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Sunday, 18 April 2004
On the dot and unprepared ::
Between doing laundry, packing, and making sure I had enough MIDI tracks bounced to audio for recording with Peter, I let myself leave for SFO later than I should have Friday morning. V works at a hotel near the airport, so I parked there, waited while she took care of a couple of customers before her lunch break, got in her car, accepted a portion of her lunch, and not wanting to eat and run, took another five minutes to sit and talk, even though I was anxious about the time—less than an hour before departure. When we got to United’s curbside checkin, the skycap said “wow!” and shook his head at the screen twice—I’d arrived precisely 45 minutes before takeoff, the cutoff time. Fortunately there was no line there or at security and I got on the plane with plenty of time to spare.
United baggage claim at JFK seemed very slow; I’d spent 15 minutes looking for a restroom, ATM, and food before leaving the secure area, but still waited another 15 minutes for my bags. At 10:30, an hour after landing, I was finally in my rental car and called Pat—I told him I’d hopefully get to Phoenicia closer to 1:00 am than 1:30. I didn’t scrutinize the NYC expressway map carefully enough to take an optimal route from JFK to the Thruway, and lost some minutes, but there was very little traffic and I pulled up Pat’s driveway at exactly 1:00.
There was a near-catastrophe when setting up to jam Saturday. I had two keyboards but no MIDI In to the computer to play the ES2 and Absynth! I discovered I had no MIDI driver for my Radium USB keyboard following a recent PowerBook transplant, and no Internet connection on which to download it. And it appeared that I’d forgotten the adapter to turn my A62's S/PDIF input into a MIDI In. I finally found the adapter in the bottom of my backpack and hooked up my 19-year-old DX7 that now resides under a bed at Pat’s house. It complained about needing a new battery and had lost all its sounds since I last saw it in November, but that’s fine, I just used it for a controller. I like that I can leave it there; it was my main axe when Pat and I were in one of our most musically active periods (1985-88).
We did a single 45-minute jam, morphing from one mood to another. I felt as musically unprepared as I had felt technically unprepared during setup, but it was fine. There was a nice, relaxed attitude to it, like we didn’t have to force anything to happen, just trust the instincts formed over 22 years of playing together. (It also seemed to help that I’ve been playing a lot lately, I didn’t think a lot about what I was doing and tried to just keep the fingers following the ears.) While we were playing, we exchanged a few smiles but we’ve learned to postpone evaluation until we listen to the tape. After lunch I hit Play while I was tearing down and heard a few of those magical moments that have sustained this musical kinship. I was unprepared again—my MOTU 828mk2 had been too much to carry on or pack, so I’d borrowed the A62 from work. And Pat’s 828 was in NYC, so there was no way to digitally bounce the tracks from ADAT to the computer (and we’d recorded 7 tracks, too many for the A62's analog inputs). I’ll ask him to please take the 828 there on a future weekend, bounce the tracks, and burn some CD’s.
References:
Motivation ( 2 August 2004)
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