I am currently a member of an indie-folk-rock band called The Body Electric (MySpace page). A little while ago, we released our 2nd EP, and it has been met with very positive feedback. It was recorded and mastered by world-class audio technicians at Rokbox Analog Fidelity in Boulder, CO, and we are very pleased with how it turned out. It is available for free sampling at several intarweb sites, listed below, so if anyone is interested in checking it out, please do so! We have been selling the EP at shows and it is also available as an mp3 album at SoundClick.com.

Last.fm
Garageband.com
SoundClick.com

It’s been a great experience being part of the local indie scene. I’ve considered myself to be a musician for much of my life, which for the most part has entailed trying to create music for myself; that is to say, as a creative outlet, to keep me from going insane. It’s a whole different world trying to make the leap to having music be your trade, however, because now, in my case, I still try to pour my heart and soul into everything I create, but at the same time, I can only sit back and hope that my creations will somehow speak to others with even a fraction of the profundity that I feel when dreaming them up.

This is why it’s such a wonderful thing to see people out there supporting us in our endeavors. On the one hand, we’re all a bunch of starving artists, more or less fresh out of college, and so every bit of support we receive goes so far to helping us be able to go on with what we’re doing. At the same time, the support tells us that what we’re doing is reaching people on some level, and in the end, that is what most makes the effort to put on shows and create new music worthwhile.

So all in all, it’s hard not to feel encouraged about the direction we are headed as a band, and the direction I am headed personally as a growing musician. It’s still so early on in the process, and it’s impossible to say what the future holds, but I hope to be able to continue making music and touching people for years to come.

Thank you so much for every bit of your support through the years.

(Jazz Comp 2 – Spring 2004)

Original Music by Jared Banta
Tenor Sax Soloist – David Black

Here’s my Jazz Comp 2 midterm project that was performed at my senior recital at Berklee. The band did a pretty nice job reading it; it’s a tough chart.

I don’t really have much to say about it I guess. I was in a bad mood when I was writing it, but I’ve gotten mostly positive feedback on it.

I should mention that I promised John to title a song “Rancid Beans” many years before writing this, although I’m sure he doesn’t remember that I am a man of my word!

(Big Band Arranging – Spring, 2003)

Original Music by Jared Banta

This track is cobbled together from two different performances. The first is from summer 2003 at the Mile High Jazz Camp, a camp I had been going to since the summer before entering high school. The band was great, unfortunately I don’t have the names of all the performers, but it was led by Brent Campbell. The second performance is by the 9th and Lincoln Orchestra, the house big band at Dazzle Jazz Lounge in Denver. The featured soloists are Jaime Parker on trombone and Art Bouton on alto saxophone.

The song itself was my final project for my Big Band Arranging class in Spring 2003, and I based it on a poem by my friend Alli. It has been my most frequently performed big band composition, including performances at Berklee College of Music, University of Colorado, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And finally, thanks to Larry Oji of WMRE radio for playing the recording on his radio show VG Frequency on 11/18/03.

(Summer, 2002)

Guitar: Matt
Guitar: Andres
Sequenced material by: Jared
Special thanks: John, Chris, Darren
Original Music “Day of Summer” and “Le Tresor Interdit” by Yasunori Mitsuda

One more game remix for this week’s track.. as of today (11/1/03) it’s the last one I’ve completed and it’s also the last project I ever did before receiving any formal composition/arranging training, so it is truly the culmination of many years of teaching myself how to write music.

It took me about 2 months to complete the first draft of it, and then more to revise it and get it ready for release. Thankfully, all this work paid off as the folks over at OverClocked Remix graciously voted to post it up on their site.

Soon I hope to finish up some more game projects, but for the time being I have to do my work for school, so it might be a while yet.

Song Page @ OC Remix

From The Wealth of Nations (1910) by Adam Smith; Book II, Chapter 3:

“The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured. The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security, and defence of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year will not purchase its protection, security, and defence for the year to come. In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc. The labour of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour; and that of the n oblest and most useful, 50 produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.”

Mr. Smith makes some very intriguing points in this selection. Being a player in the music trade, it was quite an eye-opener to be made aware of the commercial vacuousness of the industry. It is true that people plop down their hard-earned dollars to see a concert of music, only to come away with nothing of any significant value to be traded for goods and services. In a way, it’s as if we steal right from their pockets.

