Title Track

When I made this page, many hours ago, I originally tried to link this page to desafinado.blogspot.com. However, in my over-enthusiasm at the availability of the page name - I overlooked my typo, which took my reference to being out of tune and changed it to the name of some deranged cartoon character. This also, explained the freak availability of what is not a particularly original idea (yet, I still thought I was the first to have had it).

Desafinado - which like I said, means out of tune - is also a really great jazz standard. It has a really nice vibe to it and I like it a lot. The singer talks about how his relationship with his significant other has gone awry like a band that falls out of sync. He's more optimistic about the whole thing though than most of the people I know in real life would be about the same situation. Which brings me to something substantial: I play some jazz.

I think out of all the things I like to do - and my consequent equations with them. Nothing is as confusing as my interest in playing jazz. I play the double bass, which is an extremely large instrument. Most people in Delhi who don't listen to music much, don't really know what a double bass is. For them, I follow a simple pattern of either asking them to super-size a cello - or - asking them to picture a violin, invert it and then pump the living shit out of it with steroids. I say the equation is strange because it is impossibly hard for me to fathom how lucky I have been (whether it's been about acquiring a double bass - a near impossible feat; to working with the extremely talented musicians that I do play for/with) - and yet I've never been exposed to something that has irritated me to the same extent that playing jazz has.

It's a great and easy form of music to listen to. It is also, usually, an unbearably hard form to music to understand and play. I have spent most of the past few years - wondering moreorless consistently whether I am doing it right.  I am sure this trend will continue for a while, because as of now, I have reached no real conclusive answer. Few things have been more elusive to me. There are days where I feel like I'm sure I'm on the right track - only to picked up by weeks and sometimes months of feeling like I'm trying to find a needle in a haystack Blind-folded. I'm supposed to be going to Berklee to study Jazz composition next year (2011), as of now, I intend to go - but those days when I'm looking for that damn needle - it's harder to say.

I play with a bebop quartet called Drift. It's a great band with some great musicians. I'll put recordings up soon. In the meantime, the link is right here "http://www.myspace.com/driftthetrio". The recordings are old and the band is now a quartet. Not to mention that it probably sounds much better too. I also play with a swing piano trio, called the Variety Hour, but I don't have any links for it. We've become a little dysfunctional lately, but it's still the band that I started off playing jazz with!