Relaxin' at Camarillo

Attack of the Psycho-Squits

No, not another new band, but the sore and lamentable malady from which I've been suffering all week, hence no playing, posting, or much of anything. Today was the first day I even made it past 3 on the consciousness scale (it's out of 100 - the Dalai Lama scores 88 on a good day), and as it was also the day Le Massif were supposed to play their fatal gig, a vestigial sense of responsibility managed to coax me out of the house for ten minutes to check on the guys I'd passed it on to. Not only did they show up as promised, they sounded great - sickeningly good given how young they all are - and with their permission, here' s a little snippet of what we might have won. Great playing all round, an edgy blues-bop guitar solo, and especially killer drumming:  What Might Have Been

In other news: Floyd, my three year-old, got his first Ukulele this weekend. He's very taken with it and as soon as he's not watching, so am I. My ear is chronic, but with the help of this bad boy, it's gonna ripen quicker than a banana in the glove compartment. I picked out both "Ode to Joy" and "Here, There, and Everywhere" on it today. Don't mock. It worked for Joe Pass.

(Floyd and I playing "Smoke on the Water" in the kitchen of my apartment in Ronkonkoma on the day I came down with the shits.)

Le Merde Central

Forgive me if I seem a little merde obsessed of late. Perhaps this post would've been better entitled Le Massif Central est Mort.

Last November, we were booked to play a gig on April 12th. We found a good sax player, got our set list together and started practicing. We weren't about to set the world alight, but it was going well. This morning, one of us casually announces that he's actually going to be in New Orleans on April 12th, so sorry, can't play. We can't play the gig without him, so we've had to pull out.

What a let-down. I'm really disappointed, but most of all, too furious to speak. Needless to say, it has been a day of terse exchanges, at the end of which, Le Massif Central are no more.

On the bright side, as today's death of Jean Baudrillard shows, the whole French Existential thing is getting a little tired. At least now we're free to pursue our Moaist bop duo, "Great Leap Forward."

Bollocks.

Le Nouveau Massif Central

...or rather, the old Massif Central re-heated. So we played last night for the first time in about six or seven months and to say we were rusty would be severely under-stating the profound corrosion that has taken place since then. Musically and physically. But aside from the sheer unadulterated pleasure of being reunited with the taciturn and unlovely bastards that are my bandmates, there was a real reason to be excited -- my new guitar arrived. They shipped the EXS-IDH, the two pick-up model (thereby proving that they really don't read the customer service emails), but I have to say that I'm delighted with it and wouldn't want to change it at all. It's a good inch slimmer than my Samick which makes it very comfortable to play, and strung with flatwound .13s has a rich warm tone. The neck is dead straight, the intonation perfect, and there's not a single raised fret or dead spot anywhere on the fingerboard. It's also really nicely finished without the slightest imperfection, putting paid to the idea that they're seconds or even partial seconds. What's more, it took only six days from buying on the web to arriving at my door and it even came with an unadvertised case. The only thing is that it only came with one bridge (tune-o-matic), and I might buy a rosewood one further down the line, but that's neither here nor there -- If you're in two minds, buy one now before they come to their senses.

Here' s what it sounds like - us playing Stolen Moments recorded live in Ramos' basement last night. I'm playing through my Cube 60 with just a dash of reverb. It's recorded using the Zoom H4's on-board stereo mics with a little bit of  compression, and if it wasn't for the awfulness of the playing, you'd have to say the quality is pretty good for a handheld recorder. Oh, and the news keeps getting better -- that Fender Princeton that was ruined in the flood -- it works perfectly AND I got the insurance money. Sweet!

Massif Plans

So I've been playing around with my new gear and am utterly floored by how completely crap I've become in the two months I stopped regular practice. It seems particularly cruel that what comes so slowly can leave so fast, and just serves to underline what a tenuous grip I had on it in the first place. Particularly troubling, as I played along with Band in a Box, was my dreadful soloing. Immediately, I changed the strings back to flat wounds (a set of Thomastik-Infield George Bensons, 0.12s. I prefer .13s [or at least I tell myself I prefer .13s] but I've had these on a day now and they're a little pricey but I think they might be the best strings my Samick's ever had. And last night I went and bought two new sets of Chromes - dickenkopf!)

In other news, Le Massif Central, rightly worried by committing to a high-profile gig when they're clearly a bunch of half-wit incompetents, have decided to recruit a new player -- a "ringer" you might say -- a melodist who can keep the band afloat even as the rhythm section flounders. This would mean I could just comp and take occassional solos -- and lower-pressure solos at that, which can legitimately open as re-statements of the melody as I won't have just been playing it. So, if any of the 26.01 people a day who read this happen to live in the Western New York region, have a penchant for pretend-French existentialism, puerile humour, insane drummers and can play sax, clarinet, chromatic accordion or Sumatran nakky-noo, then do get in touch. Our set list is likely to look like this:

1. Autumn Leaves
2. Stolen Moments
3. Fly Me to the Moon
4. Rosetta
5. Besame Mucho
6. Douce Ambience
7. The Look of Love
8. Nuages
9. Misty
10. I Can't Get Started
11. My Funny Valentine
12. In a Sentimental Mood
13. A Night in Tunisia

And many thanks to Leo for putting us onto this site -- lots of free material here. Check out the chord-scale reference guide in particular. That's what I want to do with my time!

Zoot Alors!

