Stone Smile 001

— a new dispatch to kick things off

The easiest way to start something is usually by finding something else you love and doing some version of that. In this case, it’s Chris Weisman’s ingenious and prolific Substack, Cadential Windfall. I highly recommend you subscribe to it. Chris, if you’re reading, I hope I get to tell you face-to-face someday what an inspiration your work has been in my life.

I remember discovering Chris’s music in college. I think it was my friend and sometime bandmate Scott who played me Maya Properties in my freshman dorm room—a fifth floor walkup with a view of Cambridge Memorial Church. For all four years of college, first with Memorial Church and then with St. Paul’s for the subsequent three years, I received quarter-hourly updates as to the passage of time. I miss those bells. After I set up my first proper DIY recording studio—as if any recording studio hasn’t been DIY in most senses, even Abbey Road was just a bunch of folks doing it themselves—I remember timing out takes between the quindeciman chimes. They provided a certain procedural order to the abstract flow of ideas that I treasured. Now, in the n’th iteration of my studio recently moved with the rest of my life from California to Manhattan, the only discernible time-token is the sliver of direct sunlight my writing room receives for about fifteen minutes every afternoon around 1pm. I always try to be in there for those precious minutes when the odd angles get some extra-terrestrial illumination. It’s wonderfully quiet in there, a rarity in New York that I treasure greatly.

Maya Properties starts with a little enigma called “given gate.” I remember hearing it for the first time. I remember where I was. And I remember what I thought. I was totally taken aback by its quiet confidence and complexity. I was studying classical music at the time and getting, honestly, a bit lost. The best music often has the quality of directness, of undiluted intentions. Think of the big V-I that accompanies “How does it feeeeeel” on “Like a Rolling Stone” or the single snare beat that ends the layered building intro of Fela’s “Zombie.” They mean that. At the same time, I was also getting a bit lost in Zen Buddhist philosophy, specifically in a book of Koans called, coincidentally, The Gateless Gate. Chris’s music snapped me out of that trance. It often manages to do two seemingly dichotomous things at the same time: it wanders, but it does so directly. It’s almost as if Chris has cracked a seam between composition and improvisation. His songs seem to exist freely in the space between.

I was talking today to my good friend Josh Ottum (josh) about this quality. Josh, whose music I absolutely adore and who I am thrilled to help release a good amount of it via Specific Records, and I were thinking about that space between composition and improvisation. Over the last few years, I’ve come to think of composition and improvisation not as two discrete processes, but rather as the two ends of a temporal spectrum.

Last night, I was playing at an Irish trad session in the Bowery led by the great Don Meade. A true master of Irish music, he’s more than a bit of a legend and somehow has both the heavy mantle of omnivorous sage and impish quality of pure glee. In short, he’s a wizard. Watching him pluck reels out of thin air was a delight and an education, and, as he (and in turn I and we) flowed from one tune to the next in an endless, seamless reel, really hammered home the true wonder, the breadth and depth, of that space between composition and improvisation. So often they’re taught as opposites. Not so. (Even this conception of them as opposites is recent, just ask Bach or any fan or scholar of Baroque music.)

All art forms in one way or another live in this space. The best paintings and movies have a certain improvisational quality. In a way, a painting is itself a kind of improvisation you only get to do once before it’s frozen.

The magic of music is that it simply does not exist beyond our immediate conjuring.