A couple weeks ago I received an email from my buddy Jared from Uprlip.com.  He is in the midst of doing his own creative thing-a-day blog.  He’s currently on Day 109.  He’s somebody I have talked about before.  He’s an inspiring musician.  Many of his posts are musical in nature and absolutely beautiful.  I thoroughly recommend perusing his blog.  There is a lot of inspiration to be had.  Also, check out his music here, of course.

Anyways, a while back Jared started this thing he dubbed “Morning Music & Coffee Consumption”.  Basically, every Sunday morning he would invite friends over to his place to hang out, drink coffee and make some music.  Afterwards, he would edit some visuals to an excerpt from the recordings and post it to his blog.  He was so inspired by the idea that he decided to start a site dedicated completely to this concept.  It can be found at mm-cc.org.  You can watch some of his previous recordings.

It’s pretty cool.  He’s even planning on adding a forum to the site because I think it’s his hope that it might grow into something larger and others around the country could participate in some way.  I started by uploading a sample for him to play with.

I think it’s a neat idea because doing something like this in the morning is unusual.  We are all used to sunday coffee, breakfast and then getting onto the chores we have for the day but I’ve never been invited to a musical jam session in the morning.  I’m used to staying up until 2am playing with music.  I figured the rest of your sunday might be a little better off for having done it.

Well, back to the email he sent me…He told me that he felt like he was spreading himself a little thin as of late and that he was hoping that I could substitute for this weeks mm-cc.  I was totally down for it.  In fact, I’m going to make it a regular once-a-month thing for the summer time here.

I got Jenny’s approval and sent out the invite.  It was completely embraced by my friends here.  We had a great turnout.  I unloaded my studio onto the grass in my backyard.  I provided a small drum set, electric guitar, bass guitar, a finger piano and my soundlab.  I was a little preoccupied with checking and double checking everything the night before that I forgot to check the mm-cc.org forum for any uploaded samples to play with.

Sunday morning, people started arriving and I was still hooking things up.  At first, I felt a bit self-conscious because I really didn’t know how to get the ball rolling.  It takes a lot of confidence to get up there and start it off.  I was pretty busy getting my monome set up.  My goal for the monome was to use an app called Mash to sample and loop the various instruments around me.  Eventually, I got it working pretty well albeit not perfectly.  I had to route the audio out of Mash through a 1/4 inch output of my audio interface and then back into it to go to Ableton, which resulted in a bit of annoying latency.

Eventually, the ball started to roll.  It began with experimental noises.  Violet, my friend Brandon’s daughter, started by playing around with the Soundlab.  Then, I looped some drums she was playing.  I didn’t really want to direct anybody because I didn’t want to have expectations of people.  I wanted, first and foremost, for people to enjoy the coffee and the company.  The music would hopefully materialize on it’s own.

More people began to arrive and eventually we had a serious mix of instruments.  Brandon brought a Banjo-tar and accordian.  My buddy Danny brought his upright bass.  My pal Reuben brought a cool circuit bent toy.  Finally, my friend Larry brought a bunch of sweet world percussion items as well as a jaw harp.

The real music started when my friend Wendy began playing the Banjo-tar into my monome and I began looping some of her licks.  It’s the first bit you will hear at the beginning of the video below.  It’s funny to me because she says to Jeff, “I’m pretending to be a musician” and I recorded that and looped it.  I felt like that was the perfect comment to get captured and turned into the music itself.

As the day went on we had lots of nice musical moments.  I recorded as much of it as I could.  I’m lucky because a lot of my friends are really talented musicians and they are also lovely open minded people.  It takes participation to make something like this work and I owe them a lot of gratitude for being a part of it.

Eventually, the crest of the morning crashed in a rousing bluegrass hoedown jam with Banjo-tar, upright bass, drums and monome.  It was awesome!  June was running around and dancing on the lawn.

I’m looking forward to continuing this as a tradition and seeing how the music evolves and how people enjoy the company.  I hope it grows from here.

After it was all over I had to sift through all the recordings and make the video.  I was so wrapped up into the monome that I didn’t take a single picture or capture a single video.  I know some friends did but I figured I should look elsewhere for footage to cut to.  I decided to download a bunch of random videos from Archive.org.

I cut the recordings into a sort of medley of the days melodies and edited it all to the random archive footage.  It turned out pretty awesome in the end.  I dig the music and I dig the visuals.  There is a bit of comedy in there as well.

Oh well, I hope you enjoy my addition to the Morning Music & Coffee Consumption tradition.  I’m sure you’ll see more of it as time goes on.