Session Musician • Bassist • Educator

Lucky's Strike - A brief commentary

Posted on 12th June, 2020

Introduction

Lucky’s Strike was a piece completed and debuted for my master’s degree recital at the RNCM in May 2017. The debut performance consisted of an 11-piece ensemble: drum kit, congas/percussion, cajon/percussion, 2x electric guitars, piano/rhodes, electric bass and string quartet (2x violins, viola, cello).

The concert, recorded live at the RNCM became my first album release ‘About Time’, available from this site or on all digital streaming platforms.

Lucky’s Strike was written as a homage to and celebration of a South African gentleman, Lucky Ranku. I had the privilege of studying under Lucky in ensemble classes between 2006-2008 during my time on the Leeds College of Music jazz program. Lucky introduced us to the grooves, melodies and the joy of African music and during those 2 years, we performed a number of his own pieces and other works that fall into the cross-over world of South African jazz.

These classes were often inspiring and sometimes frustrating. The inabilities of British jazz students to accurately portray the emotion of feeling that is inherent within African cultural music often led Lucky and us to feel frustrated and deflated. However, often with no particular idea as to how or why, we occasionally did manage performances in the spirit of the music. Lucky would become joyously animated, dance around the room chanting “Yes chumzas!”, (“Chumzas” meaning friends, or mates). These moments made it particularly clear to me that the essence of joy and emotion transmitted though music couldn’t necessarily be intellectualised, as was common practice in the academic musical leanings of jazz school. My main memory from his sessions is how to find the joy in the simplicity of what we play, and how this comes from within us. It is the realisation that all of the technique and knowledge of our instruments and music in the world means nothing if we can not translate that emotional narrative to each other and to our audience. One could argue that this is the greatest possible lesson to learn in music.

During rehearsal breaks Lucky would enjoy a cigarette and chat freely about music. He was rather old and showing the typical signs of a musical life well-lived. He unfortunately couldn’t play his guitar anymore due to suffering rather severe arthritis in his hands. Some moments he would attempt to show us what we were missing by picking up a guitar and demonstrating. These moments were saddening, as we all could see his frustration at being unable to play what he once could.

Towards the end of my time at LCoM there were a number of rather public disagreements between tutors and the college administration regarding restructuring, redundancies and the like. This led to a few instances of tutors rallying against the college and protesting against employment conditions. Lucky was an unfortunate casualty of the lay-offs as a supplementary ensemble tutor. His long, rich and vibrant musical experience and energy that he shared with us could not be quantified as worthwhile by administrators.

This piece is playfully named ‘Lucky’s Strike’ as a homage to Lucky’s energy and passion for and defence of the music when involved of the collective teaching staff disagreements, and also after his love of the occasional Lucky Strike cigarette. Although at this point I can not be sure if his favourite brand was Lucky Strike or not. It would indeed been serendipitous and felt appropriate for the word play of the title.

Sadly, Lucky had passed away a few weeks before the original debut of this piece. His teachings will be long remembered by many, and especially by myself and those who shared his ensemble sessions.

The Second Circle Release - The Challenges in Reduction and Orchestration

The new release of ‘Lucky’s Strike’ now in May 2020 is the debut of my new ensemble Second Circle (www.secondcircle.uk). This ensemble is designed to work as a flexible collective of musicians for collaborative purposes, allowing experimentation in arrangement and orchestration in different setups. I will write more about the aims, purposes, strategies, and outputs for this ensemble in an additional article.

The reason for attempting to tackle the challenge of reducing the original 11-piece orchestration to a 7-piece was to:

  1. See how much musical information could be given to an instrument without ‘overloading’ it in terms of practical performance
  2. See what musical ideas seemed extraneous or unnecessary and could be removed or adapted
  3. See what other combinations of instruments could be utilised in different ways to still perform musical ideas that were deemed too important to lose
  4. Attempt to re-arrange the piece into a more logistically manageable ensemble for performances

The 7-piece Second Circle instrumentation was as follows: soprano saxophone, violin, electric guitar, piano/rhodes, electric fretless bass guitar, congas/percussion, and drum kit.

Instrumentation reductions are therefore, guitars reduced from 2 to 1, string quartet from 4 to 2 (violin & sop sax), and percussion from 2 to 1.

Due to logistical and technology difficulties in the beginning of the recording process we were not able to utilise the soprano saxophone, meaning the original plan of re-orchestrating the strings down to a violin and soprano saxophone compound was not possible. This final 6-piece ensemble actually turned out to be a more interesting development than it was an unfortunate setback and allowed the creation of and initial experimentation with a violin, electric guitar and electric fretless bass compound, I referred to as a violin/guitar/bass (‘VGB’) section.

