‘The desert wastes nothing’

We went on a road trip this past spring to the American Southwest, which culminated in a kayaking expedition on the Colorado River.

While on the river, we got caught in a quick but furious downpour. When the storm passed, all the plants turned from a greyish-dust-color to a subtle yet vibrant green.

In a world of feast or famine, this was a brief time of plenty.

The audio file below is a draft I made recently with Mike Lorenz on guitar and myself on piano. We recorded this remotely and have only this summer begun to play it in real life.

On the chart below, there are horn backgrounds to be played during the ‘B’ sections that do not appear on this recording.

‘Happy Little Accident’

The current state of this song happened unintentionally.

My first draft was actually in 3/4 time, a jazz waltz, as it is sometimes called. It was OK, nothing special, and so it sat in my ‘draft’ file for several years.

Until one day…

…my laptop died…

Fortunately, I had a backup of my ‘draft’ folder, but the problem was they were formatted for Mac. I now had a PC.

The files were incompatible!

I found a way to convert the files and did so for hundreds of my ‘drafts’. All perfectly copied over to my new PC.

All except one…

‘Light and Shadow’

For some reason, in the conversion from Mac to PC, despite having copied every other file perfectly, my program decided to change ‘Light and Shadow’ into 4/4 time…

That’s right! You can even see it in this chart. Unless there is a tied note, every measure’s beat 4 is just a rest. As if the program just added an extra beat in every measure of the song, but had nothing to put there. So, it was left blank.

I couldn’t believe it, and, to be honest, was a little annoyed. Now I’d have to change it back. But before I did, I gave it a listen, and to my amazement, it sounded great!

So, I kept it like that.

Overtime, it developed into a kind of collective improvisational piece, like the live version below.

What do I have in common with legendary composer Maurice Ravel?

Nothing…

But I do love his music!

And his composition ‘Pavane pour une infante defunte’ (don’t ask about the title, it’s a real downer), was floating around in my brain when I wrote my piece ‘Pavane’.

I don’t have a draft recording of my tune here, but I wanted to share with you the sheet music because it is relatively simple to play on the piano, and perhaps it will inspire you to make music.

I did, however, include a version of Ravel playing his composition on his piano!