After a one month break from the music in March me and the solo band / 13 Chaos St / Inagone bass player Andy (Drake) Mallander decided to get down to the rehearsal and do some 2-minute jams in front of a video camera and put it out. We simply took a timer and set it to two minutes and when then time was up, the timer beeped and we finished the take nicely and as naturally as we could. We had nothing to go with in advance, no ideas whatsoever, the only thing we decided before turning on the timer and go for it was in which key the jam would go in. One of the main things was also to vary the keys. But not even the tempo or the music direction, or the style, of what to come was decided in advance. Pretty fun and stimulating indeed.
Check it out at my YouTube site.
I'm aware that it's not 100% tight, in tempo, in tune, the choice tones etc, but being all that is not really the point here at all. (I might also mention that we were a bit rusty as well, since we've had the break before, this was basically the first time we picked up out instruments for a month or so... But hey, that doesn't matter.) It's jam!
Both Andy and I (and our brother in arms, drummer Vesa Kallio as well) have always been very into the jam/improvise- (or ad lib, if you wish) thing, probably mostly due to Led Zeppelin, but of course the roots are in the way older blues, jazz and folk, I guess. But we do it in the name of metal/hardrock. I improvise almost all of my lead guitars in every band and project, and even lot of the rhythms, doing lots of improvised fills, which is an important part of my style, of who I am as a guitar player.
The thing is that most of the guitars and bass on the upcoming 13 Chaos St album was written and recorded as a jam and improvisation, a very cool way to make the recorded material feeling alive and instant. Again even here, maybe not as perfectly performed as it could have been with more takes, but you loose a lot of soul, feeling and personality in the retakes. According to me music should be alive.
Anyway, we thought this might be a cool thing to try, it's always stimulating with new things, stretching your own ability and limits, in this case when it comes to improvisation. Hopefully this becomes a tradition and that we'll get our asses down for more of these sessions, and maybe even inviting some friends along...
Hope you'll enjoy it, remember that this is real and unedited, instant creativity and performance, music in it's purest form. Not that common in today's way overproduced music scene.
RnR
/ PM
