Pine Mountain Club, California

In this category, I’m posting all of my musical compositions, ranging from quick riffs and muddy recordings of melody lines on old cassette recorders to all digital multi-track efforts in both song and symphony.

I’m trying my best to keep these in chronological order of their record date, starting with the oldest first. So, what you see at the top of this category are my most recent offerings.

As of this note, I’ve covered my work from the late 1960s, all of the 1970s, and we are now into the mid 1980s.

I believe there are number of songs somewhere on “lost” cassettes in my boxes of old possessions, and if I ever find them, I’ll just plop them in with a note that they are out of order and my best guess as to where they belong in the sequence.

That is all. Please resume your previous activities.

Back in the mid 1970s I as in my mid-twenties.  I had purchased a TEAC four channel reel to reel tape recorder and a Casio CZ101 synthesizer and could finally approximate some of the music I was hearing in my head while I played it only on the piano.  This is one of my early experiments with that equipment.  All these years later, I’m still pretty happy with this one.  I especially like the bendy organic sound to it.  It may be on a synth but it is anything but stilted or programmed.  It was all performed “live” – and recorded on analog multi-track – nothing processed or electronically arranged.  (Pat own self on back).

This one is inspired by the television series, Miami Vice, which was playing new episodes at the time.  I wanted to see if I could compose something in the style of Jan Hammer who wrote the score for the series.  While I wrote this I was picturing Crocket and Tubbs, all scruffy and chic at the same time, driving through the rougher parts of town on their way to meet some drug lord as undercover agents posing as distributors to make a buy.

Here’s one I wrote and recorded in the early 1980s. Kind of a psychedelic jam session. I was experimenting at the time in bendy music – trying to get away from “notes” and more into evolutions, yet making a whole series of intertwining threads work together, even though they are all on their own organic meandering courses. Recorded on my TEAC 4 track reel-to-reel recorder I bought in the late 70s and on my Casio CZ 101 Synthesizer.