Studio 33

In 2009 we had what we called "Studio 33" sessions: guests came to the studio to listen to the longer tracks that had been recorded. This story is about the feeling of those sessions.

"Three Visitors, Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Carson McCullers" Charnie Guettel Music Video #49, sept 16, 2009

more on the inspecting of compositions

This composition from Oct 9, 2009, is the soundtrack for an introspection about my jazz development, which flows both from having been a classical piano player, and a country singer with a banjo, and later playing in rock bands. The singing and playing were formed from all these traditions. Thats what piano bar was like. Piano bar work was the great combiner.

FREEDOM TWO © charnie guettel Oct 9, 2009

Japanese In-sen scale for "Toronto": Cityscape

These are the intervals used to tune the Japanese stringed instrument, the Koto. They form a pentatonic scale with a very reflective mood. I think I will use it for a few compositions during the next while.

"Toronto": Cityscape. (Again, lots of blueness)

Die Wiederkind Blaüe (Recovery Blueness)

charnie guettel music video #101

a jazz composition about recovery..... blueness, the beauty of blueness, getting the strength to transform trauma into remaking a life, renewing, returning, .....the "you" that gets up is different from the "you" that fell down.

Die Wiederkind Blaüe © charnie guettel may 17 2010

an overview of the compositions this past year

I have begun an inspection of the composing over the past year. It was about this time last year that I began to concentrate solely on the instrumental composing for jazz piano, the best form for the transformations I have been experiencing in my hearing and my playing.

This piece recorded February 02, 2010, at about the halfway mark, "what i am doing is what is happening to me" CG music video #77, is described as "an openly therapeutic meditation on the realization of the effect of the composer's music on herself ". It was me taking in the results of recording new material each workday, and preparing for it by listening intently to the music I had written the day before. I was transforming myself into a vehicle for my own composing process.

"what i am doing is what is happening to me" CG music video #77 feb 02, 2010

parallel abstractions

I noticed just now, photographing a visual that had been formed from the blue tissue paper that had stuck to the blue trunk, after a display had been removed (the earring display)...that there was a direct line from the poetry shawl project of eight years ago, to the current soundtracking of abstract visuals now, or rather using visuals to display the jazz (soundtrack in reverse) (then it was a relationship between the poems and the cloth itself)...and I wanted to thank you, David Bateman, for sponsoring that poetry shawl concert in Calgary what is now several years ago...for seeding that recognition, and that possibility...one artist is parallel to another artist, one artist's abstractions are parallel to another's, but we look out of the speeding train windows of our lives, to the parallel abstractions that rush by.

Comment from Nicolas Sanaa

Nicolas Sanaa

C'est à dire que cette musique me touche beaucoup, et dans son style et dans les émotions qu'elle suscite, accompagne... C'est très beau.