So, this is a video of the original song from my album I Wanna Work For You, using cuts from the Sibelius video sheet music and other images. That first one is an amazing NASA shot of cloud formations off the Aleutian islands, appropriate since the song begins with the Williwaw blasting off from the Aleutians. Like it?

Only moments before there’d been a brief surge of promise, followed by an argument. We’d been sitting in the green room, which has absorbed generations of reefer smoke into its carved wood walls. I was reclining on the couch. He sat at the piano and began to play something intriguing. “Hey, have you started on the arrangement to The Names of the Winds?” I asked him, sitting upright. “Yes, this is it. Wanna hear it?” I skipped over to the piano and he spread out some cream-colored manuscript paper with penciled melody lines and chord symbols. Next to that he placed a lyric sheet. “I went through your lyrics and counted the syllables,” he said. I spied the numbers. “Uh… OK, can you play it for me?” Over the phone, when I gave him the arranging job, I had told him I wasn’t particularly happy with my melody, but that a better chord structure might inspire me to improve it.

He began to play something sinewy, exotic and jazzy. Nice. He played the melody in his right hand. “OK, that’s not my melody, but… interesting. So how does the chorus sound?” I asked. He came to the chorus and began playing something, that, like the first part, did not resemble the song I’d sent him. My pulse quickened. “Did you listen to the version I sent you?” I asked him. “No, no — I didn’t want to have any influences,” he replied. “Yes, but I asked you to arrange the song, not write it. Here’s how the melody of the chorus goes–” “Oh, I already know how you write your melodies. I’ve heard that from you before.”

Fighting words! I was livid. He was too. A voice in my head said, “It’s a match of big egos. Put yours aside, Alexa — perhaps you’ll get a better song out of it.”

Fighting words! I was livid. He was too. A voice in my head said, “It’s a match of big egos. Put yours aside, Alexa — perhaps you’ll get a better song out of it.” Alas, a collaboration was not in the cards for us. I can’t remember how the conversation continued to devolve, but it did. Ultimately I told him not to work on the song anymore. It occurred to me that I should be very clear about this — I didn’t want him going around later saying he had anything to do with what I came up with.

After the show, I seethed about the situation for a few days, and shared it with my co-producer, who agreed that the behavior was egregious. I told another pianist about it and he said that if I wanted he could write a few melodies and I could choose the one I liked best. “No, that’s not the point! I wrote the song, I just want it to be better and I know the melody I have now isn’t quite there, but I want better chordal ideas, not a cowriter.” He nodded. “The whole point of the album is that it’s all original.” I knew my lyrics, inspired by the Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brien, were some of the best work I’d ever done. I could see he totally understood that hunger to compose a great song to match them. “You can do it yourself,” he said. “You’ve got it.”

So I began to pound away at the song, in a way I’ve never done before. After sitting for hours at the piano and playing it, reshaping some of the lines and considering how composers I admire set their melodies (Satie, Joplin, Chopin, Gounod, Bach, Guinga), I took a few good motifs and switched to composing it exclusively on the computer in Sibelius (music notation software by Avid). I spent days on it, locked in my room. My boys left me alone. “Where’s Mommy?” I heard one ask behind the door. “She’s still working on her song,” the other replied.

I discovered that it was interesting to write orchestral string lines in Sibelius and see how they interacted — even though the piece would be recorded with just piano and bass. When I wrote the song back in the mid-2000s, it had a key change in the song from verse to bridge/chorus. I kept that. A new development was a time signature change that occurs at the end of each chorus. I was especially proud of this. The song goes from lilting waltz as I sing “Tell me all the names of the winds, whisper all the ways I’ll never know,” to inexorable 4/4 with eight-note arpeggios under the sad lyric, “Which one will blow me to my love?”

