you are now indicted...and convicted...of beauty...treasonous gorgeousness...

I recently found an old scrap of manuscript paper, with a scratchy lead sheet written on it. And when I sat down at the piano to play it I thought “oh, I remember this! And I still like it.”

When I say old, this must have been written in about 1985, when I was 22, and studying Composition & Jazz piano at the University of Miami. I could hear straight away what I would have been listening to a lot at the time. 

This is my realisation of that lead sheet, some 37 or so years later…

Lake Osceola

Bobby the Cat

Song I wrote over the weekend. This is our rehearsal. We all have done things that we can greatly regret.  And the shadows of those regrets hang and loom and spill beyond, over and underneath. We recorded this today. The guys first laid eyes and ears upon it . There are sure to be revisions. Joe Gilman piano, Ben Kopf bass, Cameron Womack drums.  Henry Robinett guitar and composer.

Shadows And Her Regret

Ganymede

I Wonder

treehaus

Na'alehu

This original composition is called Parallax: Exercise in harmonic visualization and chart creation: write the tune without the aid of an instrument - hear it, write it down, bring to rehearsal. Inspired by the film, Amadeus, and watching the brilliant pianist Makoto Ozone while across from him at the Coffee Shoppe while I (and he)was in school, write charts as freely as the spoken language, I set out to do the same with this piece, and feel I was successful with less adjustments in notation than fingers on one hand. 

This piece is a tribute to two of my favorite artists, so they are stylistically combined in my mind: Miles Davis and Terje Rypdal.

We went over the sections, then ran the chart. Recorded (just by chance actually) on the Boom Box cassette machine because it was the only device in the room. !st take.  Sonicly low-fi, but to exercise worked out OK,. It sounded like I intended, only about two pitch corrections. Matt Ryan on drums, Geno Lopes on bass, Ray Elzey on keys/guitar, me (Dave) on Guitar

Ganymede

Steven Coolidge

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