Week of Wonders: September 6

September 6, evening

Forty hours in NYC and it rains the whole time. Try to work on a Sun Ra remix for an upcoming WFMU fundraiser but nothing comes together as imagined. Tried to digitize an LP that I have to write about so I can take it along, but somehow ten minutes gets cut off each side. How does that happen? Forty hours in NYC and all I got done was laundry.

Is there a new energy this late in the week, or am I just in a different place? Eskelin opens, still midtempo but seemingly with more zeal. Could the exact same recording sound different in different places? I bet it could at different altitudes. Wouldn't the density of the air, the available oxygen, affect the hearing? A nice 2½ minute solo intro before Eisenstadt and Sanchez come in, laying a grid over the sax solo which Eskelin conforms to at length. Then they modulate together. Then a wonderfully uneven piano line. This is shaping up quite nicely. It's the longest track on the album by at least a couple minutes, and so far by far my favorite – although I don't exactly feel as if I remember the others Perhaps this whole exercise was a mistake.

But in truth the last five tracks day by day felt a bit samey to me. This one stands out. The others were in sentences – this one's in paragraphs. This moves in – oh, what is that song? I hate that song. “She moves in mysterious ways”? God, I don't know who that is but I know I hate it. A return to form, return to the A section (if the intro isn't counted). I wish I had counted – four parts? five? What day of the week is this Sept. 6? I wonder if the tracks are tied to a particular year. Did Eisentadt write one song a day? Song's over.