Real & Imagined
Real & Imagined Records • February, 2008 Release • R&I-001
An imaginative take on the acoustic jazz piano trio, Kait's original music blends elements of Latin, folk, jazz and groove genres into a fresh new improvisational and compositional voice.
"Machine 2" is a piece that started as a 2-bar fragment in a quiet room at dusk up in Banff, Canada. Not until a much later moment behind a piano in Pasadena was this piece re-thought and expanded. If you can figure out the meter(s), I'll send you a CD. Ross and Daniel and I are still debating it. Despite the unusual time feel, this piece reflects a compositional moment that was less thought out and more happenstance, suggesting that free-flowing or perhaps "organic" composition is possible and playable.
"Train of Thought" plays out a thought process. An idea or image or memory emerges in our mind and is transformed as other thoughts and memories interact with it. As we follow the course of our memory, we experience interruptions and moments of more or less reflection. So, too, does the song change and break with the interruption of new ideas.
The title "Phase/Faze" can be sourced to a paragraph of Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage, a book on grammar and style which, despite my exciting description, is really an excellent and well-written guide on English language usage (if you're into those things). For example, I didn't realize that the word "faze" even existed, and is the correct form of what I would usually write as "phase". "The sudden meter change didn't faze him at all!" for example. In relation to the song, however, it describes the way the song goes through different "phases", as if someone were shifting a dial on the radio (remember those?). The second half of the song is really the "phase/faze", as the melody passes through a sort of phase-shifter and elongates and slows. Don't be fazed.
“Backstage” was a compositional adventure that happened unexpectedly very late one evening about a week before the record. I don’t know where it came from, but while sitting there with my piano in the wee hours, I was theatrically transported backstage, waiting and listening from the wings while a show of sorts played on.
"Real & Imagined" is a journey of your choice.
"Machine" is a piece in multiple parts. It reflects the more positive aspect of our social machinery, in the bustling, productive city way, but also in the personal way of our own, quietly thinking selves.
"Epilogue", as seen in books, is the little section at the end. The tale of what happened after.