A new project coming...

During my week off, I realised I needed to start this project.

Photo taken in Chennai train station in 2019 - a trip which helped inspire a project. Image by Lucia Molina Pflaum.

To those who follow The Liner Notes closely, you may have noticed it has been a while since my last article: I put my phone into a drawer and closed it. It might appear that I have done the same with my laptop. In a sense, I have, so please allow me to explain. I hope you can forgive the potential navel gazing, but I want to describe an important change coming.

I started The Liner Notes with an ambitious project in mind, which for various reasons I have delayed: I wanted to build an audience, mature my ideas, improve my writing; my second child was born. Valid reasons, or elaborate methods of procrastination?

During my week off, I realised I needed to start this project, and so I planned to continue to publish while organising the project in the background. However, as I got into the structuring, the research, the budgeting, the planning, it became obvious that to do the best job I should dedicate myself fully to that, and pause publishing. Allow me to elaborate on this.

The Internet has given us access to more art, writing, music, and film than ever, creating a vast and important collective repository for audiences and artists alike. However, for anyone who works artistically, the pervasive culture of social media has created an artificial sense of urgency, both explicit and implicit, to put work out continuously and with an emphasis on speed. While this works well for some people, this does not generally suit the projects I work on, which often require a lot of research and experimentation. For instance, the project I’m planning now has been developed over 15 years.

I will continue to prepare for a short while, and for paid subscribers I will pause payments for this month. The aimed rhythm of activity will increase publishing, and the next article (coming soon!) will provide a detailed outline of the project. For now, I will say it explores a specific musical topic in great depth — one that I believe deserves much more attention. Spanning two continents and ten years, it examines how time, algorithms, and the human body can combine to unlock new music to help reinvigorate music.

Thanks for following The Liner Notes so far. I hope you enjoy what comes next!

In other (sad) news…

Jack DeJohnette in 2014 by Ukberri.net - CC Creative Commons

The American jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette died this week. Without question he was one of the finest drummers ever. My first instrument was the drum kit, so I have been lucky enough to have attended a huge number of concerts and masterclasses from many of the world’s best drummers; the most impressed I have ever been by a drummer was with Jack DeJohnette. His delicacy, deliberateness, and mastery of the instrument were otherworldly. He was a poet of rhythm.

I saw him play live only once, with Keith Jarrett’s trio at The Barbican, London, but it was one of the greatest musical performances I ever attended. I have retold the story so many times I am no longer sure of the true number, but the trio played something between 5 and 10 encores, and I would have gladly stayed for 10 more. Along with Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, DeJohnette belonged to a breed of drummers born in a golden age of jazz.

I suspect what provided DeJohnette with such subtlety was his skill on the piano, which gave him a great sense of tonal variety and sensitivity to dynamics. He played the kit in a unique way. A fascinating musical insight I gained from DeJohnette came from his unusual insight into Laundromats. I learned about this while studying The Art of Bop Drumming by John Riley, which I no longer own, though I found a summary of the idea in a short essay written by Jeremy Brown.

(…) when someone watches clothes through the window of a washing machine or dryer, they see the machine spin at a steady speed while each article of clothing rises into view and then disappears at an independent rate. When this applies to rhythm, the soloist disguises the tempo of the tune by playing rhythms that move around that tempo, departing for a whileº, and then returning at different points.

The following performance, while far from his most advanced playing, exemplifies his qualities as a musician: a head-bopping, impeccable swing feel, combined with comping that supports the other musicians, and a nice solo thrown in too.

Thanks for the joy, Jack, you’ll be sorely missed.