Tag Archives: Meaner Than That

Lalo Sì

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People still seem to be finding my Ba Ren Chi album on Jamendo, with just under 1000 listens and dozens of downloads over its first month of being out. This makes me very happy.

I wrote earlier that one surprise was how many more listens the song “Meaner Than That” had than most of the others, but the big exception is now “Lalo Sì,” which has increased over the last couple of weeks and is now a close second. This is a song I wrote years ago, a tribute to the great Argentine-American pianist, arranger, composer, and conductor Boris Claudio “Lalo” Schifrin.

Making it was so much fun, with all the changes of tempo, the odd time signatures, the driving 7/8 that transitions to 10/8, all the energy it brings out, and the subtle and not so subtle hints at Schifrin’s most famous TV theme, the one from Mission Impossible, which made its way into movies, and is now so pervasive that just about anyone will recognize it after only a few notes.

Schifrin is one of those figures who has shaped the musical scene over several generations without having a name that everyone recognizes (a little like Quincy Jones), and I am a big fan. So very happy that my little tribute seems to be agreeable to some listeners.

Meaner Than That

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It’s nice to see the hundreds of listens to Ba Ren Chi compositions on Jamendo since I released Cool 7 earlier this month. I was a little surprised to notice the piece “Meaner Than That” move up slowly as people sampled different ones. Not displeased (I personally like all of them), just surprised. One listener, LebKamp Radio RNB, even added it to a playlist (I need to figure out why this one sounds a lot quieter than most of the others on LebKam Radio RNB’s playlist–if anyone knows, please send word!).

Still, I couldn’t keep my hands off it and felt there was something of a missed opportunity in the B section, which was feeling a bit like it ended too abruptly. So I made a longer version. The A section is the same as before, but for B I added punchier accents in the brass and percussion, beefed up the counter melody that emerges in brass section No. 2 towards the end, and opened up the middle for more drums. The end is bigger, too. Here it is as an “extended version,” released yesterday as a “single” on Jamendo, a nice feature I will probably make use of as I develop album No. 2.

Ba Ren Chi

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I just released an album on Jamendo: Cool 7.

The seven pieces were written over a dozen years or so, newly edited and optimized, all instrumentals. They are Rok Ni Yon, Tango Sorpresa, Para Margarida, Meaner Than That, ZAPP, Cool 6, and Lalo Si.

Jazz-ish, which means some fusion, some R&B, some latin, some rock. I seem to like writing for flute, vibraphone, acoustic bass, percussion, guitar. I prefer the sound and feel of real instruments, even if I can’t be in the same room with people now.

Every day’s a gift. Sharing.

Music Saving

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COVID-19 isolated me, as it did most of us, in ways that we could not have anticipated. I found a variety of ways to not go crazy. One was to rediscover music, not listening so much as making, something I have done off and on for many years since I was a teenager. In the age of non-contact, what I found was notation software, which has come so far it is hard to believe. I started composing again this spring and summer, picking up threads from years, sometimes decades ago and creating completely new ones from scratch. It does not seem to want to stop at this point, but calls constantly. I have to resist in order to get my “work” done.

I’ve put up so far a lucky thirteen pieces at the YouTube channel I created for sharing. The name Ba Ren Chi is something I thought up years ago, the Japanese Romanization, one possible one anyway, for the first three syllables of my last name. It seems apt.

The latest is mean, I mean that’s in the title, Meaner Than That, and the two before were spur-of-the-moment compositional gifts to my mother on her 90th-birthday and my wife on her we won’t say which birthday. Then before that Cool 6, which I find so fun, and then older ones like the zany Zapp, the eclectic Rok Ni Yon, and the sincere September Elegy. And that’s only seven of them.

I am sharing because it’s really all I want to do. Have a listen if you’re at all interested. No pressure to like or become a follower (or whatever the YouTube version of that is). I put little stock in such things. But if anything speaks to you, please drop me a line via comments here. It will make me feel very good.