Eric at Play

I hadn’t done an improvisation to tape for a few weeks, which on the one hand is not a bad thing: I have a number of concrete ideas that are still waiting for a recording, and have made a few in the last couple weeks, too. In any event, I took about 15 minutes last evening and knocked this out.

I had intended to use some sort of tonal instrument, most likely a guitar, but decided against it. Percussion music is beautiful on its own terms. Even though I’m a drummer above all else, it took me some time to come to appreciate percussion for percussion’s sake. I got into John Cage a number of years ago, and read at one point a line of his that if you wanted to investigate sound, as opposed to tonality, you go with percussion.

I couldn’t agree more, and as I think about the future, I like the idea of the sound of percussion. At this point sound as sound tends to be a matter of electronics, of either sounds generated or manipulated with computers. I enjoy all that, as an upcoming post on Jari Pitkanen’s music will attest, but the problem there is that something is lost when the sound heard in music is not made by a human being directly. Something is gained, too, no doubt.

Airto’s work with Miles Davis is to me as good as this approach gets. He had his bag of tricks, so to speak, and used all sorts of percussion to add sound to Miles’ music. Bitches Brew is the most famous case-in-point, but to me Airto shined most brightly on Big Fun and Live-Evil.