history.

• "Moonstream" (written circa 1996). This instrumental came about in the wake of my discovery of the New Age artist Yanni. In the 1990s my dad would sometimes come down to the basement to watch a hockey game and do his exercises at the same time. In between periods he would flip through the channels to see if there was anything else interesting. One evening he stumbled across what I would later learn was Yanni's "Live at the Acropolis". He thought I might be interested because he mistook violinist Shardad Rohani for a clean-shaven Jean-Luc Ponty. Anyway, I watched the show with him. At one point Yanni played his song "Nostalgia", which uses quintuplet-note lines and single string chords for each beat. I thought, "I can write a song like that." And "Moonstream" is the result. It may use the same rhythmic and orchestrational gimmick as "Nostalgia", but the melody is completely different. This production was recorded around 2000, in the same sessions that saw the production of my promo kit CD Reaching for the Stars.

• "Love in My Heart" (music written in the mid- to late 1990s; lyrics written May 2014). Nowhere in my experience have I ever encountered a jazz ballad whose lyrics are centered around soccer. If you became a fan of a professional soccer player after he/she scored the winning goal in stoppage time after a scoreless ninety minutes, this song is for you. I have no clue when exactly I wrote the music for this one, but it was after I left Humber, and long before I "discovered" soccer. The first set of lyrics I wrote for it skimmed over the origin of the teddy bear in around 1902-03, but these lyrics didn't really work for me. Then came soccer and the perfect player and game to write lyrics about. However, I'm going to be a Carly Simon about the identity of this player (a la "You're So Vain")...though I'm sure a few of you may have already guessed who she is.

• Horizons (written circa April 2000). I still have the original "sketch" recording of the main theme of this tune, dated April 23, 2000. To me the music suggests paddling down a quiet lake in the early evening, or taking in the view from the top of a large hill. Even the notation of the sustained E♭'s in the string part visually resembles a thrown rock skipping across a pond—it, too, is going somewhere. So I felt "Horizons" to be a logical title—and that's good, because I'm not usually all that great at coming up with titles for instrumental tunes.

• Everything to Your Heart (written circa 2000). This recording is also from the Reaching For the Stars sessions. In it the narrator notices things are getting serious in his relationship with his girlfriend, and he wants to take the relationship to the next level.

• Blues in 7/8 (written in the late 1990s or early 2000s). This tune arose at a time when I was playing in a blues band and developing an interest in the new age artist Yanni, many of whose tunes are in 7/8. I designed the guitar part to be a no-brainer to play, although it's a bit advanced for me to play on the guitar, as I'm just an advanced beginner at the instrument. "Blues in 7/8" may not be a "traditional" blues in the sense of, say, John Lee Hooker or Jeff Healey, but many jazz tunes that use a blues chord progression have the word "blues" in their titles even though they could hardly be considered blues tunes in that sense either.

• Gotta Get Together (music written 2007; lyrics written May or June 2014). This song grew in September 2007 out of the G-A-G-A-G motif so prominent in the melody. At the time I was in the middle of an experiment to see how far I could take the idea of building songs around a motif. The song went through three or four different bridges, including one incorporating the chord riff of the Gipsy Kings' song "Moorea" (C Em Gm D E♭ Cm D/F# D), before I settled on the current one. From day one I wanted the lyrics to be about the idea that we as a global people should take our cultural, religious, and philosophical differences and run with them, forming a global "army of light" to fight against the very concept of war, rather than have some of us fight each other over those differences. Part of the reason the lyrics took so long to write is that I wanted them to alliterate on G where the G notes appear in the above-mentioned motif—and if you're going to write a killer musical hook, you need a killer lyric hook to go along with it.

• The World Tomorrow (music written July 2013; lyrics written May or June 2014). This song, whose melody was probably subconsciously inspired from the Bee Gees' early 1970s song "Alive", came as a result of a riff I had come up with while fiddling around on my five-string bass guitar. This song is a sort of secularized commentary on how we as a society should help the needy—and not just when prompted to by charitable organizations or the impending arrival of Christmas either. Where do we want to end up after we die, in heaven because we do certain things to help these people, or in hell because we don't? Initially the lyrics weren't intended to echo Matthew 25:31-46, but as I turned more and more to that passage for ideas of how we can help the needy, I decided to let the lyrics evolve in the direction they were going.

