The Many Writings of

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my last show with the group, and I realized that, besides a few stories and answered emails, I haven’t communicated much to those of you who have asked to know about what I’m doing these days.

Well, I’m still working on this record thing. It’s not turning out to be what I had first envisioned, which was a sort of light mélange of original tunes and arrangements. What it has turned out to be is the mostly classical, or more accurately, classically oriented record I’d been compiling in my head and postponing for a long time.

I have had to gradually reconcile myself to the idea that this was really what I wanted to do – make a recording of music that has an even smaller niche than the one I had recently left. That was a bizarre realization, especially given that I had been offered a distribution deal for a record I hadn’t even made yet, but with the obvious expectation that said record would fall safely and happily within normal commercial boundaries.

But no. I had to – had to – go and do this. When I become possessed of an idea, when it takes root, I have to follow it. All I know it that I’m scratching a deep and powerful itch, and boy does it feel good. So I’m nearly done, hopefully, with the recording part of this thing and it’s going to be four song cycles, just a hair under the full capacity of a CD. Three of the four cycles are for voice and piano, and one is for electric bass and bass voice. (I hope that the mastering process will tame the bottom end of this thing so that it’s safe to play on your home stereo without having your woofers end up as smoking piles of garbage in your lap.)

That’s it – just one instrument and one voice – doing acoustic performances using a stereo pair of microphones in a beautiful room with a newly restored 1892 Steinway piano. Almost all the songs are just one take, with a very few tiny tweaks here and there because I can’t help myself.

Recording like that is challenging. It’s like being naked. There’s nothing else going on, and you can hear everything going on in the room, like piano bench squeaks, some of which have been left in the recordings for posterity. They are, alas, imperfect, as I am.

I have increasingly found myself drawn to simplicity and directness in music. I don’t mean that the music itself needs to be simple. I mean that I am drawn to the simplest presentation of it, with little production, a real performance that hopefully maintains the feeling of the piece intact, rather than an assemblage of lots of little bits and pieces that is cosmetically perfect but often loses the spirit of the music. That means going for entire renditions of songs with which I am happy. That takes a while.

Even in the world of so-called classical music, full performance takes are becoming the exception, with most projects falling victim to the seductive temptation of superficial perfection through the extensive editing capabilities of the digital medium. I think that sucks. The digital world is harsh enough on music even without the ‘cut and paste’ process that leeches the essence out of it. In an ideal world, I’d probably make a vinyl LP and be done with it. Now that would be true retro, and I’m sure that the twenty or so folks out there obstinately clinging to their old turntables would be elated.

So this is the program: There is one set of four songs that are arrangements of sea chanties. They’re in English. There’s a live performance from a while ago of one of them on the multimedia page of this site. There’s ‘Quatres Chansons de Don Quichotte’ by Jacques Ibert, which were originally written for the Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin to sing in a really terrible old movie about Don Quixote. The movie was a total bomb but the songs are great. The third cycle for voice and piano is the light and cheery ‘Songs and Dances of Death’ by Modeste Mussorgsky – some of my favorite music ever. Yeah, the French songs are in French and the Russian songs are in Russian, so I’m going to have full translations on this here site. The last cycle is a group of seven spirituals I’ve arranged as simple duets for my fretless bass and my voice. That cycle is definitely the one with the most low notes in it.

I dunno, but this project sure sounds like a chart-buster to me. Through the roof. That’s what makes me laugh. Why would I work so hard on something that’s virtually guaranteed to be a commercial failure? The obvious reason is that I’m crazy. The real reason is that I love this music and I have wanted to record it for a long time. I plan to have it finished in the fall. It’s great not having a deadline. But the best thing about the whole project, I think, is that everyone involved is doing it because they love music. My accompanist, a guy who seems to be in demand 24/7- 365, is carving time out of his intense schedule for our sessions. Our recordist is also a very busy man. And of course there’s the piano that required a home equity loan to finance its restoration. The only philistine in the mix is the piano tuner, who continues to demand a fee for his work. I don’t mind. My tentative title for the record is “Live from the Jake Sennett Mink Farm”. Explanation to follow.

I’m also working on a book of short stories, which is why none have appeared here for a little while. I’m mining the rich trove of ucky experiences that comprise a large chunk of my span on this earth. Many of them are funny, at least in the retelling, and I’m having a great time remembering, laughing, and banging away on my keyboard. In this area as well, I am getting wonderful help and support from a couple of extremely generous people who know all that there is to know about writing. No deadline with this project, either.

I thought it would be cool to have a book and a CD ready to roll at the same time, but I’m not at all sure that will be the case. The CD is quite a bit closer to finished than the book, and I’m not going to hold up the CD while I putz around trying to finish the book. I have no idea how long that might take, but I’m conscientiously trying to move it along.

One of the few things that occasionally sidetracks me is what I now call ‘hamstergate’. One day someone came up with the idea to write to me, asking questions about something obscure. In this case it turned out to be hamsters. I had never really considered hamsters, and although one or two have passed through my life, I never really bonded with one and knew precious little about them. I really think that someone sat down and thought to themselves, “Hmmm, Bear is such an effing know-it-all, I think I’ll start sending his erudite ass some questions that will either stump him or prompt him to write something funny. So I wrote a couple humorous responses to a few of the initial hamster inquiries, which thoroughly mystified readers who weren’t in on the initial cleverness. Some thought I was a newly discovered hamster meister, and others, I’m sure, thought I had finally lost what mind I have left. So listen, I don’t know anything about hamsters that you can’t find in a five-minute web search. That’s the truth. They have provided me with a little fodder for sly political and social comment, but they won’t fetch and you can’t eat ‘em. Well, you can but I wouldn’t.

The bottom line here is that thinking about hamsters takes valuable brain power away from working on my creative projects, so if you want music or words from the Bear any time soon, stop it already with the hamster queries. Otherwise you may end up with a perfectly useless but very impressive coffee table book about them, but none of the music or writing you’ve ostensibly been waiting for.

Now that I’ve put the kibosh on hamsters, I’ll start getting questions about gnus or emus or phytoplankton. Don’t do it. You know how I get.