Fuzz Bucket - "Make It Stop!" 3/18/2016

This jam session which was from March 18, 2016 (I got the titles wrong on the video) was pretty special.  For starters, Jamie was in town for the weekend so we had our full lineup.  I had the 4 gopros and my vsn mobil v.360 camera so there was plenty of footage to cut an interesting video.  Since this was at Astoria Soundworks and not in Eric's basement we recorded on Eric's and my Edirol recorders, 2 4-track recorders linked  so we could get 8 tracks sync'd, which is just about right.  I'm not so impressed with the 360 footage but at least you can see the whole room in the one view.  By the way, you wouldn't believe what a pain in the butt it is to stitch that footage together. I'll have to write up a whole blog post about it.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of long jam sessions because they run out of steam pretty fast, but maybe it's just this idea I have of the short attention span of the average consumer of Internet things.  Because in reality, whenever I've worked on this video it usually went by pretty fast.  In my head it feels like a 6 minute jam but when I look at the counter I'm pretty surprised to see that it's about 10 minutes long.

So, when you listen to this try to imagine the 2 or 3 times that I was trying to steer the jam session toward a winding down sort of ending.  I tried as much as possible to use cues to wrap things up but unfortunately it's very difficult to communicate when you're playing sax.  I guess I could have stopped playing for a second but I've ruined jams that way.  So, all I can do is express myself with my eyebrows and by what I'm playing...  I think my frustration helped me lose myself a bit toward the end and play a little more playfully which I think produced some really cool stuff.

But... Ultimately what impressed me the most was the cool little lick I came up with, or is it a riff?  It's a very simple 5 note repeated phrase that once I heard myself play it once I couldn't stop trying to revisit it from time to time.  Basically, (I don't know what key I'm playing so I'll describe it in A minor since it can be expressed without sharps or flats) it is something like E C, E C, G ... E C, E C, G... Just so cool that it ends on the leading tone.  Which, now that I think of it, makes up basically a minor 7th chord.  Sorry, I'm doing all this in my head and I'm too lazy to run to a guitar or keyboard to confirm my music theory...

So, now that I feel foolish and it's way past my bedtime, I think this post is way overdue.  I might have to revisit this track later to analyze it some more...

Here's the video:




or if you just want the audio here it is on soundcloud: