This is a very special album release for me, and I figured since I am about to graduate and head into the world of band teaching and music education, this would be a good time to release this sort of legacy album. It is a collection of songs that I have worked on and wrote over the years from about 2016-2019 which have been rewritten and recorded multiple times. Many of these songs come from a previously unreleased album called “Bass Blues” which would have been considered my first actual album. My goal as a self-proclaimed “jazz bass clarinetist” was to prove to the world that bass clarinet was more than just a band/orchestral support instrument but had a unique solo voice that could and should be shared with the world in any style of music. In many ways I can consider this album a journey back in time through my musical development to about 2016 when work on these songs first started. In those days, I thought of music a lot differently. Music was more simplistic and more mysterious to me, and I had this mentality of just making music that sounded good and was fun to play. I didn’t worry about sounding like anyone else or following any composition rules, nor did I care to understand any of that. I just used musical motifs and ideas that sounded good to me and wrote songs based on them. This yielded various results, but at its best I ended up with many of the songs that you will hear on this album. I wasn’t concerned with proper theory and complicated chord progressions or any of that; I just wanted to make music. And believe it or not, I consider some of this some of my best and most genuine music, and here is my reasoning. My thoughts when I sat down to make music back then were about expressing myself and having fun with the musical experience, which is something that I felt like I lost later on in life.
After going into music college, I felt like I was always pressured to “fit the mold” and make my music fit a specific genre. I was so concerned with proper voice leading and theory rules and trying to conform my melodies to the “standard” chord progressions. There were many songs that I wrote that were an attempt and sounding like another artist or trying to be complicated when it was not necessary. While these songs were good, I didn’t feel like they were truly my work. I felt like I was loosing myself and the ability to express myself because I was trying to be the musician that other people expected me to be rather than the musician I wanted to be. No longer could I be a jazz bass clarinetist, I had to be a classical clarinetist or a jazz saxophonist. Now don’t get me wrong, both of those things are a lot of fun and I learned so much from doing those things, but neither of those were really me. I am really a bass clarinetist who just happens to play clarinet and saxophone. Working on this album really helped me to rediscover myself in my music and helped me to understand that it is good to do your own thing. This album is supposed to be more individual and will be kind of different in some ways from my other stuff I have released recently.
You will hear some basic chord voicings and progressions and repetitive melodies, which may lead some to criticize and call it “too simple” or “harmonically boring” but the important thing here is the expression of emotion in the music, not the over complication of something that doesn’t need it. If we all made the same music the exact same way, none of it would be special. And yet that is what so many people seem to push upon us. They impress this idea on us that we always have fit the stereotypes of our instruments. We are told that we must be “traditionally correct” or have to sound and model ourselves after a specific artist or we are not “real musicians” which is a terrible and false message. Music is an emotional thing that is different for everyone and we have the right to interpret it and make it whatever we want it to be. And that is what makes music so beautiful. This is kind of what I am trying to get at with this album, as well as share some of my old tunes with you all. Fun fact: the tracks “The Bass Meets The Blues” and “Suspense and Sorrows” are original unedited recordings of me playing bass clarinet in 2017 in high school. Also, I use the term legacy to describe my musical journey but this is not the end of my music production whatsoever, as I have several albums planned for the future that I will work on outside of education. With all of that being said, enjoy the music!