Rant alert. If you don’t like rants, stop reading. There’s probably something on Netflix you can watch, or a book you can read, or something you can listen – – hang on, that’s exactly where I’m going.

When you want to watch a movie online, or (obviously enough) in the cinema, you are compelled to pay for it. There are pirate sites, but moves are being made, I understand, to shut them down. Penalties have been imposed on certain individuals trading in pirated film-type content, and that seems like a good thing since movies cost money to make and might hope to have some of the expenses they’ve incurred, earned back. Netflix and Stan rely upon your paying some money to stay connected. If you go to the iTunes store and look for ‘Casablanca’, just as a random example, it’ll cost you $4.99 to rent it, and $14.99 to buy it. Which is ridiculous, because JB Hi-fi will sell you the DVD for $12.98, or (at the moment) as part of a deal for ten bucks if you buy something else for the same price. But still you gotta pay.

If you want to read a book, you can go to the library, just like you can watch telly, if it happens to be screening the flick you want to see. But if you want the book on your shelf, you’ll need to exchange a copy for some dough. ebooks, so called, also cost money (unless you want to read something from, say, the nineteenth century). Want to read the London Review of Books? Take out a subscription. Ditto The New Yorker, The Financial Review, The Australian (you’ve only got yourself to blame), etc.

Music, on the other hand, is apparently free. Listen to whatever takes your fancy; it’s probably on Spotify. And you can subscribe to that – but why would you bother?

Now I’ve heard the odd thing on Spotty, because I was curious and it’s there. But really, isn’t there something wrong with imagining that the world’s music is just free to any comer at any time? I think there is.

Now I still buy CDs. I actually like going to the shop and purchasing them. I love the idea of the record store as somewhere you might discover something you didn’t know about, a place where you might chat with someone who knows more than you do, who has a hint for you about where your next listening might be about to come from. I enjoy to place an order and then wait for the arrival. Even if I buy a CD online the idea that it’s on its way is seductive. I listen to albums in their entirety, with the tracks in the order in which the artist put them, and enjoy the journey from track one to track [last].

This is obviously way less than cool. Streaming is what’s happening everywhere! Today I went to the bottle shop and recognised a trumpet line that had obviously been appropriated; it was appearing in a context with which I was not familiar but goddamn it I knew the line. Investigation showed we were listening to some playlist from somewhere-or-other with a generic title and, well, there hadn’t been a great deal of thought put into it; music was in its own very small way accompanying your selection of drinkie-poos.

How (the fuck) is it that the work of musicians has come to be so slightly valued? How (the fuck) can it be that the time it takes to make music happen, the training that went into becoming able to imagine and generate it, the distinction of originality and the capacity to effect new experience for the listener, are suddenly worth so little? How (the fuck) does it happen that everyone seems to believe, even without apparently thinking about it, that they deserve to have music at their disposal every minute they breathe?

And what (the fuck) are we going to do about it.

I have only one album of my own on Spotify. There are others that I’ve played on that are there because I’m not in charge of them, but of those over which I have control only one is streaming. It’s there really only to advertise the others, and I may take it down. In fact I think I will. In fact, I just have.

Good.

Now please, if you’re really interested in music, if you really want there to be more music, if you’re at all keen to reward the bastards who made the music you like, try to make sure they are rewarded for what they’ve done. Buy their albums. Recommend them to your friends. Go and hear them play live. Get a party together and play an album you’re into so you can spread the feels. Remember that your favourite artists are working against a world that is actively devaluing all they hold dear, that they are cleaving to things like beauty and communication and, yes, love. Please remember this.

13/vi/2018

Friends, I hope you had a happy Easter and all that. I mean it’s a few weeks ago and all but still. The school holidays kicked off on Good Friday, but for the first week I was useless because I was totally preoccupied with working towards my recording session on April 5 and 6 (Thursday and Friday of that week), with rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. (The second week was a completely different story because certain members of the commune decamped to Paris, and I caroused with the two who remained. Blessed times.) The record date’s already three and a half weeks ago but it doesn’t seem so. At long last I was taking the double trio in to the ABC to record with whom you can be who you are. Composed in 2014, premiered then but afterwards put aside until a couple of further performances in 2016, the piece had patiently waited its turn to reach the studio.

Organising to record a piece this size is not something to which I am accustomed. I mean it’s a very unusual piece for me to have written, and the composition was a matter of research as well as imagination (phew! I didn’t say ‘inspiration’) so at the outset I was not overly confident about it either. Having worked on it with the original band – Anja Grant (violin), Phoebe Green (viola), Naomi Wileman (cello), Dave Beck (drums) and Ben Robertson (bass) – and finding that although challenging it was not unplayable, I was encouraged. The premiere however did seem like a massive thing to have got through and so I didn’t even try to get it played again for a couple of years. Returning to it in 2016 for two performances at Bennetts Lane, with Zac Johnston taking Anja’s violin chair, it felt better again and definitely by then the idea of getting it recorded was something on which I was beginning to focus.

