Cascades
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | No Comments
One of my favorite places to write music is on trains. Most recently I was taking Amtrak’s “Cascades” line back and forth between Seattle and Portland quite a bit last fall and had some quality time to work on new kora band tunes. I’m now happy to share with everyone the result, a new tune called, appropriately, “Cascades.” I went up to Seattle earlier in the week to record this tune for a grant application (more on that forthcoming, if it comes through…), in our favorite engineer Don Gunn’s little backyard studio, “The Office.” We were really happy with the results so I decided to put it up on Bandcamp as a “single” for you to check out. We’ll be recording this tune again in May, along with the rest of our second album, and it also serves as a little preview for our upcoming fall shows, including this coming Friday in Portland and Saturday in Seattle.
The tune itself is pretty fun, I had been playing with Loveness Wesa and the Bantus Band for a bit when I wrote it, so there’s certainly some elements of the “Shona heartbeat” 4-on the floor, as it were. I also wanted to explore A minor/C major on kora, which works well when tuned to the typically Malian “Sauta” tuning (basically F lydian). And of course my interest in and love of the electric bass continues, despite the absolutist promises of my 12-year-old self, and Brady certainly slammed the weirdly difficult basslines I wrote him on this one. Hope you enjoy! Use the player below or click on the image to go directly to the Bandcamp page, where you can download it for free, or if you are so inclined, name your own price.
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