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Freedom jam ::
On Saturday the 9th, after seeing family in Ithaca, I drove down to Shandaken, in the Catskills, to play music with my Stuck friends. We had gotten set up to play on the front porch, but then sprinkles turned into a downpour and we had to move the musical events indoors. What a wonderful group of musicians. Sometimes I think I should live around NYC just to have more chances like this to play.
I forgot the trick to making the 828 work after the PowerBook’s been asleep (cycle its power) and didn’t get to do what I might have liked on the first couple of jams, but necessity is the mother of invention—I had my Repeater on top of my controller and had fun, rapid-triggering and transposing fragments of loops I’d stored on its CFC card over the last year.
People drifted off to eat, drink and socialize. Later I found myself back in front of my keyboards with just Joe (drums) and Stan (bass) playing. It felt pretty informal so I started pushing the envelope, playing fast, changing keys and polyrhythms constantly, and to my amazement, Joe followed me every inch of the way. Usually when I go out on polyrhythmic limbs, the branch breaks and I fall on my face—but not that night. We went on for maybe 15 minutes, and afterwards were just laughing and laughing about it. Stan’s wife came and told us we were “evil,” and we just laughed some more. I decided that this event needed to be captured for posterity, visually if not sonically:
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