Gallimaufrey
I’ve always been a musical omnivore. My CD collection looks as though it was assembled by a committee. And the music room is a strange oasis that is home to a mixed herd of guitars [electric, acoustic, classical, 12 string], basses [fretted, fretless], banjos, ouds, keyboards, and percussion gear. So it should come as little surprise that when I’m recording original music at home, it tends to be difficult to classify.
I’ve begun to program some percussion parts for one song, using a tabla track as the foundation and layering it with some processed metallic sounds. The harmonic content will be fleshed out by fretless bass and frenzied guitar. As always, the tracks are conjured from musical styles (and noise) that I like. I’ve tried to record songs that are clearly within the bounds of a single style (“here’s my version of some jazz classic…”) but the limitation to one style seems bland and I find myself reaching into the spice cupboard.
In Jumbalassy I was responsible for 20 years’ worth of playing rhythm within a bounded Caribbean style, but I peppered my guitar parts with whatever inspired me. Little phrases and solo features were always changing / evolving. People often approached me after shows and asked me if I was the only guitarist in the band, or if someone else plays some of those parts. Yes, I’m the only one. Which means all those skronky loops, african guitar parts, rock solos, goofy pop, two-handed-tapping, blues, and jazz all were swimming around inside my head. It’s all fair game since the point of the band was to write original music based on the self-expression of the musicians involved. But it made for some difficulty assigning us to a genre.
A contrasting example is that I also play in tribute / cover bands in which we recreate another band’s music with painstaking accuracy. In these settings I’m attempting to occupy the head space of another musician; my personal self-expression is completely absent from the performance. Marco Perroni and Steve Stevens are both amazingly cool and stylistically unique guitarists, and it takes a lot of effort to get their parts absolutely right.
I’ll be diving back into my recording this weekend, and it’s likely I’ll color outside the lines. One of these days I’ll try to define a term for my style classification. For the present, I’m inclined toward “gallimaufrey”.