music, art and words
The electronic music project I commandeer, The Resident Alien, has released its first single in 5 years entitled “I Am The Virus.” It’s a reflection of the times and for a limited time you can download it free from The Resident Alien website when you sign up for the mailing list.
In another first, the song is also available as an NFT! So if you want to part with some Ether and be the claimant of this block on the chain, all you need to do is follow this link and make an offer.
It’s time for another instalment from the Cubist sessions. I’m a huge fan of Bossa Nova. To me it’s some of the greatest music this world has produced as it contains so many special elements: complex harmonic structures borrowed from jazz and classical music, intricate rhythms from Latin and African music and great melodic songwriting. Plus everything sounds good in Portuguese.
According to an Argentinian guitar player I know – Bossa is the brain child of the musical intelligentsia in Brazil who were listening to the jazz greats from America like Ellington and Basie and constructing a whole new style of playing in the dark, smoke filled cafes of Rio de Janeiro. It all sounds very romantic to me.
The fourth song in this series of videos is a short tribute to Bossa and in particular one of it’s greatest composers Antonio Carlos Jobim. I first heard this song, Samba do Aviao, on a Baden Powell record that I found randomly when I was around 14 and it blew me away – the composition and the playing.
When I finally got down to learning it I gained even more respect for the difficulty involved in playing these complex rhythmic patterns with their sliding melodies over constantly changing harmonic progressions. It was a difficult song to learn but well worth the effort. It’s a real pleasure to play.
It’s time for another video from the Cubist sessions and this one is an original composition – with vocals this time – entitled When You’re Gone.
I wrote this song at the Banff Center for the Arts and recorded it for an album I released as The Ever After in 2019 called Eh Voila! It’s a bittersweet ballad about missing someone special and it’s a song I’m quite partial to. I hope you enjoy it as well.
And if you want to hear the original you can do that here.