You might be able to hear I've been listening to Mwandishi era Herbie Hancock, Eddie Henderson´s early albums and of course Miles electric era. Oon the Rhode's side of things I'd like to recommend Hysear Don Walker's 2 Complete Expressions albums. The recently Departed Ramsey Lewis had some fine moments on the cadet label at the rhodes too, if you don't already know his 'over version of the Beatles White Album 'Mother Nature's Son' then check it out, it's fantastic. But all this is very different music from what I'm presenting to you here. This is me embracing the skronk. there's a lot of flat fifths and clashing minor/major ambiguity going on.

Music theory Geeks may have spotted from the title what key this is in. The Octatonic scale is a strange beast. Symettrical. it contains four instances of every interval. 4 minor seconds, four tritones, four of each. That gives it a distinctively spicy sound. Vaguely eastern in feel, that'll be the minor second and flat fifth I used the half tone whole tone version and had G as my tonal cantre. I got playing with patterns using the scales and a fender rhodes patch.


I got really into layering different keyboard parts as you can probably hear. Keeping things kind of Retro I just picked up Cherry Audio's CA600, an emulation of the ARP 2600, which of course Herbie Hancock used majorly. which so far I'm enjoying using. I must confess I'm not usually much of a synth guy and am most looking forward to using this to process the guitar signal, perhaps I'll use it in a frippertronics live session soon.

In any case this has a little more 70s style funk to it's undercarriage. All instruments and writing by me (though I'll cop to taking miles trumpet part from 'Spanish key' and playing it on guitar and keys. I'm glad to see that the last track 'Amma' got a little attention on here. Although I love this kind of music I'm not in any way a virtuoso on any instrument. Truth be told long solos irritate me anyway, I prefer patterns which evolve over time.

For those that like to count along to poly rhythms there's one set of percussion doing a 5/4 pattern and another doing 7/8 meaning theres a beat and half difference each cycle. Some of the drums are playing 6/8 patterns over the steady 4/4 of the second kit. I tried to keep a bit of rhythmic variety going on. All this is complicated further by the fact I did everything at 50 BPM but double speeded a lot of the drum patterns so they are effectively 100bpm.