Well, that piece I described below fell through about a week later. For the past two months, I’ve been hard at resuscitating a piece I’d rejected for the album (see May 24th entry, below). I tossed all the fancy chord progressions I’d worked so hard on and heaved the third of the three melodies and started with a very simple palette. It didn’t take long – maybe ten days – to come up with a satisfying structural arc for the revamped piece. And then I hit a wall.

The wall was a break in the piece, a bridge that I couldn’t, for the life of me, get to work in any complimentary way. Weeks of hard testing, introductions of new instruments, dozens of melodic variations, ensued. I tell you, the thing nearly made me give up hope that I might have any talent in composition. Not to be melodramatic, but the last month was a friggin horror for me. Day after day of failure. Fucking hell…. I almost chucked the whole thing.

And then the other day I figured it out – what to do with this break. I got it going, reached a very happy place yesterday, and today, absolutely nailed the structure and instrumentation of the rest of the piece. It has now turned into a very joyful section of music. I even considered making this the first piece on the album – that’s how confident I am in it.

So now I have seven pieces for the CD – a total of maybe forty-odd minutes of music. In a way, it’s not much time, but man… a hell of a lot of work has gone into these few pieces. And I’m nowhere near finishing mixing them. But at least now I have a cohesive whole, a very odd, very modern, fairly unique cinematic dark jazz album.