Here's a few of my favourite tracks that I'd like to have on my Spotlight page permanently if I had the room. To be here, it's important not only that I'm proud of the music, but also that I enjoyed the process of making them and the musical company of others involved

12 Front Page Favourites

Not sure if this track makes a political point...and let's face it, the way the Western media portrays things, none of us has a clue about what's really going on in Libya....I was just struck by the utter contrast in the way Western leaders and Qaddafi spoke.  But no matter whether one speaks with control or with passion, war is war.

I wouldn't kiss that Camel for all the Oil in LIbya, Dave McKeown with Colonel Qadaffi

Here's another collaboration between myself and the wondeful Shauna Hamilton on piano (aka dark_barcelona). I find her gentle spacious music inspirational...it suits my musical temperament perfectly. This piece features my bass clarinet, not usually considered a lyrical instrument, but then it rarely gets given the space and time Shauna gives it here.

I took the picture in the Shetland Islands

Can't Believe, Dave McKeown with Shauna-Kay Hamilton

This is what my daughter and I got up to on Boxing Day.
Siobhan, aka <a href="http://soundcloud.com/shibby-shitegeist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shibby Shitegeist</a>, is a DJ and minimal techno is her thing. Her events at festivals and clubs across the UK go under the name Danzshlag and when I appear alongside I am known as Dadshlag....don't laugh!...I'm being serious.
Anyway, Siobhan made all the beats here and I played whistle, clarinet, read some words and helped with the mix. The words are fantastic and worth repeating here. The old fellow in the picture is Joe Cooley, a renowned accordion player of Irish traditional music. The words come from a fantastic book by the Belfast musician and poet, Ciaran Carson. These words are describing this very picture and the reel that I play on the low whistle goes by the name of Joe Cooley's Reel.
"The sleeve is Cooley's face and shoulders and the upper half of the box, the straps digging into his collar-bone, the Paolo Soprani radiator-grille Art Deco aluminium sound-plate-and-fingerboard on his right, the bellows on his left stretched in an elegant accordioned ridge. He has his jacket on. A floppy-collared shirt, a tie; a jaunty cigarette between his lips. It is a gaslight snap, blown up till all the grains show, till you are drawn in to reinvent the smile you imagine to be there behind the eyes in shadow, as you are drawn into the gas of the recording, of the mono LP hissing blackly and revolving in its shellacky crepuscular upon the turntable of an archaic Decca mahogany-veneered radiogram the size of a china cabinet, with its dog-sized speakers and dead mice inside them, after you foolishly abandoned them in the back room of the damp mouse-infested gardener's cottage that you left for where you live now".
 


davemckeown.co.uk

Jaunty Cigarette, Dave McKeown with Shibby Shitegeist

Here is a piece for piano and tenor saxophone. Big thanks to <a href="http://soundcloud.com/dgreening" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">♬ Dave Greening</a> for very kindly allowing me to root around in his extensive back catalogue for another tune suitable for collaboration; with it's wide open spaces at the beginning and end and with the beautifully voiced and intense middle section, this piece fits the bill perfectly.
All the different moods in the piece are created and played with gorgeous sensitivity and a sure-footed sense of structure by Dave. It was a huge pleasure to spend time adding an extra layer on saxophone.