This 6-piece, I felt was the minimum reduction possible whilst keeping as much ‘essential’ musical content as possible. Further reduction could indeed be possible, but would require further decisions on what musical essential artefacts to preserve and which to forgo. One could actually argue that the ensemble is still a 7-piece as the fretless bass is doubled in some moments as part of the new VGB section.

The first choice in orchestration reduction process was to observe where it was possible to combine instruments to perform and honour as much of the musical information as was deemed too important to lose, essentially creating a hierarchy of musical importance. This meant analysing the arrangement and deciding what musical fragments were essential and which were not. These were usually decided on whether they were deemed important as supplements to the melody or harmony.

The biggest reduction result was from the string quartet. Purely melodic ideas were kept in the violin part but a lot of the supplementary melodic and textural ideas were either removed (such as the short string interlude after the B melody in the original recording) or blended into the VGB compound. It’s worth noting at this stage that the fretless bass was often overdubbed for this purpose. These three instruments occasionally worked together wholly, in pairs, or independently, depending on which parts of the original orchestration they were performing.

Re-arranging 2 guitars down to 1 seemed an obvious choice. The main guitar part carried the most responsibility for the A melodies, but within these the part now allowed for some space to assume the responsibilities of the 2nd guitar. Other aspects of the 2nd guitar part were given to the violin and fretless bass, such as the rhythmic responses to the A melody.

Piano was exclusively used in the original performance and in this case the keyboard reproduction rhodes sound was utilised much more. The keyboards part was orchestrated for both to be covered by a single musician. However, in having the time and space of isolated recording, I opted to record the rhodes and piano parts separately for ease in playing- allowing Alex Hill to be freer with his part; and for the editing and mixing process.

Most percussion reduction was a fairly simple process, removing the cajon allowed more rhythmic space for the drum kit and congas to occupy, but meant losing a contrasting rhythmic texture to the drum kit. I decided that this textural loss in this case would not take away from the rhythmic strength of the groove.

Interesting Finds

The VGB trio compound of violin, electric guitar, and electric fretless bass guitar was the most interesting development resulting from this recording. An example of innovation born out of an unfortunate situation. This idea, I will carry through and develop in future works to see what sounds can be achieved. The VGB trio shows interesting and unique textural potential for voicing harmony and contrapuntal interplay.

The percussion reduction allowed for Brendan, our conga player, to experiment with incorporating a small percussion setup to allow 3 aspect of percussion via one musician. Meaning he could cover more percussive space. His setup was: 3x congas, woodblock (right foot), and shekere (left foot).

Challenges in Recording

The original recording session for this piece was scheduled to be in mid-march 2020, at the time the Coronavirus Pandemic had demonstrated how dangerous and disruptive to global society it was going to be. As such and as we all know, systems and services began shutting down. Including the this recording session, which was planned to be in the Spirit Studios, Manchester.

The original recording plan was to record 4 live tracks in one day, of which Lucky’s Strike was one, with the 7-piece ensemble. The more it became apparent that the Covid-19 lockdown was inevitable, the decision to move the recording to a remote-online format meant that for now at least I could be working on these pieces, albeit in a very different way.

The Process

The MIDI information from the Sibelius score file was imported into Logic Pro X and adapted and converted into a semi-accurate representation with a click track to create a ‘map' of the piece. An individual version of this mapped track was sent to each musician (minus their part’s MIDI performance) along with their notated part for them to record and film themselves playing too.

One difficulty here was, the first couple of musicians to put down their parts had the most difficult time to record as all they could hear is a rather lifeless MIDI representation to play along to. Imagining the instruments as live musicians to perform with whilst performing their sometimes difficult parts, and fabricating the energy of a live performance can be very tricky indeed.

As I received the individual recordings back from the musicians, I was able to replace the MIDI information with the recorded audio and re-send this to the musicians as hybrid backing tracks. Those who recorded towards the end had more ‘real’ musicians to play with so to speak, much like in traditional multi-track recording. Once all of the parts had been recorded it was a relatively simple process of editing, mixing and video production. Only a few extra samples were used to bolster the production on the recording, such as cymbal rolls and a bass synth in the B melody to provide extra low-end support for the bass melody.

The mixing and production was not a job that I had originally intended to complete myself but given the circumstances, it created an opportunity to learn more about the audio production process and develop skills necessary to better represent my music myself. In the future I believe the audio production will begin to play more of a role in my compositional and orchestration process, opening up more avenues for personal exploration.

I believe the final product delivered a sense of excitement, forward motion and high performance energy as the piece intends to. This is a testament to the professionalism and skill of the musicians involved. Lucky’s Strike, to my biased ears, was successful in its endeavour to fabricate a live ensemble performance energy from a remote recording context, however, there is still no substitute for the real thing. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the piece and on comparing the original live performance from my original album ‘About Time’ and Second Circle’s recent release.

Thank you for reading.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions you would like to share or have a wish to collaborate please write to me: nick@nicholasjameswaldock.uk

Many thanks,

Nick

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