Toumani Diabate on Al-Jazeera

Yesterday's discussion of Oltremare touched on Toumani Diabate, Jali extraordinaire and one of my favorite musicians on the planet. As a follow-up, here's a fantastic find a reader emailed me -- the Arabic news network Al-Jazeera has done a detailed, respectful and very interesting piece on one of Mali's great musical ambassadors.

Furtherology: Djelimady Tounkara's Sigui.

Translating "Oltremare" | Part 2

As a cue from both Boubacar Traore and John Fahey, I spend a lot of time with my left ear pressed against the body of my guitar. Especially when I'm writing. I've discussed the Chorus Effect once before, and I didn't do it justice. The physics here are integral to Oltremare, both as an abstract composition and a throbbing mammal experience. The key concept is Sympathetic Resonance, something that just happens to relate directly to the origin and nature of the Universe as you and I know it.

For now, though, just listen to this great live version of Oltremare by the composer himself...



Listen to the huge floating cloud of sympathetic resonance that reveals itself whenever Einaudi pauses. Listen to how it actually, audibly moves. You can hear those final notes spreading out in both directions and through specific, radiating intervals. It's gorgeous beyond words and it perfectly illustrates two completely different stories about the history of music theory. The first one starts in the Sahara.



The kora is considered a hybrid instrument by musicologists who should know better. The instrument is not a "world music" curiosity but a proud & unbroken cultural lineage. It exists in a generational ecosystem of luthiers, musicians and ritual context. The Mande Jali knew about counterpoint harmony, pentatonic modes, and tonal gravity a thousand years ago -- yet music history gives Africa curiously shallow treatment.

Let's begin with an important addition the ancient griots made to the fundamental recipe of wood and strings: goat flesh. While your guitar is built around a resonant chamber constructed entirely out of dead trees, the kora is built out of something more like a drum head: a taut membrane of treated goat skin stretched over a calabash frame.



When critics refer to Toumani Diabate's recorded work as "African classical music" I think that owes just about everything to the huge waves of sympathetic resonance the kora can summon. It's not so much the ornamentation and chord changes as the raw sound itself. The tonal space is unmistakeably similar to a piano, especially in the midrange counterpoint lines (umbengo, non?) -- less so on the droning bass dives. The high end has the short, stabbing attack and almost instant decay that gives the kora away as a harp instrument. It's worth noting that, connected to sufficient signal chains at sufficient amplitudes, the kora becomes something very different and probably superior to all other stringed creatures. That's not what this is about, though.



Let's bring it back to pianos. Big, booming, beautiful and expensive ass pianos. There is a remarkable amount of foot action going on in apparently simple pieces like Oltremare, but our TV generation has been trained since birth to watch hands, closely. Piano players make their art faces and caress with cultivated care, but come on, the basics of a piano trigger escape mechanism mean that there's actually not much fine control going on above waist level. In fact, even with three foot pedals the basic acoustic impedance and ASDR envelope of any given note doesn't change a whole lot. For the most part, low bass pedal tones "float" because they are usually strung with two or three strings of unusually heavy gauge which vibrate very slowly -- which means the tone spends more time transferring to the soundboard and the wooden frame of the piano itself, teasing out overtones and hidden colors that tend to stay the same no matter what you play.

Writing about music always reduces me to run-on sentences. If only soloing was as simple as talking too much.

Here's an example of how this applies to transcribing. This phrase in E minor shows up a lot and it can be played a dozen ways. Here's two, and I think they demonstrate the importance of careful phrasing and active listening when you're writing something out. Lately I try to keep phrases and runs in three or four string groups. It forces me to learn the fretboard and I really like how it keeps longs passages sounding consistent.



Play 'em both as repeating loops; savor the flavors. If you think the version on the left sounds better, you are objectively out of your mind. The switch to the timbre of the G string is jarring, plus the ringing open string is loud enough to compete with the low drone of the E tonic/pedal/root. The E thing, man, that. Keeping it on the 5th fret of the D is awesome because it makes your pinky get into the damn ring and fight like a man, and doubly so because it sounds like it's part of a distinct counterpoint phrase that supports the open, ringing low E. Blaow.

Let's bring it back to pianos again. Those low notes move through the body of the piano slower than higher register waves, and this is colored further by 1) post-Industrial conventional cross-strung pianos designed to enable mass production, 2) Aliquot stringing, which makes harmonics ring out louder and longer, and 3) Railsback Curve equal temperament tuning. The result is a very specific set of constraints.