Much changed thereafter however because neither Ben nor Dave found himself able to commit and I had to find a third violinist too so that rehearsals would be manageable. So the band that went to the ABC earlier this month was Madeleine Jevons (violin), Phoebe and Naomi, Marty Holoubek (bass), Tony Floyd (drums) and myself.

There are seven movements to the piece, each named with the initials of a close friend of mine. Hence the title. I think about friendship a lot, as I wrote shortly after finishing writing the piece, and so to be in the studio with people for whom I have sincerely friendly feelings making this music was a joy that was humbling and immensely gratifying. To have the friends in my life who agreed to have their initials appended to the movements of the piece, and then to feel so incredibly comfortable with the people playing it makes me a very fortunate boy indeed. And at the moment I’m listening through to what we recorded and awaiting the summons to re-enter the studio for mixing and so forth.

So, listening: there are parts that I can’t believe I wrote. Not because they’re great or anything, but more because they do things I never quite expect. I don’t know how I thought to go there, rather than anywhere else. There are a couple of endings that, even though I wrote them, surprise me and sort of even arrest me. I’ve previously said things that even in the saying I admitted I probably shouldn’t say, and, oh well, here we go again. But having written or played music that exists as artefact, as record, one regards it in its solid manifestation with a slightly different eye, I think. There are moments in my solo and trio recordings when I can’t quite believe that what demonstrably – since on record, then undeniably – happened, actually happened. I hesitatingly indulge in a measure of self-congratulation that they did, but I can’t honestly take credit for stuff that occurred because of neural impulses of which I do not feel to be in charge. One trains one’s technique so that hearing and acting move to the closest possible proximity, but that proximity is ideally so abbreviated that actual thought is prohibited. There isn’t time to think. You react. You hear, and you respond. Improvisationally, I get this. I totally get this. I’ve been doing it for yonks. But composition of the kind that made with whom you can be who you are is a very different kettle of fiddlesticks. Someone – I think it was Mickey Tucker, but I can’t be totally certain (and if it was, I don’t want in any way to detract from his wisdom through my shithouse recollection; he is a tremendous musician and a wonderful teacher and he taught me an immense amount) – once said to me that composition is to a degree easier (or, let’s say, more forgiving) than improvisation because right by the pencil you have the eraser and anything ill-conceived in the first instance can be revised before anyone even knows you’ve thought it.* Writing with whom I had the eraser close at hand, and probably I moved from one eraser to the next, in the manner in which you shave frequently enough to have blunted your blade so you reach for a new one.

All composition begins, some wise bastard once said, as improvisation. Good grief I wish I could remember who that was. My memory is clearly not serving me very well these days. Obviously it was an improviser, or someone theorising improvisation, making a case for jazz being awesome, or something along those lines. I’ve read countless shelves of stuff I’ve forgotten and freely I admit this but now and then there’s a nugget I’ve retained without being able to recollect who unearthed it. Exhibit A. Often enough I think of the Saturday Night Live sketch with John Belushi playing Ludwig van Beethoven, deaf as a post when instructed by his maid to eat, but apparently able to hear as he tries out his various ideas, playing for example the first four notes of the fifth symphony, and shaking his head to cast them aside. But there was a moment in which that idea was improvised. He had the idea, he saw its potential, he ran with it.

Not that for a moment I’m trying to compare myself with Beethoven. I mean really. Did you think? Please say you didn’t. But ideas come and you have to work with them as they present themselves and sometimes they’re actually okay. When this album appears, you’ll be able to hear ‘a.o.’, named after a colleague now living in the USA, a fellow piano player with whom I studied as an undergraduate at the VCA. It’s a slightly strange piece that, while tonal, doesn’t completely give its centre away (except perhaps by implication) for some minutes. There are blues choruses (no, really) in the tonic key but as things wind up we’re back in vague-land. At the end of the last iteraton of what might be termed the ‘head’ material, things are extended a little and there’s a resolution to E-flat major. I’m very pleased with this; it seems to work. Similarly, at the end of ‘m.b.’, a set of alternating variations between the string trio and the improvising one, the piano takes the melody initially presented by the violin, but in the second half of this final ‘variation’, there is a manner in which the melody is turned back on itself to create a bit of breathing space before everything is brought to its conclusion. When I hear this it seems right.

I’m really not – repeat, not – endeavouring to rave about my own creative genius here. If I could say that in the cold, bleak light of day I elected to make these things happen in the full awareness not only of their consequences but also of the many and various consequences of what I otherwise might have elected to write – assessing this, rejecting that – I’d be, well, bullshitting. It was late at night. I had coffee and cold and tiredness (but determination) and what I came up with seemed right, just then. And, you know, I’m pleased that it seems right now it’s been played and I can listen to it.

This record will go the way of all my records: briefly in the light with a few appreciative listeners and a sweet notice or two, then will it sink. I don’t care. I honestly don’t. Were I to worry about a Bell Award or an ARIA or whatever I should be much the loser, even if I won. If you play for applause, that will be your reward. We make our work and we give it to the world and it’s there. The end.

* I’m reading this six years later and I’m certain it was Mickey who said this. Why there was any doubt I can’t imagine. I can see him saying it.

30/iv/2018