There is an eleventh tune, called "Loving Friends", which I also reworked during these June 2014 sessions, but as my dear friend Mary Panacci is co-lyricist and co-performer with me on that song, I feel it only fair that she be the first to hear the reworked version before I release it online. Besides, she may have her own ideas as to how she wants her contributions released. I'll probably be able to post it after I see her in late August.

Except for "Everything to Your Heart", which I recorded in 2000, I did all the vocal tracks within the space of a week. Admittedly, that's not a lot of time, but as I mentioned, I was a little bit pressed for time, as I had a couple of other projects I wanted to do before the end of the summer (more on those shortly), and I was anxious to get the songs out. On top of that, the website of the now-inactive German singer-songwriter Kira had an entry in February 2008 that, loosely translated, began: "New songs are like new varieties of chocolate. They have to be tested and tasted before they can be considered 'locked' into the assortment." So I feel sites like MySpace and ReverbNation can be considered "testing grounds" for my songs in their "somewhat rough production" form—after all, I don't think it economically intelligent to spend time and money in a "big" studio producing recordings of songs that are not going to appeal to many people, especially at a time when illegal MP3 downloading is hurting CD sales to the point where a lot of record companies are starting to have less incentive to sign and develop new talent.

With that in mind, I posted much of the material to ReverbNation around June 28, and my stats have started to slowly snowball. I don't intend to make the material available for sale just yet, as I eed to determine a fair market value to sell those recordings for. In addition, before I can "fully" release the material yet, I have to approach the musicians' union to find some way to "file" the songs with them so that they can collect the appropriate royalties on my behalf if any of the songs are used in a movie or whatever.

As for the other projects I alluded to earlier, one of them is the choral revitalization project. I've determined what material the choir can sing, both in terms of difficulty level and in terms of accommodating their vocal ranges, and now I'm in the process of creating a database of the Sunday-specific anthem suggestions on the website of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. This process should take me another four weeks or so, and then after that I will be putting together a rehearsal schedule for this material that will cover the entire three-year liturgical cycle. And of course I'm going to Toronto toward the end of August, and so I have some work to do in preparation for that. So how far am I going to make it into the charts in the next few weeks? Let's wait and see!

The last five and a half months have seen progress made, changes made, and a hiatus started. But in the midst of this, it's still steady as she goes.

First of all, as you've probably noticed, I've completed the preparation of my Irish material, ultimately getting it performance-ready in four and a half months. Then I realized I should make it promo-ready as well, and so I spent an additional two weeks laying down solo tracks and vocal tracks. I even bought an acoustic guitar, a Fender C-60, partly to lay down one of the solo tracks (and mainly to replace my old B&S Grange acoustic). I'm thinking of expanding the basic concept to expand my repertoire even further, using material in other genres—Motown, 70's material, 80's material, artist-specific tributes and so forth.

However, I won't be able to get started on that right away, as I'm still going full speed ahead on the choral revitalization project at St. Augustine's. I completed the process of entering into my notation software all the pieces in our choral library, which also took four and a half months. Then I created a series of CDs of this material for the choir, mainly to give them an idea of the scope of the material they will be working from and to give them ideas of older material they as a choir have not done in ages and could still bring out. Now I've begun a two-week project to gather the lyrics of each of the pieces, along with preliminary, piece-specific data regarding biblical references. Then I intend to determine how feasible it will be to do this material, considering factors such as difficulty level, the vocal ranges of each choir member and the section-specific vocal ranges called for in each piece. Then I intend to determine what pieces can be performed on what Sundays, and then create a three-year schedule for rehearsing and performing these pieces. Big job, yes—which is why I figure I will need all summer to get that preparatory work done.

Meanwhile, Nile Groove has decided to go with another keyboard player, wanting to go in another direction. Hotter than Ice has augmented its roster with a second keyboardist, with whom we've worked before, the idea being to free me up to play horn lines and add some diversity to our repertoire. And while Afrodiction has been struggling to keep its momentum going, there are plans to revive the band some time this spring. But to paraphrase Horatio Nelson, I expect that every musician will do his duty.

So it's steady as she goes despite being in something of a state of flux. Stay tuned!