I got the first ideas of this music many, many years ago, around 1993, give or take a couple years, as I studied Composition at Sonoma State. Not as a Major, mind you, but as a requirement. I really enjoyed the class, and the act of writing. And I was fairly prolific, I might add.
Unfortunately, after withdrawing from Sonoma State, it would be years before I did any conscious composing again. And by that, I mean the act of sitting down and composing for oneself, not because one has a homework assignment due. I had written in the interim, but the tunes lacked an inspiration, if not a general “feel”.
The idea at Sonoma was a sort of jazz-spectacle which evolved and morphed from one piece into another. I was in my acid-phase and it just sounded like a good idea at the time. As a composer, I was impressed with Anthony Braxton’s non-stop pacing at quartet shows at the original Yoshi’s on Claremont Avenue. Plus the rise in raves and non-stop trance. So it was a mix of Braxton and the Cat in the Hat. The idea which I would return to, many years later: compose 2-bar vamps, and have the performers switch between them at will.
I ended up with nearly 100 of these vamps. I had BIG plans for them, and I wrote them on oversize (11″x17″) 18-stave heavy-count paper. I loved the feel of the paper, and wrote all the notes with a Berol Eagle Chemi-Sealed Draughting pencil. Thing is: I only actually needed 5 of the 18 staves.
1 stave for a Bb Tenor Saxophone melody.
A grand staff for piano. 50 vamps written with chord changes, 50 with notes-on-staff… 
A stave for bass (unspecified between acoustic and electric).
And an interesting, if completely failed, attempt at recreating a simple ’80s Brooklyn beat… a percussion staff using just snare and bass drum. With only one of the two drums sounding at any point in time. Usually. Again, not my greatest outcome, but the idea still shows promise even today. Re-write in full effect.
I saved the notebook through the years. It had also doubled as a bit of a scrapbook, holding jazz postcards from highschool days, plus concert tickets (lots of Robert Cray and Sting shows), Oakland A’s tickets from 1982 through 1984, and random CD cardboard covers that I found artistic (I still have “Blues for Allah”, but the CD is long, long gone.)
After years on shelves, and in boxes, closets, storage units, I realized that digitizing the vamps could be a really efficient and effective way of manipulating them into larger works. That was late 2006 through early summer ’07. And the flurry of activity before the first experiments at Coffee With a Beat’s weekly jazz/poetry nights.
I first had the idea of making cardstock vamps (3 per “page”) and then scissoring them into the collection of 73 which had survived the decade. That part was easy. I found that my artistic choice of neon blue and neon green cardstock was largely unappreciated. So I shelled out more dimes and put it over to manila and ivory versions. I experimented with various physical contraptions that could hold several of these shards at once, often to very little success. Finally common sense prevailed and I realized that the computer could print out any combination (of 3 vamps per page) with simple drag-and-drop preparation.
I spent several months exploring using the vamps in different keys, for varying lengths of time. The Van Kleef shows were always interesting as the music itself was not particularly difficult, it was just written in such a contrary/confusing manner that when we did gel as a unit, it was only to be broken up by a pre-”arranged” notated Rorschach repeat sign/fermata.
The vamps then moved quite easily into longer, modal jams. The good part of this is that the spirit of the music itself has been given space enough to grow and to flower. I often feel like the vamps lend themselves towards a early-’70s Miles Davis jazz-funk fusion. The layers add up quick. I found that changing the orchestration, primarily through augmentation, could quite easily change the amount of “script” that we, as musicians, would use.
From a composer’s point of view, this presents me with a current music which I feel is rich with possibility. I feel proud to realize, via the stage and audience, that original idea for the “piece” (which is hardly one work, but more of an overall style, or approach). And yet, in many respects, the clay is just starting to take it’s shape into the music to be. I feel that I have to lend more direction, and actual compser’s ink, to an “escape clause.”
The vamps are musical seeds of sorts. And once they sprout, the improv takes it’s course. Sometimes it leads itself to a natural conclusion, or to a bridge towards a new seed. Sometimes the question in the air lingers, and as a composer, that is where I have the opportunity to re-assert my presence and shape the process, whether it be concluding or continuing…
