produced August 11—September 4, 2018 in Chicago using Cycling '74 M 2.8, Apple Logic Pro 10.3, Sibelius 8.2
badly engineered by Sinker at Sinker Audio Solutions LLC, Chicago—blame them, smh
direct all inquiries to kierod@gmail.com

Dedicated to Fuj

These pieces are, only to a certain extent, quasi-satires of and provisional solutions to the problems of the post-80s Brooklyn 'avant-jazz' aesthetic as documented by labels like Pi, Skirl, JMT, and others. Such music is often quite impotent in its ambition to synthesize first-generation AACM with senior-thesis-recital-at-Eastman-level polyrhythmic texture, primarily due to its lack of functional harmonic and rhythmic integration at the level of improvisational structure. The notated sections instigate a general improvisational 'gestalt' from which to proceed into gestural rhapsodizing, or they are abstracted (by 'slowing down' its harmonic rhythm, deriving salient segmental groupings, etc) in order to derive linear harmonic rhythm, or both, or neither—none of which offer a truly integrative solution, if 'we' still 'want' to improvise. One of the important lessons from the first-gen AACMers that, incidentally, eventually coincided with the development of hip-hop—which was, by all accounts, the 'next step' after fusion (whether of the populist or modernist strain): maintaining and emphasizing the functional role of timbre, polyrhythm (& polytempo!), and linear heterophonic and polyphonic ('unison') improvisation in the face of the withering salience of triadic vertical harmony and homophony as foundational—was and is that the 'notated section' is entirely sufficient as the structure from which improvisation can be superimposed, rather than to which it is affixed or abstracted. This position offers the effect of a complex multidominant system full of dialectical tensions, pure and false repetitions, and relaxations, rather than the perpetuation of a position so overtly bound to external reference and homophony. One need not gesture out of the 'notated' stasis in order to imbue the totality with some sort of false variation that only inference and dialogism can supply—while also needlessly overextending the sonata form for the sake of its … cultural value? This lesson from Black avant-gardism came as the result of asking the question: What is the most effective form of organizing my music? But, perhaps this is all needlessly reductive—a not uncommon charge brought against one who dares speak about improvisation. Nonetheless, such reductionism only serves as a tangent from which the logic of the present compositions can be partially construed—given their instrumentation and overall texture. Only partially, yes, otherwise a tedious track-by-track analysis will be needed. And even I, 'the composer', distrust myself enough to stop here, as I should have done much earlier.