Thank goodness for the advent of recordings in the early 20th century. Clearly, the emergence of the recording industry served to legitimize the whole field of performing musicians, as it gave us a way to set our tunes into a more physical, and thus tradable medium.

So, perhaps in our modern and enlightened era, I can continue on my path to musicianship. Once again business and technology save the day from personal crisis, upheaval, and torment.

But I did not come here (to my computer) to talk about music. There is another inexorable force which serves to suck away at the livelihood of each and every one of us; that force is hunger.

Think about it. Most of us lived with our parents for the first 18-odd years of our lives, during which time we were given free meals to our hearts’ content. When food is not a commodity, as with anything, one takes it for granted. Yes, we lived lives of bliss and plentitude then.

Not until we struck out on our own did we learn the horrible truth: food is the most oppressive of all taxes. It is extracted from us all twice, perhaps thrice daily, and the consequence for not paying up is unrelenting physical and mental anguish. If payments are not settled for too long, death is the punishment. Seems like a rather cruel and unusual way of frightening people to cough up their wages, but it is the way of things, and we have come to accept it as usual.

To draw a further parallel with the above selection, as with music or Government taxes, food money might just as well be flushed down the toilet, and I use this expression in its most literal sense. Food that is bought is invariably eaten, after which time becomes entirely devoid of monetary value. We buy, we eat, and we never see any returns on our investment, save for the temporary staving off of the “collection agency,” if you will. Then the cycle repeats itself again.

What I’m trying to get at here is that free food is awesome. It is one of the awesomest things ever. The only problem that I have with free food is that by a cruel twist of fate, my tight and frugal eating regimen has rendered my stomach unable to consume as much free food as I would like at those times when I am presented with such. Ideally, I would be able to eat so much free food that I could live off of just body fat for the next century. But alas, this is not the reality of things.

So in conclusion, it is time we mobilized to cast off the shackles of our fleshy prisons that we call our bodies!! ¡Viva la revolución!

All right I need to vent a little bit of frustration. My realtor is starting to get on my nerves, because they are coming across as spectacularly inept. When I first got here to Boston at the beginning of September, I didn’t have an apartment because they had my sign a lease for a place that apparently wasn’t technically on the market. Now they handled this rather swiftly and I ended up with a good deal out of it, so I was going to go ahead and let that little (major) oversight slide.

Anyway, yesterday I got an invoice that said that they hadn’t received my rent check for October. This is stupid, because when I was there in early September signing forms for the new place, they told me that I had paid twice for September, once in the deposit and then accidentally again because of a miscommunication with the bank. They said not to worry because they would just carry the extra month over to October, so I didn’t need to have a check sent. So ok, I didn’t worry. As seems to be the case fairly often, however, someone forgot to record this into the computer. And we all know that with a business of any significant size, if it’s not in the computer, it never happened.

So the long and short of it is, I hope I get this sorted out before they evict me. Which would suck. Also, we’re reading about capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in history, so this makes me all the more “Damn you, capitalism!! Damn you!!!!”

Other than that, I have very little of importance to say. Check out Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Also, if you get the chance, check out the original Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo, which the whole idea for Sketches originated from. It is a beautiful piece of music.

Also, I like this picture a lot.
If I could remember the site that I got it from, I would post a link. But I don’t. So.. yeah.

(Feb 2000)

Saxophones: Darren, Adam, Matt
Trumpets: Henry, Chris, John
Trombones: Walt, Tony
Piano: Darren
Guitar: Andres
Bass: Jared
Drums: Chris
Original Music by Koji Kondo

Here’s an arrangement of mine that we performed at our senior year high school Pops Festival. We had a lot of fun with it, and people seemed to enjoy it a lot.

Listen @ SoundClick.com

UPDATE (6/17/08): NOW you can watch the video online!!

(1/22/04):
Thanks once again to Larry Oji for playing this song on his radio show VG Frequency on WMRE Emory University Student Radio in Atlanta.

It goes like, Duhh duhnuhnuhnuhh duhduhh duhnuhnuhh duhnuhnuhh nuhnuhh duhnuhh… no wait it was duh duhnuhh nuhnuhh.. no… shit, hold on, duh duhnuhnuhh nuh.. aw fuck it I forget.

