Nov. 1st, 2008 @ 10:44AM
A MOMENT OF TRUTH

A friend of mine who is a professional musician recently did me the favor of giving me an honest appraisal of my work.

"You're a fantastic songwriter," she said, "and you're a good, distinctive singer and piano player, and you play saxophone pretty well. But you're a lousy one-man band, and you don't know jacks--t about being a recording engineer. The 'band' recordings you make turn people off on your songs. Just do solo recordings of them, and get yourself a drummer, a bass player, and a recording engineer." She gave me some good leads, and I will soon be following up on them. Applications from you, my internet public, are also welcome. It's time for "the Intangibles" to become tangible, and time for me to move my music into the American mind at a much more active level, in a much more effective way. I will be forming a publishing company and looking for established artists who appreciate my peculiar genius and enjoy singing my songs. Me, I got no taste for touring.

Soon, I will be replacing most of what is here (she liked my space music) with solo recordings, supplemented soon with well-done group versions. If there's any of this that you have admired for its earnest, amateur klutziness, download it now, while it's still available.

It's a tremendous relief, really. I have always known that, all too often, I was taking a really cool piano/keyboard rendition of a song and diminishing it, rather than augmenting it, with the extra parts I added. Here's to a brighter, simpler future!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Musicians are magicians, but not all of us do magic for the same reason. I play music to project and effect a heightened state of consciousness, to the best of my somewhat limited technical ability. But, as one of my teachers observed, passion and enthusiasm can make up for the limits of skill and talent, and so I hope you will accept these humble musical offerings in the participatory spirit in which they have been created: that none of us should go to the grave with our songs unsung. May this music inspire you to express your own highest aspirations.

I have been playing piano ever since I was tall enough to reach the keys. I have always been totally fascinated with pianos, but have always been too lazy, intimidated, or busy to take lessons, so I have evolved a style that I would call folk piano. Imagine people sitting around a campfire, playing their pianos and singing songs.....

I took up saxophone in my teens from a love for the big band music of the thirties and forties, then got my mind blown by Ornette Coleman and Jerry Garcia. I have never played sax commercially, but have played informally with many guitarists and drum circles through the years. I also play hand drums, in part because it seems rude to play saxophone all the time in such contexts. As W.C. Fields once remarked, A gentleman is somebody who can play the saxophone and doesn't. So I am a gentleman some of the time.

I have always loved to sing but only recently, with the help of a voice instructor, have I figured out how to consistently sing at least passably. Before that, I had some horribly embarrassing moments.

Sometimes the electric keyboard is merely to provide the appearance of bass, drum, and organ accompaniment, but sometimes I do like to take full advantage of the possibilities of modern electronics.

So this band is called Brother Martin and the Intangibles, in part because I am the only tangible member of the band. I enjoy playing music with others but haven't been able to figure out how to play saxophone and piano and sing my best all at the same time! Someday, perhaps, a solution will present itself......

Meanwhile, I would be happy to play acoustic piano (and occasionally sing) in a tobacco-free Amsterdam-style coffeehouse...similar venues will be considered. Make me an offer!.