Sharing moments...

[KRosser414@aol.com]

>Anybody want to share a few moments that made them realize that they had
>no alternative other than to become a loopster?  Or shining moments?

My interest in it started in the late 70's/early 80's when I was playing 
with
rock bands and had two cheap-o tape Echoplex knock-offs with different
lengths.  Being a bit of a harmony freak from way back, one fun thing I 
used
to do with them was play a series of intervals (verystraight witha  clean 
dry
guitar sound) in one and then a series of intervals in another in unrelated
keys sometimes in different registers, other times all within the same 
octave,
then set them both to looping at different lengths to hear how they 
recombined
harmonically.  Biggest lesson I learned from this:  rock bands have no
interest in this stuff.  

My looping in band situations was pretty much limited to droney textural 
bits
when my focus as a player began to get clearer and I realized that when
everyone was telling me what a drag it was that I couldn't just come up 
with
"a solo" for each song and play it right, that really what I was craving 
was
improvisational experience.  I then exited the more straight-ahead song
oriented rock world and got involved in some free improvising rock bands 
that
were a bit of an offshoot of the early 80's arty-punk sorta thing but 
started
to become frustrated by what seemed to be a willful disdain for knowing 
what
the fuck you were doing which was sorta part & parcel of the times in the
avant-rock world or so it seemed.  I then realized to try to get deeper 
into
being an improvisor it would help to be able to study a tradition in which
improvising was integral.  Granted, there's many great traditions like this
all over the world, but being an American we have a great one right here 
that
I could sink my teeth into, so I took a roughly 15-year detour into 
studying
and playing jazz as much as possible.  

Not to say that I've even come close to mastering that particular idiom, 
but
after studying what jazz has to offer in terms of harmonic improvisation,
melodic development, free improvising, standard song forms, blues forms, 
etc.,
in the last few years I've found the road diverging again, where I'm 
realizing
that my loyalty to jazz is as a vehicle or method for improvisation, not
preservation or expanding of the jazz tradition, as much as I respect it.  
I'm
an improvisor first, jazz musician second.  Maybe looper third or so.  I've
spent the last couple years revisiting and refining a lot of the old 
things I
learned about sound processing and specifically looping (though now it's a
Lexicon LXP-5 and Digitech 7.6 Time machine in place of those old tape 
echoes)
and I'm wondering how to combine this stuff with the vocabulary of 
techniques
I learned in the jazz world.   

I did study one non-western tradition for a while, three years of the 
chinese
pipa, but it was all classical-based, I'm not really sure what kind of
improvising tradition there is with that instrument but my teacher, bless 
her,
wants nothing to do with it.  There is an improvising pipa player in NYC
that's worked with Derek Bailey but I think she's an anomaly rather than 
the
norm among pipa players.  I know there's a pretty rich history of 
improvising
in Arabic music and I just tried out this electric oud at the NAMM show 
that
knocked my socks off, the guy that makes 'em is fairly local and gives
lessons, so my mind's beginning to reel again...

Where do I expect to end up from any of this?  Beats me.  To directly 
answer
the initial question, there was no epiphanous moment when I realized I dug
looping the same way I realized I'm an improvisor.  To me looping in and of
itself is about as intrinsically interesting as slide guitar, a minor 9th
chord, soaring feedback or rhythm changes, in other words it's what you do
with it.  Others feel the same way about improvising.  To each his or her 
own.
I mostly lurk here for that reason, looking for the odd tip here or there.

Ken R