The instrument is tuned toward the middle of the keyboard, so most melodies and classical solo pieces carve themselves through that center C line. Most of all, though, it's the ringing sustain of the piano's sheer elephant mass that dictates what chord changes "work" and which definitively do not. If you shift to something that doesn't have enough harmonics in common with what you just finished playing, it's like throwing a light bulb at a brick wall. On a nice big piano, those waters run deep and you don't win when you fight 'em.

Oltremare, front to back, is architecture. It sounds like a piece that was worked out carefully, late at night. Even the nicest in "digital piano" keyboards can't do this song much justice. Einaudi plays both with and against the washing overtones as they drift out of audible range. The stage itself seems to play a key role in giving the live version so much dirt and character. It's far from an original observation, but there's still so much to unpack from that simple insight I'm going to have a busy life.



NEXT: Finally, some guitar tabulature.

"Game of Thrones" as Arrangement (& Drill)

Pretty sexy. Here's an excellent tab arrangement to get you started on your own version. Ramin Djawadi sold HBO a polished gem. The chord progression is a tight piece of work, simple and effective and fun on guitar, especially that when that G minor opens up. Trying to work out arpeggios led to mapping out the melody all over the fretboard. I've been on a "no open strings" kick lately, so here's the sequence I practice lately - this is the opening progression: C min, G min, A#, F min. These are good shapes for a pinky workout.



Now, here's that same sequence worked out as a practice drill to develop fluid fret jumping, laid out as 2 string phrases, thus it's deliberately hard to play. You'll clearly see the basic substitutions I've done to shift the notes from the D to the A string. Here's the basic concept, for that same chord progression:



Getting the Fearless Flying Pinky down takes a lot of patience. Practice the fret jumps with every finger, of course, not just the 4th one: each finger brings a different set of available positions once you've landed. Give yourself time and space to get it down right. Make sure you're visualizing the run as a single object instead of a "low section" and a separate high note you need to worry about. To make this exercise even more diabolical (and educational) you can flesh it out on every 2 string combination. Here's the C minor - this is the chord the theme opens up on, so you'll get ample opportunity to try this out:



So all in all, that's 5 versions of the same 4 note phrase. (string combos: EA, AD, DG, GB, BE) Walk that back down and you've got an even 8 bars of C minor, despite the fact your hands will be flying all over the neck the whole time.

This kind of OCD level iteration is more than just another finger strength exercise, though. Taking a full inventory of the available options a chord progression presents is an essential first step towards doing an arrangement (or composition) -- figuring out where reliable shortcuts and happy accidents give you the space to make the song yours. Although it's time-consuming and about as fun as algebra homework, I've been filling out pages of notebook like this for all kinds of songs I'm obsessed with, like Oltremare, Canon in D, or Blue in Green. This kind of detail gives me a roadmap to practice and improvise, and keeps me fluent with the theory behind everything I play. Amen.

Debussy, Composition, and Guitar

"The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams." - Claude Debussy



It was the Albany hip hop producer Daimyo who first introduced me to this mesmerizing gem. In discussing Oltremare, I wandered into timbre, formants, and most of all, music visualization. The system that you see above was developed by Stephen Malinowski, and the color-coding and linear connects make it the most instructive and useful way to visualize a musical score I've found so far. Debussy is not a mess of notes, there is a geometric motion and internal logic to the Arabesque that this animation captures nicely.

The opening revolves around E major but colors all over those lines, bringing out some wild overtones with pentatonic riffs. It makes sense I would be drawn to this: it's the common ground between Slayer and Djelimady Tounkara. The hook, without question, is those gorgeous descending lines that come in at the 0:23 mark, a dancing counterpoint that triggers some serious synaesthesia. That's the result of syncopation at work, a brain-tickling perceptual illusion triggered by playing the descending triplets over the sweeping 8th notes of that bass arpeggio:



Debussy: "The musical arabesque, or rather the principle of ornament, is at the basis of all forms of art. The divine arabesque was used by Palestrina and Orlando. They discovered its principle in Gregorian Chant and provided support for its interlaced designs with strong counterpoint."

Throughout his career, Debussy was always quick to give credit to his predecessors and inspirations, and this rich lineage has given music critics a great deal to write about. (Here's one very intense example.) As you can imagine, though, there is little to be said about Debussy that's as interesting as the music itself.

It was the horizons that Debussy was most interested in, the inherent possibilities of music. He was fascinated by iteration and permutation, and wrote with a very long-term legacy in mind. For illustration purposes, here's a valuable comparison: "Reverie" performed by two masterful players, one behind a piano and the other gently fingering a guitar...





Both of these "Reverie" performances are compromises & interpretations. Deric Bownds brings what he wants out of the composition, and if you peruse the comments, you'll see a lot of folks chiding him for rushing the tempo and taking liberties -- but this unfaithful adaptation is precisely what makes his version work. Which brings me to the real point of this: what makes Debussy work so well in the first place?

