Riffs On Riffs

 

Last night I was watching some footage from the David Gilmour Luck and Strange tour, specifically Great Gig In the Sky, where in place of the vocal improv by Clare Tory, they had a female vocal ensemble based on it–essentially a “scored” piece. It’s interesting that something spontaneous can later be arranged and played as if it was through-composed. (Brian Eno once called it a “deceit”. If anything it’s a “conspiracy”). This has happened to me many times where I'll be playing something in a track as an improvisation and then later go back and actually score it for strings, even if it’s something musical in a field recording. Similar riffs happen in culture as well, where you take some cultural or historical element and spin it into something else that takes on secondary meanings (like the Mandela Effect), for example JellyRoll. Jelly Roll Morton is my version of it. JellyRoll doesn’t use Morton as a primary influence because he’s not jazz. His use of the name is for Morton’s personal life as a peripheral influence. You're not explicitly saying that you're using an influence but you're actually doing it in a cunning way. They’re cultural riffs–essentially memes. It’s taking one isolated element, like a fragment in a vocal and extrapolating it into something completely different. You can go a step further and sample elements from the scored piece and make something different out of that--sort of a Droste effect.