{"id":9120,"date":"2025-10-05T14:54:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T14:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=9120"},"modified":"2025-10-08T15:51:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T15:51:43","slug":"mixing-the-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=9120","title":{"rendered":"mixing the idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em>, an instrumental piece named by Mendelson Joe. The title wasn\u2019t my idea. I\u2019d 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 – \u201cYou have the name! It\u2019s right there in what you\u2019re saying!\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019d been chasing all along, the space between who I was and who I thought I might be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[222,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-piano","category-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}