(Written 2008-07-17 22:00)

Attended Pori Jazz in Pori, Finland. Highlights: Return to Forever and Bob Geldof.

Return to Forever split up 25 years ago and this gig was part of their reunion tour. The quartet played very solid traditional fusion jazz (strange, shouldn't that be an oxymoron?), improvisation interleaving seamlessly with unisonous vamps. There was tangible synergy between Stanley Clarke (bass) and Chick Corea (keyboards) during the jamming; observing the professionalism, the playfulness, the ease of it all and the joy on their faces was a pleasure. The gig wasn't a performance, it was great musicians having fun together. It was, however, a shame to see guitarrist Al DiMeola shunted into a side role in all this. It seems everything can't be healed after 25 years of growing apart. As a whole, the performance was great. I love fusion jazz and here was one of the best lineups playing it live.

I found a new friend in Bob Geldof. Firstly, I fell in love with his style the moment he entered the stage. Secondly, when the music started I immediately knew what I was looking at: a heir of the same British music tradition that spawned The Clash's reggae-punk, David Bowie's detached and angsty country glam rock, David Gilmour, Syd Barret and Ian Anderson. Bob is a punk star grown old and tired, a rock musician who found folk influences (like Anderson), and most of all, a blue storyteller. Needless to say, the gig hit me hard.

And now to the posterior part of my titular juxtaposition: modules, i.e. tracker music. I've been composing a soundtrack for a short movie project for the past few weeks. The movie itself was filmed a few months ago and edited in one all-nighter a few weeks back. First, a few words on music software:

Years ago, during my first foray into making music, I used Jeskola Buzz on windows. Buzz was an all-in-one solution: sequencer, mixer and loads of software synthetizers all in one sweet package. I've searched for a replacement that would run on linux for years -- to no avail. A few reimplementations exist nowadays but they tend to be young and flimsy, not ready for production. BEAST is just inadequate. Running soft synthetizers and a sequencer separately is just too much of a bother, but the best method I've run across. I've never digged sample-based stuff so trackers were pretty much out of the question. In the end I just stopped making music for lack of time, tools and motivation.

The soundtrack project provided me with the proper motivation so I just needed to find the tools. We needed something very acoustic and decidedly non-electronic, so I turned to the numerous freely-licensed sample libraries on the internet. I managed to cobble together an adequate set of sounds and fired up Schism tracker. I had played with Impulse Tracker years and years ago and tracker software on linux while searching for a Buzz replacement. Schism was the best of the bunch and also a reimplementation of IT so it was a natural choice. I started working and soon the tracker started feeling very natural. After a long pause I was channeling creativity into music once more. It felt great. How typical: to get over the angst and procrastination all that was needed was the proper motivation. You'll hear about the movie when it's released, which will hopefully happen at the Assembly '08 Short Film Compo.

Update: 2008-07-17 22:50 grammar