Make my Glass the P-Glass

Jaron Lanier jamming

Last Saturday I saw Jaron Lanier jamming with Rick Sacks at the Arraymusic studio downtown. Rick's a percussionist, and you can see him in action in these videos.

There were only about ten people at the show, including Tim Knight, a cataloguer friend and colleague who has an exciting blog about KF Modified (the Canadian law classification scheme). The studio's small and it was quite informal and improvisational. Lanier and Sacks just made it up as they went, and there were many times when they got into something really interesting. Sacks played all different kinds of percussion; Lanier played piano, a small Chinese harp, and several different kinds of flutes. Another fellow played drums and percussion on a couple of songs, too. Lanier told some good stories. I enjoyed it very much. It's always worth it to see two really talented musicians improvising together.

I saw in Lanier's Wikipedia entry that he's collaborated with, among others, both Philip Glass and George Clinton. Not at the same time. But what if those two did collaborate? What if Glass wrote a based on Clinton's work, the way he turned David Bowie's "Heroes" into Symphony No. 4? I think the lyrics might go something like this:

We want the funk give up the funk
We want the funk give up the funk
We want the funk give up the funk
We want the we want the
We want the we want the
We want the give up the
Give up the give up the
We want we want we want we want
We want we want we want we want
Give up the give up the funk
Give up the give up the funk
Give up the give up the funk
We want we want we want we want
We want we want we want we want
Give up the give up the funk
Give up the give up the funk
Give up the give up the funk
We want we want we want we want
We want we want we want we want
Give up we want give up we want
We want we want we want we want

Comments

It was good to see you two heavy hitters of the abstract academy and delighted you archived a bit. Rick Sacks Array

Hey Bill,

It was a great afternoon of music on a wet and rainy Sunday. Those two really got some great things going with some very inspirational improvisation. Glad we had a chance to check it out. I posted a short video with Lanier playing those two unmamed 'gypsy' flutes on my Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/21327032@N06/4433157116/. Hopefully they'll post some of the video they were shooting on the Array site soon.

This funk collaboration is intriguing we should get together and see what we can do. Check out Undercurrent, cut number 4 under my unreleased list, on Noisehead http://www.noisehead.com/mypage/silentk. It's funky but more of an Alan Parson's kind of funk. :-)

Thanks for plugging the blog!

Tim aka Silent K aka Freemoth

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