I’m about to go work on my Counterpoint 2 project, for which I actually am coming up with stuff that I don’t hate for a change. Maybe I’ll post it here when I’m done to see what you all think. In the meantime I thought I’d talk about some of the amazing stuff I’ve been studying and listening to lately.

First off, there’s Miles. Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain. And I’ll be listening to more in the next few weeks. But what can you say about Miles? You don’t appreciate him enough when you first start studying jazz, and the more you learn, the more amazing and deep Miles seems. Listening to him, you get the feeling that he really truly meant everything he said with his horn, and he had an uncanny way of always being aware of the context and saying things that were perfectly relevant. There are very few other musicians that you can really say this about. He was a visionary, and it rubbed off on all the people he came into contact with.

I also developed a new appreciation for the song Lush Life by Billy Strayhorn. We listened to a Nat King Cole recording of it in survey (who, by the way, has an incredible voice), and it’s a nice song, but the lyrics are what really kick ass. They’re really cleverly manipulated. I found that I still have an old Joe Pass/Ella Fitzgerald recording that I think Matt sent me a few years ago, so I got to go back and listen to it.

I got to go and talk to Ted Pease this week, he’s my survey teacher and Jazz Comp Guru here at Berklee, and he’s been inviting us to go talk to him about various things we’ve listened to in class, among them Maria Schneider’s work and a piece by George Russell called All About Rosie. George is an interesting character, he’s got some really different ideas about harmony which he’s applied to his pieces to get some really fresh-sounding stuff. He was commissioned to do All About Rosie for a Gunther Schuler album of what he called “third-stream” music, which is basically the melding of jazz and classical music. This isn’t like Gil Evans using orchestral instruments or Dave Brubeck borrowing the rondo form for his Blue Rondo a la Turk, but this is hard core contrapuntal and multitonic explorations, really complicated and ingenious stuff. Apparently it never really caught on. I’m really interested in studying this stuff because it’s an avenue that I’m interested in exploring in my own work, so I talked to Ted about it and he loaned me his score to study for a few days. It’s nuts.

Don’t worry, I’ve been indulging my more rock-oriented musical needs too, with music by the Grandaddies and also Peaches; you know, The Presidents of the United States of America song. Ahh, memories of middle school. Good times. Mmm… Good Times.

(Winter, 2000-01)

Featuring Matt (Vocals, Guitar)
With Jared (Guitar, Sequenced material)
and Greggers
Based on Original Music “Rainbow Road” by Kenta Nakata

I’m finally breaking down and making this public, I’ve been wrestling with it for awhile since I promised Greg not to put it up on Napster back in the day. However, it’s several years later and Napster is all but dead, and I’ll still try to protect his identity as much as possible.

Over the years this has been one of the more requested songs in my library despite its complete musical atrociousness. It’s rather handy, because while usually everyone gets to gripe about the horrors of their college roommates, few actually get to demonstrate what it was really like to live with these people.

This song accomplishes just that task. One weeknight at about 3 AM, Greg got nice and hammered and proceeded to babble after his usual fashion. At some point during his babbling he mentioned that he wished he could record it so he could hear himself the following morning when he was sober. This roused me out of my pretending-to-be-asleep mode as I got up and produced my tape recorder out of the closet.

The product of this was a nice 8-minute recording of Greg-babble that subsequently inspired us to make this song, which includes samples from the original tape. It is a good example of our low-production-value Goldwave days, when it was hard to be accurate with timing and pitch and the like, so it has an overall drunken amateur quality which thankfully adds to the desired effect of the song in this instance. Also, it is chock full of inside jokes, which usually means that no one can possibly appreciate it as much as us who made it, but I think there’s still some entertainment value there.

I also wrote out the lyrics and tried to transcribe Greg’s story, which can be hard to hear. I couldn’t figure out a couple of things, and if anyone wants to try and help me out, you can contact me for the original 8 minute mp3.

Also, thank you to OverLooked Remix, the site for crappily craptastic game arrangements, for adding this crappy song to their collection of crap.

Song Page @ OLRemix.com - Lyrics