Album Notes

ASTERISK. Radio Poland. When I lived in Poland I liked the format of popular radio. You would hear Handel, Boston, Journey, Christmas Carols, Cool American songs i never heard in America, all kinds of songs mixed together. Too bad you can't find that in U.S.A. Well you get the idea, This album is a mix. The songs. Joy Luck Club. One of my piano students was a Chinese girl. Her mom had this movie named Joy Luck Club. I love them so I named it Joy Luck Club. I play for a lot of older audiences. I can't even read music really. At least I couldn't read music very well when I composed this piece. I nicked one them from Chopin. The rest of it was spinning off music from my drills: Scales, Arpeggios, Chords. I did a lot of them for years. Not much reading. I practised by the EXIT light in auditoriums because I didn't have a piano and I was a bit shy about playing where people could see me. Long Story. And a lot of the details are out of chronological order here. I have performed a lot for older people. I have performed for a lot of gracious people in the Washington D.C. area. I have been rejected by very many gracious people too. I'm puzzled about why this style of composing isn't used any more. I think the more refined students I have heard in the last 20 years would give American composer's a place among the European masters. I think my countrymen prefer Jazz. KarmaNova Just a couple of overdubs. I Hope. Song I did a long time ago when I pecked in every drum beat, but played the most of the guitarish parts and strings and stuff. Love song. Very Syrupy sweet. I always wanted to re-do it, but I lost the tracks and its hard to start again from scratch. So this is a data dump, just to see if there is any reaction by anybody. GET THIS The only hymn in the bunch. Praise to the Lord. Outtasync I listen to a lot of perfectly produced music on the radio. Some of it I have to make a quick grab for the MUTE button. Because I don't like a lot of the music. So here is some flawed music that might even be esthetically OK. Future Almost evrery song on this album is a rough draft or part of one. This song has lyrics, but not this version. Mercy Another anesthetic bit of synth work that starts out with some piano because I'm a pianist. N Short title I put on the piece when I go to sleep late at night. I had a lot of students and i run around to their houses. The kids in Virginia pleading "don't go!!" Stay and play football with us. Watch T.V. help us with our homework. Wow! I was so lucky. I love those kids. 7 years like that. Even more. But I'd get home sleepy, and just scratch out another rough draft like this that gets forgotten until its time to submit a CD and here ya go. CANON Everyone of my students plays a version of Pachelbel Canon. The only way I can get them to have something ready for a performance in just a couple of sessions. The audiences will whisper to themselves.."Wow how do those little kids remember all those notes?" The kids laugh while they're performing, because the didn't learn any notes exactly. They just learned how to wing it. Well they did learn some real repertoire after a while. This bit of a recording was something I hacked out just the day of the deadline to finish this CD. A little crude, but it probably won't hurt ya. NOT LONG I have some other tracks that go with this, including a different electric guitar track and some lyric versions. The other version is KINDA LONG. This one is Not Long. TECHNO PRINCESS I had a bad case of tendonitis. I had a piano student that was a pretty good figure skater and she was looking for some new program music. So I pecked out all the notes to this in a primitive sequencer, before i had one that did some automatic parts. I was sure the kid would be skating in the OLYMPICS with my music. Primitive piece. I don't think this music ever made it out on the ice, but i have some on another album that did. Queen of the Ukraine. Different girl won with it a lot. POIGNANT (Short Wave Radio Mix) THIS IS ONE of the coolest pieces I think. Lots of versions of this song. Some of it is much better production. Some versions have lyrics and other musical themes and different instrumentation. Why the crude sounding production? The sort of Short Wave radio sound? As far as I know there really isn't music for shortwave radio. It is such a flimsy bandwidth there is no way to put quality across on shortwave. Well if you were in the jungle or someplace remote before the internet existed, you would only get the scant poor quality of shortwave radio communication with the rest of the world. I have had this version since most internet users used dial up. It was a ram file. that is a very small file. i was going to put a better version of production on this CD, but I chose the primitive imperfect crude one. There's just something cool about it. One more thing I wanted to illustrate. All the attention to minutia in production and having the latest gimmick and the best instruments and yet you often get what I think of is a super produced, perfectly performed crummy song. Bleah!! THANK GOD for the MUTE BUTTON. So here's POIGNANT. (The word meant to me: looking back with some melancholy at the good old days gone by. Good old days that weren't really that good except when you look back at it all and think what memories have gone by and what maybe could have been, had I been wiser.) The newer version, has lyrics and other musical themes, and a different angle. A bit of a tribute. Well this Album presentation here, ASTERISK is what I consider sort of a market survey. I saw my other album get some hits, song plays, downloads and some songs got more attention than others. It was all just piano music. So I thought I would get this out there instead of years more procrastination. Then I would work more on the newer stuff, with a keener attention to quality and production, while i survey any interest in this album. Thanks for checking it out here.