Joel McNeely

Here is a plug, no, a tip, a really good tip, for those who love jazz, or those who love creative instrumental music, or for that matter, anyone who has come to this blog because they trust me enough to take my recommendation. My dear friend Maria Schneider has a new record out, called Sky Blue, which if you are remotely in any of the above categories, you simply must get.

Maria's ensemble is a fairly standard big band configuration, however I don't think many would hear this music as anything approaching conventional big band music. To my ear it's more orchestral. Anyway, the compositions are long-form, 10-22 minutes in length. Don't go in looking for the standard intro A,A,B,A long improvising sections and then the whole thing over again with a coda tacked on. These are fully developed compositions, which often require slowing down one's expectation mechanism and settling in for a journey.

I won't review piece by piece here, (they're all great) but for me standouts are Rich's Piece, which is like dark, dark bitter chocolate, delicious with a lingering bite and redolent of something distantly melancholy and Cerulean Skies which reminds me of Ravel. Also, for you music heads, try, just try and figure out the meter (meters) on Aires de Lando. Lot's o luck.

The playing is superb. One of the things I love about Maria's writing is that she seems to know her players so deeply and she so often finds a way to feature them in a way that sends them soaring. Rich Perry and Donny McCaslin, the two tenor players, blow my mind. And I love the addition of the accordion. It's an unexpected strange color, which by the end of the record feels integral.

Lastly, if you're smart enough to take me up on this tip and get this record, go for the expanded version. It has two beautiful booklets, one with a diary of the compositional process and thematic sketches, and the other, a photo journal of the recording process. Maria finances her recordings herself, eliminating record company intervention in her creative process, another reason why this project is so extraordinary and deserves support. We need artists like this to keep going, to keep writing and playing, and to keep making our world a more beautiful place.

My rule about reviews is that you can't allow the bad ones to get you down. Therefore, you mustn't listen to the good ones either. It's all about the work. I always try my very hardest and hope that the music reaches someone. But these two reviews seemed to get what I was attempting on my last soundtrack really well, so hey, rules are for breaking right? I'll admit they made me smile.

http://ifmagazine.com/review.asp?article=1948

movie-wave review

I like that they picked up on the role of the piano in this score, which I'll talk a little about. Since it's disappeared from the theaters by now, (SPOILER ALERT) I think it's okay to say that the bad guy is the piano teacher. By way of clues to this effect, every time the killer appears, what you are hearing is some sort of messed up piano. And since the Chopin A minor Waltz is played in the very beginning, I use small quotes of that throughout whenever the baddie is around, a little trail of musical breadcrumbs. The one review mentioned the little jack-in-the-box crank sounds. I was happy he picked up on this because those sounds took forever to make. I took piano tuners' rubber mutes and muted the strings. I then hit them with wooden mallets, which made that little sound. I also took handfuls of little erasers and threw them at the strings with the sustain pedal down. As they bounced around randomly they created a great creepy effect. I knocked on the sound board, I plucked strings, I put dimes in between the strings, I stroked them with a feather, I took a butter knife and scraped up and down the strings, I banged on the low strings with my palms, and on and on. Then I played them through guitar amp modeling software to really mess and distort them up. So, the majority of what sound like bizarre samples and synths are really just my trusty Yamaha grand.

Once again, thanks to Varese Sarabande for putting out my soundtrack!