Ride The Dragon: How it started
by April 21, 2023It was Feb 6 2020. I’d just finished teaching a student. We had been discussing minor 11th voicings. Inspired by the lesson, I started improvising and eventually came up with a chord progression that really resonated. This is what became the opening chords you hear on Ride The Dragon. I had no expectation or set goal to turn it into a tune. Like with all gestating ideas, I captured it on my iPhone. Usually these voice memos sit there for a while. I decided to do something different this time. I was in the process of starting to score my first feature film, so I was already in the flow of getting my ideas straight into Pro Tools. I decided to do the same here. I setup my click track and tracked the chords. It needed some placeholder drums, just to set a vibe. So I used Addictive Drums, created a pattern, and we had a groove. I then heard a bass line that reminded me of the rhythmic phrasing that Dizzy Gillespie used on his tune, ‘Salt Peanuts’. Kind of wild how far removed his vocal line is from this tune, yet it inspired my bass line. So a trio track was born. I had an A section, and that was it. I began recording a bunch of other random ideas, sounds and textures. There was no objective, just ‘sound painting’ on a blank canvas.
I remember walking away and coming back to this track a lot. I began to expand by adding a few layers, and added a new section. The latin breakdown in 5/4 took me by surprise, but I kept hearing it and so I figured that’s where it wanted to go. It kind of reminded me a bit of Jason Lindner’s Now Vs Now, a band I love and whose records I listened to a lot in 2017. I vividly remember setting up my mikro korg and recording a few solo takes on this section. I really dug one of them, but I didn’t think it was a moment for a synth solo. It ended up becoming a part that sits under Dave Levy’s trumpet solo.
I knew from the outset that I wanted to take listeners on a journey, I just didn’t know exactly how that would or should sound. I just followed my intuition. Following the Latin break down, the track comes back into 4/4, using synthesizer sounds that borrows influences from my early love of trip-hop (shout-out to FatBoy Slim). There was no vision of a flute solo, but I wanted there to be a moment for the strings to really come in and support whatever was going to be in that place.
There were lots of spaces left. This was deliberate. I wanted the musicians to feel that they had room to be themselves. Of course, when it came to recording, they had dots to play. But they also had freedom. You can hear this in Sarpay Ozçagatay’s electrifying flute solo, or the way Chase Baird fills in the gaps with Michael Brecker style blistering-tenor-boss tone. It then became clear how the rest of the track’s structure would take shape: I wanted a place for the strings to soar, a reprise of the main sections heard in the opening, and some kind of lo-fi inspired, breakdown glitchy beat drop for a final solo. I recall working on creating this in my demo, but I didn’t quite nail it as I had possibly intended initially. The vibe ended up switching a little, and that was OK. I think sometimes we can have an idea in our head, but during the process of making it, we can start to see new directions to follow.
There have been instances where I’ve quite literally attempted to recreate a sound, vibe and energy of a track I love, but fallen short. In that moment, I think the ‘failure’ to arrive at that place you thought you desired so badly can actually give rise to new opportunities you never thought of before.
The original session of this track was called “Feb 6”. For whatever reason, I find deciding a tune name to be harder than writing the actual tune. And as per the above, I hadn’t even set out to write a tune! It was just a date that I had created the idea. An idea that grew into a theme, to follow your dreams, even where the pathway is unchartered and not guaranteed.
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