Aleatoric improvised (AI) electronic jazz
A new album by Joop van der Linden
Ten times, ten songs. It’s jazz, but not the jazz you know. It’s improvised, but not by me. It’s electronic, that’s a fact. But it’s not dance. It’s very personal. I love to dance to it. Possibly, I am the only one who can.
This is the story of the album.
At one point in time, halfway through the sixties, while four guys in Liverpool changed the world with their beats, and another guy from the States burnt his guitar to change the sound of the world, I was born. About twelve years later, the world changed its colour when I heard Hey Joe for the first time, watching a pretty mediocre German movie in our neighbours’ house. This was the moment I knew I wanted to create music.
I learned to play the trombone, played drums and guitar, got two degrees in music, and got more and more interested in synthesizers. I learned to understand and play jazz, lots of styles of what they call world music (which is a stupid name), and listened extensively to modern classical music (which is also a stupid name). I started dreaming about combining techniques from different styles, putting together the freedom and unpredictability of jazz, the rhythms of dance, compositional techniques from the classical world and the sounds of synthesizers. I wondered how I could make computers improvise.
As a jazz musician, when composing for a group of musicians, I leave a lot of space for my musicians to add their individuality to the music and to shape the music to their taste as well. I will compose part of a melody and ask them to continue improvising on that melody, or I will outline a rhythm and will ask the drummer to create parts based on that rhythm.
When starting to work with a modular synthesizer system, I wanted the computer to behave similarly. So I created basic melodies that it could improvise on. Sometimes I just provided a group of notes that it could pick from when creating its own melody. I defined rhythms, defined the amount of freedom to play around with these rhythms, or I designed several ones and let the machine decide when to play one of those.
This album is the result of this process. It takes its place between modern jazz, contemporary classical (composed) music, and electronic music. Oh, and there’s some disco in it as well, because I am a child of the eighties after all. I hope you find it as inspiring, intriguing, sometimes funny, sometimes overwhelming as I do. Please take the time to listen to it with your full attention, I promise you it’s worth it.
Every performance of the songs was different, but unfortunately it’s not yet possible to share that experience with you. So what you hear on this album is one performance out of many possible ones. I hope one day it will be technically possible to create an album that is different every time.
- Composed, programmed, performed, edited, mixed by myself.
- Artwork by Martin Draax
- Mastering by Michiel Cornelisse