Last June or maybe July, Doug McClement, generous as always, offered to record me at the Harris Institute. Two grand pianos to choose from – both gleaming, both waiting for someone with more authority than I had that day. I began with The Idiot, an instrumental piece named by Mendelson Joe. The title wasn’t my idea. I’d been trying to explain to Joe that I was an idiot, self-taught, fumbling toward something classical and melodic without really knowing what I was doing. He cut me off – shouted, in fact – “You have the name! It’s right there in what you’re saying!” That was Joe. A man who could locate meaning faster than most of us could locate the downbeat. I miss those interruptions, the way they rearranged the air. Sometimes I see his paintings. Karen Robinson posts them online, those long, insistent canvases and I feel that same sharp jolt again, like a door opening in a room I thought was sealed. When I mixed the recording later, I added reverb. I hesitated. Doug, being the consummate engineer, had already captured the space perfectly. But I couldn’t resist. A small vanity, perhaps. The shimmer of it made me sound as if I were performing on an imaginary ECM stage, a room of ghosts and microphones. In the reverb, I could hear what I’d been chasing all along, the space between who I was and who I thought I might be.
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