Eleven Twelve Nine

The preshow music Coming to Meet and Diary of the Night appear on the CD Into the Blue.

Thanks to Scott Guillory for introducing me to the Bebot iPod app.

Cereal Music and Microascii use programmable instruments I made with the Max/Jitter software environment. Video was taken from a masterclass with teachers in the UL Lafayette jazz program.

William Chapman Nyaho was a senior member of the UL Lafayette School of Music faculty. When he left in 2002, two new lines were opened, which brought me to teach music media, and Chan Kiat Lim for piano. I had seen him when he visited a few times during his concert tours with Susie Garcia but had never had the opportunity to talk with him. I finally grabbed him (chasing him down the hallway like Alice after the White Rabbit) on his last trip and asked if he would listen to Sleepless Nights, which had been bringing up a lot of voicings in seconds. It felt like those scenes in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Richard Dreyfuss is compelled to work on a statue of Devils Postpile because it means something important to him that he doesn’t understand. I felt I had some kind of karmic connection with him (since he had indirectly created my position, leading me to Louisiana), and that, with all his concertizing of new music he might be able to point me to other composers who are using the same type of voicings. He was very encouraging and fired me to up do something with my compositions. My ambition to promote them at that point was low, and our session revitalized me, resulting in this DVD documenting the recital, and plans to notate some compositions in the future, and other projects. He coached me on Sleepless NIghts, suggesting adding an ostinato. At that point I was playing it with repeated sections in Ab maj interspersed with sections systematically voicing the melody in seconds, thirds, fourths, and then fifths. It probably sounded better that day when he was egging me on than it has since, but at least the idea of having an ostinato survived, along with the more forceful chromatic section.

Cosmic Rag was my grandmother, Friendly Lucas’ favorite song.