There's a lot of myths about the Golden Ratio being encoded throughout the scores of Debussy, but evidence is mixed at best. In fact, it's the gently broken nature of his work, his willingness to push out into dissonant spaces, that keeps me so compelled by his music, so he obviously deviates from the pure harmonies of Pythagoras. Both his contemporaries and his subsequent biographers have noted that Debussy was unusually preoccupied with something that also happens to obsess me: timbre, the distinct tonality of instruments, rooms and equipment.



Consider Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, something I strongly advise taking in at high volume and on sparkly drugs. Incorporating bassoons, clarinets, flutes, oboes, harps...note the plural usage. Throughout the piece, you hear Debussy pushing the instruments to make sounds only they can make and hold notes that resonate with the physical instrument. He also takes advantage of the fact there's at least two of everything, unleashing all manner of minor key intervals that straddle the harmony/dissonance gap and, again, emphasize resonance.

Debussy's interest was artistic and philosophical, but in 2012 the principles of resonance and dissonance are fully weaponized concepts, manifested as the LRAD crowd control unit. None of this is obscure or academic.

It can be beautiful, though. Here's contemporary songwriter David Rawlings, talking about his own love of dissonance and the unique timbre of a perfectly shitty guitar...



So: back to our beautiful Arabesque. In the Malinowski animation this all began with, it's being performed on solo piano, a devilishly impressive feat considering most piano transcriptions are written for "Four Hands." Still, as the video makes clear, the layout of the song is a counterpoint conversation between the bass and treble. The raw complexity is similar to the classic crab canon, Bach's The Musical Offering, but far looser -- Debussy was writing soundtracks prior to the invention of cinema. Here's a charmingly goofy example of how the duet format opens the piece up: a classical guitar and an accordion.



As the man himself noted, "works of art make rules, but rules do not make works of art." He had a rare ear for beautiful riffs from far outside traditional music theory, and he also had a mathematician's patience, tinkering with orchestrations until he found arrangements that clicked, building without blueprints.

I have been tinkering with the first Arabesque on guitar for months now and I'm starting to view it as a mathematical object like the Mandelbrot set. There's a tremendous amount of ideas packed into an apparently breezy little exercise, and a playful self-similarity I recognize from natural fractals. There is ultimately such an abundance of math inside the Arabesque it becomes a sort of Rorschach test. Some folks see parallel chord movement and other see bitonal architecture and nobody is exactly wrong.

Meanwhile, I keep trying to find all the sweet spots.



"An examination of the harmonic techniques out of their context has all too often led to misleading terminology such as 'static' or 'non-functional' as a description of Debussy's harmonic methods. Viewed as a whole, however, the tonal coherence of his music depends upon a carefully calculated and often dramatic interaction of these various harmonic 'types' with each other and with orthodox diatonic harmony. The result is a tonal language, but one which is fundamentally different in concept from classical tonality. The detailed classifications of harmonic events is no longer possible in Debussy's music where the central tonality of a work emerges only through a constant focusing and re-focusing on harmonic types." - Jim Samson



"Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind..." - Claude Debussy, 1862-1918

Thoughts On Translating "Oltremare" | Part 1

Clearly it was fate: I woke up on a friends couch at 4 am and this was playing on TV. I've been listening to it every day since then.

Ludovico Einaudi was, like most of the 7 billion human beings on Earth today, unknown to me. Since this fortuitous accident, I've been enjoying his work a great deal. It's all solo piano, very much in the vein of George Winston, toeing the line between soothing and haunting. Out of everything I've heard so far, the opening five minutes of Oltremare remains my favorite.



I have been picking the piece apart slowly over the past week, working it out as an arrangement for guitar and bass. I started out attempting my favorite passages by ear, with typically mixed results. When I first tried "ear training" courses back in high school, I quickly found out I have a pronounced blind spot of sorts: my ears have difficulty distinguishing A from B. (To be precise, odds are my ears themselves work fine, and the real problem is with the cottage cheese wiring of my auditory nervous system.) It's a problem but it could be worse, and I'm betting continued training will end it this year.

The defining breakthrough, predictably enough, was being hipped to the fact there's published sheet music for all of Einaudi's albums. Since then, it's been a messy and illiterate process of translating from standard notation into that bastardized language of the fretboard, tabulature. For the most part, this has felt more like a puzzle game than a musical exercise so far, but I found an excellent visualization tool...



Or, taking a more lateral view...