I took the picture in Savernake Forest, Wiltshire

Bliss, Dave McKeown with Dave Greening

Here is a Prelude and Fugue I've written for saxophone quartet. For those of you not familiar with the format, that's soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones and I'm playing them all on this recording.
This music was written for the <a href="http://returntostyx.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://returntostyx.com</a>/ project created by David Stuart, aka <a href="http://soundcloud.com/archimedes">Archimedes</a>. This is an exciting collaborative novel with contributions in text, music and image by all sorts of talented people here on Soundcloud and from elsewhere. It's a fascinating process seeing how people have interpreted the brief and brought their own creativity to bear on the project.
When David mentioned the "Return to Styx" project the first thing that came to my mind was Handel's amazing Baroque operas in which the Underworld was a common theme. It's difficult for us to imagine the incredible impact a Handel opera would have had on the audience of the day. There would have been no CGI or amplification or indeed, much acting or scenery. But Handel knew how to convey very real human emotions in his exquisite music, and that's what theatre-goers would have felt as they concentrated on the performers. That's why I decided to write this piece in a Baroque style....not as an attempt to capture any of the passion and artistry of Handel because that's an impossibility.... but to pay my respects to that first emergence of the personal and vulnerable voice in musical theatre.
For those of you interested in this sort of thing, I originally planned the first movement as a Toccata, but it's not quite long or difficult enough to justify that title, so I've settled for the less ambitious Prelude. The Fugue is in 4 equal voices, with two main themes heard together in counterpoint at the beginning of the movement, before being developed around the ensemble in various keys and combinations. The Prelude is principally in D minor, but the main key in the Fugue is F Major. The Fugue's coda however modulates back to D minor, bringing the piece to a close with the same harmonic sequence as in the Prelude .

I took the picture in a cave carved out of the ice in a glacier in the French Alps

Cave of Mirrors, Prelude and Fugue, Dave McKeown

Here is a piece of latin jazz fusion with myself on alto and tenor sax and the incomparable Tory Slusher, aka http://soundcloud.com/thejivemonkeycartel, on everything else. The composition is Tory's as well.

Tory is simply one of the best musicians I've come across on the Cloud... she has astounding technique and creativity. Needless to say I'm excited to be playing on this one and slightly relieved she asked me to play on one of her slower numbers!

Eskimo Pie, Dave McKeown with The Jive Monkey Cartel

Here is a simple duet with pianist and composer http://soundcloud.com/michelle-eaton. I really enjoyed listening to her exciting and skilful piano playing and superb orchestrations so I suggested a collaboration. By return of post I received this deliciously delicate miniature...an arrangement of a song I don't know by George Shearing. Michelle's playing here is beautifully feather-light and adding my part on clarinet felt like painting with a one-haired brush. Hope you enjoy it. Please do call by Michelle's page for more delights.

Ramona, Dave McKeown with Michelle Eaton

Here is a collaboration with Matthias, aka http://soundcloud.com/truehedonism, our contribution to the Soundcloud Collaboration Tombola. First of all, big thanks to the Rockshamrover boys for such a good idea, and especially to Barclaybunch Dave for all the hard work and fun he put into organising it.
I hadn't come across Matthias before but we've had a lovely time putting this together. The main musical ideas are all from Matthias. He developed a beautiful gentle electronic theme, both percussive and serene. It made me think of Japanese music so I added chopped up samples of Maria Callas singing from Madame Butterfly, (Puccini's opera set in Japan), some geiger counting hihats and BBC recordings of 9 year old Ayaki and her father Hitoshi who live near Fukushima. The words in English are
"We have a machine to measure radiation,
but it's in English, so I only used it at the start.
I don't really understand it
1.0 microsieverts is high and 0.3 microsieverts is a little bit high.
I check the levels in my room sometimes

The levels near grass and water are high, so we try to play on the tarmac
If I went over there I think dad would get cross. There are lots of trees and the radiation is probably high.
Dad told me to play in this car park so I only ever play here."

I found plenty of recordings of experts predicting one million Fukushima-related cancer cases in Japan over the next 10 years, or talking about the trillion dollar clean-up bill, but none of these were as powerful as a little girl learning how to measure radiation levels before going outside, and having to play in a car park instead of on the grass. Thanks again Matthias.

SCT, Playtime in Fukushima, Dave McKeown with True Hedonism, (translation in track description)

Here is a beautiful song written and performed by http://soundcloud.com/anj-7 from Germany with a few subtle additions by the wonderful Michelle Eaton on piano and myself on clarinet. 

Anjù writes brilliant songs that are simple and direct. There are no pyrotechnics. She manages to imbue them with the deepest of emotions with the pure and intimate tone of her voice and impeccable phrasing and timing. Meanwhile, Michelle just captures the dark melancholy of this song perfectly on the piano. Just such a pleasure for me to be involved with such talent. 