Now this really is forcing the issue... Last night, Le Massif Central were approached to do a nicely paid one-hour gig at a cocktail party in a Frank Lloyd-Wright house. Of course we said yes, even though we haven't played together since June, and then to an audience of eight people and two dachshunds, which meant that 20% of our audience that night were sausage dogs. Fortunately, the date is not until April 17th, so there's plenty of time to practice. It's a shame we haven't replaced our amps since they floated off on an effluent swell last month or we'd get going straight away. Instead, I'll start thinking about a set list that doesn't comprimise our pretend-French-existential values. It may be a swanky cocktail do, but Massif Central always dress to depress.

Massif Celebrities

Look at this... Does that officially mean Le Massif Central have a following?

Fans would be nice, though highly unlikely, and a practice is long overdue. Peter has returned safely from Australia though he's in deep mourning for both Steve Irwin and Australian racing champ Peter Brock who died in a crash a mere three days later. I tried to comfort him by telling him it was a testament to Australian masculinity that his boys hadn't passed away quietly in their beds with only a sliver of drool to mark the passage to the ever-after, but had rather fallen in the field engaged in rufty-tufty pursuits. I helpfully suggested he go bungee jumping to cheer himself up.

However, as entirely non-jazz content is absolutely forbidden at Relaxin' at Camarillo, here's a nice voicing for an Amin11th with no root to get you stretching a little.

 

And here's a context for using it in. I suppose this could be an intro to something. Might even work for "Autumn Leaves." Note how simply changing one voice in Em produces a nice effect (the partly-obscured name of the penultimate chord is Ab7b5.)

Massif Practice

Last night, Massif Central had their last practice for a while as Peter is off to Australia for two months - a text-book error in my opinion, as aside from missing practice, he clearly fails to realize that it'll be winter in the southern hemisphere now and snowing here by the time he gets back. I thought it best to record a couple of tunes so we have something to remember him by in the event he's eaten alive by dingos, so here they are. You might want to turn your speakers up a bit, as they were recorded on my ancient and malfunctioning 4-track with a super-cheap mic that I just stood in the middle of the room. Sorry about that. I'm working on getting something better.

Our first is "Rosetta", and probably best avoided as it keeps cutting out for some reason. I used Audacity to remove all the swearing, but I still can't seem to stop it cutting out. If you can force yourself to listen to it, you'll see that I'm basically aiming a bop sound though my chops are way off and the tone is still a bit twangy (I'm having trouble getting a warm tone out of my amp without getting horrible feedback every time I play a note on the 5th or 6th string.) I basically play in F major using  chromaticism and an occassional C# diminished arpeggio or C#Maj7th arpeggio any time I'm in the general vicinity of a V chord. The bridge confuses me completely as I'm still not very good at working out shifts in tonal centres, so basically, I play in C major for the first half and F for the second. The second tune is "A Night In Tunisia," again in F. I try to play around the Dmin, Eb9 chord shapes, mark my place by recalling the lick, and then play around Amin and Gm shapes for the bridge on the 12th and 10th frets respectively, before doing something (not entirely sure what) on the F6 that takes you back into the final A section. My main problem here is that I'm trying to play too fast. This is one of Ramos' favourites, and he deliberately tries to sound as if someone were randomly firing a gun at his kit.

Download Rosetta.wav

Keen-eyed observers and walking jazz encyclopedias will note that "Rosetta" is a track on "For Django," while "A Night in Tunisia" is a cut on "The Real Cat." See how it's all coming together to form an all-encompassing master plan? And by the way, I post these not to win applause, but to provide an entirely honest document of where I am and how far I have to go. It's a fairly brutal assessment of both, I think you'll agree. Cheers!

Le Massif Central

About eighteen months ago, I started jamming with a couple of friends. Initially two guitars and a bass, we focused on standards, Django tunes, and swing oldies like "Mr. Sandman." I played a nylon string classical and we never performed live except for once at my son's first birthday party, where we were told to shut up by the older kids who were trying to watch Scooby Doo. We were practicing twice a week, and getting steadily better until a beautiful thing was savagely taken from us when Jeff, the rhythm guitarist, decided to move to El Paso to live with his girlfriend, Yoko Ono. But as one door closes, a window opens, and Ramos, an eccentric half-Lebanese, half-Venezuelan poet and drummer moved back into town. And so Le Massif Central was born, the east-coast's leading pretend-French-existential-sixties-jazz-trio. I'm the looker on the right. The mustaches are stunt mustaches, merely for the purpose of public appearances.

I'm the beginner in this franchise. Peter, the bassist, while ten years younger than Ramos and myself, had tons of experience playing semi-professionally in a funk band in his native Australia. As a youth, Ramos' band "The Unknown" was voted best live act in Baltimore 1988 by the local press and they made a couple of studio records. He recently found one on ebay being sold by some bloke in Holland for $50.

After about a year of trying to work out what the fuck we were doing trying to fake our way through jazz (including about three months when Ramos and I weren't talking to each other), we were invited to play a show and made our debut performance on January 25th, 2006. We only knew six songs, and only really three of those went well. I wore a vest and played my Highway '51 Strat strung with flatwounds beneath a projection of "Last Year at Marienbad" we insisted they show to reinforce our message of bleak, existential solitude. Here's our attempt at "Autumn Leaves" from that evening (or "Feuilles Mort" as Le Massif prefer it). It's a fairly good representation of where my playing is now. Some of the single note stuff is ok, some not, the chordal intro is a bit of a hack job, and I fluff the comping in a couple of places having only learnt to play the 3rd and 7th of each comped chord about three days before the show. The chorus effect was stuck on by the soundman, though I'm not sure why.

Massif Fact: each member of Massif Central was born and raised on different continents.