I had been approaching the piece with the guitar in standard tuning, but last night I cracked open the Celtic-sounding passage that starts at around the 1:15 mark and there it was: a low sonorous D, staring me in the face. I love to play around in altered spaces, but considering the whole song is in E minor, I was pretty hesitant to give up on that ringing open note! Still, I had to. Since then I've been adjusting all my voicings and for the most part, the slight change in tuning has been more of a help than a hinderance.

This process has left me with a lot of time to think about timbre. The infamous Chief Noda version of Canon in D was one of the first classical songs that I learned and still a regular muse for me in 2012. I found early on that some of my favorite passages sounded tinny and flat, especially in the upper register, where an open pedal and even polyphony lets a piano melody hang and simmer. The piano, in fact, amounts to a huge analog chorus effect, which is definitely sold separately when it comes to guitars.

For the axe slinger, meanwhile, the Second Law of Thermodynamics manifests itself in the concept of "Inharmonicity," which is a mouthful I don't recommend even attempting to pronounce. If you play, though, you already know exactly what it means. Frets get changed, fingers get moved, and notes disappear pretty quick on this humble Yamaha acoustic. So in arranging Oltremare I am aiming chiefly for what works in a fretted strings context. Keeping track of all the harmony lines leads me to some very Allan Holdsworth, contortionist style fingerings.

As long as we're getting into psychoacoustic High Strangeness, one advantage guitar offers the expressive musician is "Formants" - the hands-on resonance and flexibility that the fretboard offers in exchange for what it lacks.

Once I get the tabulature done, I'll walk through the intro, meanwhile here's some brainfood...

[PDF] An Exploration of Real-Time Visualizations of Musical Timbre - Kai Siedenburg

My Bad Obsession with BWV 1007

I spend a lot of time working out my own versions of classical music. Whether this is hubris or insanity, I am in no position to make that call: I just know that I tend to hear things differently in my head. Getting that out through my hands can be quite a long-term process.

On a piano, everything rings out beautifully clear. While dynamics take a long time to gain fine motor control over, once players achieve that kind of competence the lyrical range of a grand piano is pretty unparalleled in the known Universe. I am of a like mind with David Rawlings about the beauty of guitar coming from the constraints and limitations of the instrument. I want a version of the Prelude that emphasizes all those broken sweet spots.

Most available transcriptions of Bach's gorgeous masterpiece are like this craptastic paint-by-numbers job: Prelude from Suite No. 1 for Cello (BWV1007). George Lin has created a great teaching piece, but my problem is the chord forms it follows are exactly the kind of brain-dead folk music voicings I am trying to flush out of my frontal lobes completely.

One of the finest renditions of this classical piece came from the late great Michael Hedges, a gentle giant and one of my all-time favorite musicians. I dig the wide fingering and high-register scream of his opening bars here, and actually seeing this performance was a welcome surprise. I inherited by admiration for Hedges from my father and thus grew up listening to this arrangement in awe, thinking it was all done on 6 strings. It turns out to be some sort of massive harp guitar contraption:



His rendition is apparently in EGDEAD -- here's a tabulature version for your perusal -- and it's safe to say that alternate tunings figure heavily into an equally impressive version of the Prelude, this one courtesy of composer Simon Nield, who really makes this motherfucker sing:



For a serious left hand workout, guitarists should definitely try out this absurdly clean transcription by Jacques Bono: Cello Suite for Bass. Here's a short, impressive performance of said marathon from Professor Bono himself:

Effortless Classical Guitar by William Kanengiser

I learned guitar wrong. I'm still working on correcting bad habits a decade later. Over the years, one of the best explanations on "economy of motion" I've ever seen is this DVD -- which was a battered VHS tape when I first encountered it.

It's hard to appreciate the full meaning of classical training until you see what Kanengiser outlines here. What he's demonstrating is the collective knowledge of several generations of conservatory playing. This is a centuries old guild system of international competition and exchange being transmitted to you via the miracle of technology.

Both neo-classical and Hindustani slide are proof that this kind of precision training pays off...and pays off far beyond the realm of Bach recitals. No matter where you want to take you playing, the fundamentals that get explained here are The Rules you need to learn in order to break.

Guitar Artistry in Concert by Ana Vidovic

Musicians, by and large, are a strange species. Very few instructional videos are presented by radiantly beautiful people -- this is one of them. Of course, the fact that Ana Vidovic could make you stop breathing by walking into a room isn't relevant to her skills on guitar. Her skills are superhuman.

The material here is more of a concert than a lesson. However, the DVD is presented by Mel Bay and shot like an instructional video with a steady focus on clearly framing her hands throughout the performance.



VERDICT: 6/10 It's hard not to learn from this, and Vidovic is a stunning artist. For the record, I am keenly aware of my glaring gender bias, yes.