Like the Sea, Dave McKeown with Anjù and Michelle Eaton

I've been having a bit of fun writing and recording some music over the last few days and I got a bit carried away with this one. The band is made up of flute, clarinet, alto sax and bass clarinet. It's a combo that seems to work quite well for me, lots of colours on the palette to work with. Don't ask me what key it's in, it's mostly constructed with augmented harmony around the note of Eb concert. 

Honey, Who Put the Toothpaste in the Microwave? Dave McKeown

Here is a collaboration with two of the nicest guys on the cloud, Vlad and Diederik. They met up in Sydney Australia last year and decided to make a track together. Before Christmas, just before Rik moved to the UK, he sent me his lovely gamelan track. I saw it was in the right key for my Uillean Pipes so decided to give them their annual outing. I also liked the idea of playing a  counterpoint on my yew wood flute, and that got me thinking about Wordsworth's powerful and mysterious poem about the yew trees he knew where he lived in the Lake District. 

Yew trees are wonderful. Some are thought to be over 5000 years old. I know one near here that is at least 1600 years old. The very same ancient yews that Wordsworth describes can still be seen in Borrowdale today. Because of their longevity they were places of worship in pre-Christian times, and many found in church yards in the UK were there long before the churches were built. The wood is a glowing mixture of purple, gold, red and orange, dense and very slow-growing. 
All this seemed to fit with Diederik's marvellous bubbling gamelan track. Yew Trees and Gamelan may seem strange bed-fellows but both represent cultural traditions whose origins are lost in the mists of time. I visited Buddhist temples in Cambodia a couple of years ago where the buildings and the trees had intertwined to become almost as one, and that's what I had in mind when I was making this track. 

In the meantime, Vlad recorded his bass track, and I couldn't believe when I heard it, it fitted so exactly with what I had added to the track. Apparently we had both heard Diederik's music in precisely the same way. 

Anyway, here is Wordsworth's poem.

There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale, 
Which to this day stands single, in the midst 
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore:

Of vast circumference and gloom profound 
This solitary Tree! -a living thing 
Produced too slowly ever to decay; 
Of form and aspect too magnificent 
To be destroyed. But worthier still of note 
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
 Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; 
Huge trunks! -and each particular trunk a growth 
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine 
Up-coiling, and inveteratley convolved, -  
Nor uninformed with Fantasy, and looks 
That threaten the profane; -a pillared shade, 
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, 
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged 
Perennially -beneath whose sable roof 
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked 
With unrejoicing berries -ghostly Shapes 
May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope, 
Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton 
And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate, 
As in a natural temple scattered o'er 
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
United worship; or in mute repose 
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood 
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.


Yew Trees, Dave McKeown with Diederik de Jonge and Vlad Josephson

I've been wanting to make a track about guns for a while now. I've collected a lot of samples and made a few false starts, but it wasn't until Kine posted these wonderful vocal stems for 'Father' that I could see a way forward. There are a few recordings from gun supporters and newscasters, but the main voice you hear is that of Kaitlin Roig, the incredible teacher who hid her first grade class in a tiny bathroom and kept them calm, quiet, and safe until the horror had passed.

I've been a huge fan of Kine since she put her first scratchy demos up on soundcloud a couple of years ago. There is a fragile power to her voice and a darkness and depth that is hard to fathom. The prayer she offers in this song puts into words perfectly what we all felt in the aftermath of events at Sandy Hook, Utøya, and elsewhere, but no-one can express it like Kine: and that, in a nutshell, is what music is for.

Darkness wash away my fear
make me forget I was ever there
take away my eyes take away my mind
make me understand how it feels to be blind

Father, Father hold me in your arms
make me feel safe make me feel strong
all I wanted was your love

Hold me in your arms
make me feel strong
I'm calling for your love
to wash it all away

Father, Dave McKeown with Kine Hjeldnes

I am a working full-time musician, teaching, performing, composing, recording and arranging, and my gigs in the last few years have included jazz combo, big band jazz, folk, Irish traditional, rock, soul, latin, klezmer, funk, orchestral, chamber, minimal techno, musical theatre and more, so, safe to say, I’ll have a go at anything. 

I'm a firm believer in demolishing boundaries between genres, cultures, languages and ultimately people, and Soundcloud is a terrific place where all this can happen.