Technical Notes on "Kierkegaardashian"

A couple of people have asked me about my song "Kierkegaardashian," which concludes my upcoming album Quartets, and its relation to the source material, which is Charlie Parker's "Kim," so here goes:

Back during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, I spent some time overlaying multiple takes of Charlie Parker's solos on a given tune, adjusting the timing to align them roughly, and then seeing how the phrasing overlapped or diverged for curiosity's sake. I wrote a bit about this in a blog post I called "Synchronic Bird,"  but I took it a step further with "Kim" by trying to compose a new song using the overlapping material. 

First, I laid out transcriptions of each take one above the other, then chose phrases between the two takes that would create a new, super-long linear melody:

I did this process for the entire solo, which spans multiple choruses, but "Kierkegaardashian" was intended as a miniature composition, so I only used the pitch material from the first chorus (I used a similar process to compose "Arc's Peel" and "Cheroot," which both appear on <3 Bird). 

Here it is in one line:

Bird without the rests is less interesting than the original, so I thought I would orchestrate the new line for piano between the treble and bass. Given this new solo piano context, I tried to take advantage of the piano to incorporate some wide-interval leaps by octave displacing portions of lines (e.g. beats 3 and 4 of the first full bar). Of conventional jazz instruments, the piano is probably best suiting for making quick leaps of a 6th or greater, even in succession, so I made ample use of that:

I decided to loop a few sections and changed the meters to fit the lengths of the phrases, which resulted in some odd metrical vamps that created tension as well as a space for brief soloistic improvisation. I ended up making a small video for the overlaid versions of "Kim," which is followed in the credits by Andrew Boudreau's beautiful rendering of the solo piano version of the piece:

When it came time to revisit this piece for quartet during my SEEDS residency last April, I decided to give myself a challenge and create a combined single-line version for tenor, which would be a kind of wide-interval altissimo etude. 

This uses the full range of the tenor, from low Ab below the staff to an altissimo Eb above the staff exactly one octave above the standard range of the horn (m. 3 has a leap from the lowest to that highest note). Doubling this line with the piano really makes it speak, and I enjoyed the challenge:

For "Heideggerdashian," which is essentially an alternate take we made in the studio, I let myself loose of the original composed material and try to cram as many notes as possible over and between the original melodic line, with Christian Li stoically soldiering on throughout. Given how short these takes were, I thought it would be nice to feature both the original version with me playing the melody and the unhinged, maximalist version.