| Bob Gluck - About my music - An interesting Zawinul tribute Bob Gluck About my music – written for the Zawinul Fans website.  I have played piano since I was a young child, when I was a conservatory student. Subsequently, I discovered electronic music in the early 1970s and pursued this, alongside piano, in college. But after that, I essentially burned out as a musician and for nearly two decades pursued a career outside of music. In the mid-1990s, I began composing again and, in 2003, recommitted myself to the piano. Clearly, my rigorous training as a child allowed my technique to return pretty quickly and the passing silent years led, paradoxically, to much musical growth.I have loved jazz since my late teens, when a major influence was Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band, about which I’m currently writing. But the first non-classical pianists I discovered after the end of my conservatory days came to me through rock music, particularly keyboard player Keith Emerson and British avant-gardist Keith Tippett, who had recorded with King Crimson. In 1974, while in college, I attended a concert by Weather Report in upstate New York; this was right before the release of Sweetnighter, and I was entranced. Zawinul’s story-telling approach to composing, his subtle expansion of the electric piano with electronics (this was just as he began using synthesizers), and his lyrical style excited me. This set the stage for a life-long love of his playing and his music. In those years, I was also very much taken by Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, Muhal Richard Abrams and, subsequently, Bud Powell. My first recordings to be released came in 1998 and 2003 (‘Stories Heard and Retold’ and ‘Electric Songs’, both on EMF Media: http://www.emfmedia.org/artists/gluck.html) and these sat firmly within world of electro-acoustic music, which is the field in which I primarily teach and write. But as I began to overcome my resistance to returning to the concert stage as a pianist, I began to incorporate the piano into my performances. Since my late teen years, I had always played rock and then jazz “on the sly,” having been raised in a music educational environment that viewed non-classical music with suspicion. Soon, the piano became a co-equal partner in my increasing performances, performances, with some of the music about re-imagining music that I loved from Miles Davis’ electric era, culminating in a 2006 concert tour in North America, with two stops in Europe and my 2007 CD “Electric Brew” (EMF Media). The concerts and the recording were all real-time solo performances in which complex layers of musical material, acoustic piano, piano recorded on the spot and replayed, and electronic sounds, with no multi-tracking. My goal was to create a complex, often unpredictable musical “stew,” much like Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” but as a solo performer. I wanted the computer to “listen” to my performance, as it unfolded, and generate its own material in response, sometimes directly related to what I was playing and sometimes not. In both cases, the setting was consciously improvisatory – the goal of the computer-generated music was to illicit my own new musical response, just as the computer itself was improvising, following unpredictable but systematically through-through procedures. Towards this end, I designed my own interactive software interfaces, using the programming environment Max/MSP. I often performed on a Yamaha Disklavier, which is capable of tracking information about what is being played, sending the data to my software interface, and then back to the piano keyboard, which would play the results automatically on the keyboard. Sometimes I used an acoustic piano, tracking the note and volume information (from which I could calculate all sorts of other things algorithmically) using a Moog PianoBar and a sound module. This type of interactivity with computer-assisted pianos was pioneered by Richard Teitelbaum and David Rosenboom, and with other instruments, by George Lewis, all in the 1980s. In one concert, I added a rhythm section and clarinetist (Don Byron) to this complex electronic mix, which meant that my fellow musicians and I were reacting not just to each other, but also to the relatively unpredictable software. Around this time, I began to periodically insert solo piano improvisations, with no electronics and rediscovered my love of the piano. When I formed the Bob Gluck Trio, with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Dean Sharp, in late 2006, the goal was a hybrid of music for acoustic ensemble and music involving electronics. For information about the band, see http://www.electricsongs.com/trio/. The new 2008 CD, our first as a trio, “Sideways,” soon to be released by the British jazz label FMR (http://www.fmr-records.com), offers some of each. I think of our group as first and foremost an open, improvisatory band, where unpredictable things happen and there’s close attention paid to coloristic playing and nuanced attention to not only conventional elements like melody and rhythm, but timbral variety. I learned this from early Weather Report, from Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band, and from the musicians of the Chicago-based AACM. Some of the tunes are performed with the piano’s sound expanded electronically: one example is the piano solo called 'Yet Another Pharoah,' based upon Zawinul’s 'Pharoah's Dance,' another version of which appears on my 2007 CD “Electric Songs” (EMF Media). I created a new software interface for the trio performances, rather different from the prior one. Yet another custom interface was crafted for our version of Zawinul’s anti-war tune, “Unknown Soldier,” which updated the sounds of conflict to include political speeches especially about the beginning of the ongoing Iraq war. Some of the tunes on the new CD are relatively straight ahead, with an extended approach to improvisation, key to the nature of this exploratory band. These include my new tunes “Sideways,” “Waterway” and “Yonati” and our interpretation of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” Michael Bisio’s composition, ‘History of a Mystery: H. Floresiensis” has a narrative structure tracing the birth and death of a specie of precursors to human beings. That structure has a parallel sectional musical structure, which includes both guided, but relatively free improvisation and more conventional chord changes. And of course, the CD also includes a third Zawinul tune, a solo piano version of ‘A Remark You Made.’ A few months ago, immediately following the death of Josef Zawinul, I decided to put together a different kind of trio, to play a program dedicated specifically to the music of Zawinul and fellow Weather Report alumni. I recruited saxophonist Keith Pray, whose influences include Zawinul’s former employer Cannonball Adderley, and world percussionist Brian Melick, who specializes in the Udu drum. I created a web page to document that concert. Images and mp3s of some of the tunes may be found here: http://www.electricsongs.com/BGWR_mp3s/. Our approach to the music was general interpretive. This is most radically the case with respect to my solo version of Zawinul’s ‘Birdland.’ Lacking a bass player, Birdland seemed like an impossibility. I think that we played a successful version of ‘Black Market’ (not on the web page), but ‘Birdland’ seemed to require something more. The path I chose was to create an improvised pastiche of themes and musical figures from the tune.  For the performance, I incorporated the Moog PianoBar again, but used it in a manner closer to that for which it was designed – to trigger electric and electronic keyboard sounds, synth pads and, especially, electric piano, which is expanded with a wah-wah pedal, and two digital stomp boxes, a digital delay and a fuzz box, which figures in this concert’s version ‘Unknown Soldier,’ one that is different from that which appears on “Sideways.” I also added two digital keyboards, one a simple controller patched to a software synthesizer on my computer and the other a Moog Little Phatty analog synthesizer, with a box that sends control voltages. The sample and hold circuit figures in the opening to the solo version of ‘Birdland.’ All in all, the response to the concert was highly positive and we look forward to considering future dates. The Bob Gluck Trio appears next at a club in upstate New York, for a celebration of the release of our new CD.
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