Circles and Convertibles

Recording jazz at Hitz.

Exciting and surreal, the past day has been, a most interesting start to the visit. There’s joy in driving again, and I imagine having a convertible and living in place where convertibles are driven would be fun.

A call to Jeep, the only person in my old university I still keep in touch with, ended up with a quick invitation to take part in a recording session – joining in on three tracks in his Jeep Jazz Trio and Friends CD six hours later at Hitz recording studios. Good fun, serious work, tight-roping between light decoration, reply to existing voices, and some nice solo parts – not a commercial function, but a good experience and nice to have one's name as part of a recording. Also managed to get that long-awaited Claude Bolling CD at Disc & Dat in Tanjung Tokong… which bring things to an interesting circle, since I started improvisation with Jeep, and he was a student of Bolling.

Flipping through a Fake Book, straight after the last take:
AF: Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell wok! You know, Christmas with Chinese food.
Jeep: (over loudspeakers) I heard that.

It was a busy day, meeting up with Sean, Mike and Michelle, and the conversation with Wing a.k.a. Devil and Beng Keat of course ended up with the surreal. BK’s had a rather intriguing idea that if you had a strong enough telescope, you might be able to look at planets surrounding distant stars, and perhaps see a space battle, that, since it took so long for the light to reach the Earth, would be actually a filmed war history.

On the way back after supper I surprisingly liked their choice of Numb by Jay-Z and Linkin Park played at deafening levels, which thankfully for anyone who happened to be sleeping at 3am, wasn’t played in a convertible.