WE WILL ROCK YOU

Pianos in New York City / The Video Series

Jan 27, 2023

Nineteen years have passed since my weekly residency at Pianos in NYC. The show was freakin’ cool, and in 2004, ahead of its time.

Every Thursday night, I jammed with Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Maria Callas, Glen Gould, Mstislav Rostropovich, and others. These iconic figures, projected on and behind me, were larger than life. I grooved on bass, triggered beats, layered samples, and presented a one-of-a-kind musical experience. The compositions were not mash-ups. Far from it. They were original pieces presented in a unique way.

THE IDEA

The idea occurred to me while listening to music with a friend. It happened during a John Bonham drum fill. Even though I was listening to the fill, in my mind I could clearly see him playing that fill. And there it was. The concept for the live performance. What you hear is what you see. This was going to be an homage to the musically-diverse 20th century, and I was on a mission to find the coolest clips and musical moments.

THE PROCESS

It took months to find, capture, and organize the clips that I needed to create the performance. I purchased, rented, borrowed, and sourced material from record shops, friends, and the public library. It proved to be a time-consuming and challenging method for composing a song—video as sound source, editor as composer.

The final videos were composed and created in Final Cut Pro, which required multiple steps. First, create the drum groove and establish the track tempo. Second, load a clip into Ableton Live and render the clip to match the track tempo. This insured that the clip would be locked into the groove as long as it is triggered on the one. Third, create the composition.

Next, add effects to the footage in real time with VidVox, a video effects application. By assigning individual clips to a keyboard’s white keys and video effects to the black keys, the clips and effects can be performed on the fly, to the tempo of the song. Recapturing the effected footage into FCP for the final edit degraded the quality of the video and added a dreamy, soft-focus quality—that of faded memories. I loved the look.

The last step in creating the video aspect of a piece was to develop its visual story line. The streets of NYC are a wealth of photographic possibilities, and I had a library of B-roll which I had taken over the past few months. This footage would set the tone and add a visual grace to the pieces.

THE LIVE PERFORMANCE

I launched the videos from a laptop and projected them onto two large screens behind me. I held the groove down on bass guitar and triggered sounds via a Roland SP-808.

Roland SP-808. The two upper right lights are the laser beams for triggering sounds.

The SP-808 was a badass piece of gear. It held sixteen samples per bank. A foot switch was used to trigger a preselected sample. Two additional sounds were launch by passing an object through two laser beams that shot out of the the sampler. With both hands needed to play the bass, passing the bass head across a beam was the smoothest way to trigger that sound.