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The liner notes for "Dice, Done" include a description of how the texts
used during the recording of the CD came to be. An excerpt:
Molly Martin: "Now maybe we should go more into the details of how the recording itself was approached, starting with that band meeting, where among other things some of the texts that had been on the tour were discussed. While it was felt that names in the texts such as Billie Holiday or Thelonious Monk could easily be inspiring, the view was also expressed that, in a more intimate setting, with the words only heard and not seen, they could be a sort of obstacle to the unfolding of the music.
It was likewise mentioned that there were certain words such as the word repetition that didn't sound so interesting being repeated or sampled. Claus (Bøje) suggested that we might take the texts back to Seattle and work with them and underline some parts that would be less loaded, from these two perspectives.
On that basis, Torben and I made two sets of what we called distillations. But then Torben sat down and sort of re-worked or played with those distillations ... "
T.U.: "Well, basically we had twelve texts – we call them "lines" – and most of these we had already used on the tour, not necessarily at the same time. So I thought it could be something to try to make twelve new ones, based only on the words of the distillations – and none other.
When we underlined the words, we had had used two pens or markers, first a pink one, and for the next set a blue one. So I thought it could be nice to make four new line-texts out of the pink-colored, and four more out of the blue-colored, and another four that would use a combination of the two colors.
We now had twelve old ones, where the meaning was familiar, growing out of the interplay between music and ball play. And we had twelve new ones, where the semantic would be different, although the words were entirely part of the of the first set of twelves. And hopefully a resonance would be established, a connective thread, like chord and melody line in the history of that music.
Still with Holiday and Monk in mind, we may think of how the bop-generation would use the chords familiar to the swing generation and put new lines on top of well-known chordal progressions, with some minor fifths and ninths added. And how a still later generation would break up the chordal and linear patterns and begin to ignore the formal requirements of eight- and twelve-bar thinking, even before the pulse itself was beginning to be, as was said, freed up.
What we tried in Humlebæk, as we had done at the tour dates, was to try also to improvise both up and down individual texts as well as across: from one to any other one."
Read the full liner notes. (PDF) |
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