A sleepless week passed, and I emerged from my home office, triumphant — or at least, “done.” We were about to rehearse the whole band the day before our two days in the recording studio. My co-producer, Sam Bevan, still hadn’t seen the song. No one had. Was it any good? After rehearsal, he and I sat down and he played it on the piano. I could see he liked it. “Where did you get these voicings?” he asked nonchalantly. Victory! The next day, Jonathan Alford, my pianist on the album, played it in the recording studio and loved it. “Is it better than the original demo?” I asked. “Did you listen to it?” “Yep, kiddo, this is much better. Those descending lines in the chorus are great.” Another jolt of artistic pride — I explained they’d come from my playing with string lines in Sibelius.

“Where did you get these voicings?” he asked nonchalantly. Victory!

Sam tweaked the chart a bit, adding chord symbols (I’d gotten so absorbed in the notes and voicings that I wasn’t always even sure what the best chord symbol would be), improving the pianistic lay of the 4/4 arpeggios and adding bowed-bass to the introduction (I love bowed bass, so this too is reminiscent of my Sibelius synth string experiments). We took the chart into the studio, Jonathan read through it for the first time, and we recorded it at the end of a long day in one magical take — the kind where you can’t wait to burst the bubble of silence after the last note to yell and applaud. I was able to use my scratch vocal from that take on the finished album. And that’s the story of a song that finally came to fruition — and in the process became the first piece I fully arranged in Sibelius!

Si Mes Vers Avaient Des Ailes (“if my verses had wings”) is a poem by Victor Hugo set to music in 1888 by child prodigy Reynaldo Hahn when he was 14 years old. It was published by Le Figaro and was a hit. I recorded this as a first test of my new Zoom H2N Handy Recorder!

My classical voice teacher Macatee Hollie (RIP, gone too soon) gave this song to me to learn probably 20 years ago, and I unearthed the sheet music recently. The lyric evokes Spring, and gardens (which I love), and the loneliness of the poet, whose verse cannot fly like love.

Here are Victor Hugo’s words:

Mes vers fuiraient, doux et frêles,
Vers votre jardin si beau,
Si mes vers avaient des ailes,
Des ailes comme l’oiseau.

Ils voleraient, étincelles,
Vers votre foyer qui rit,
Si mes vers avaient des ailes,
Des ailes comme l’esprit.

Près de vous, purs et fidèles,
Ils accourraient, nuit et jour,
Si mes vers avaient des ailes,
Si mes vers avaient des ailes,
Comme l’amour!

Translation:
My poems would run away, sweet and frail,
To your garden so fair,
If my poems had wings,
Like a bird.

They would fly, sparkling,
To your happy home,
If my poems had wings,
Like wit.

To be close to you, pure and loyal,
They’d speed, night and day,
If my poems had wings,
If my poems had wings,
like the wings of love!

CD release and Kickstarter victory celebration at Yoshi’s Oakland on December 18, 2011. Thanks to Patrick Hickey for amazing photos included in this video, Yoshi’s Oakland for being such a fantastic venue, and Roberto Daza, Mark Oltmanns and Oakland North for stellar video coverage of this show.

Arranger, associate producer: Sam Bevan, bass
Musicians: Colin Douglas, drumset
Jonathan Alford, piano
Carlos Caro, conga
Mara Fox, trombone
Steffen Kuehn, trumpet
Vince Mansel, guitar/vox (live show only)
Braulio Barrera, bongo/vox (live show only)

Hear more of this album or purchase this song: http://alexawebermorales.bandcamp.com/track/i-wanna-work-for-you

Also available on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/i-wanna-work-for-you/id492831745

I Wanna Work For You
Lyrics and music by Alexa Weber Morales © 2010 (BMI)

I wanna know where the meeting is
Take me to your leader
I’ll tell her everything she wants to hear
I’ll make the coffee sweeter

Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna wear a suit, I wanna work for you

My resume never used to fail
Now every door is slammed harder
I guess you think I know too much
But hey, I’ll make you look smarter

Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna wear a suit, I wanna work for you
Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna wear a suit, I wanna work for you

I used to watch the sailboats on my lunch break
I used to wonder if someday I’d catch my wave
But everyone was right and I was so wrong
Who was I to think that you would buy this song?

I got laid off and I became a troubadour
I sang with the baby on my hip
Please take me back, put me behind the Levolors
I can’t buy breakfast with my wit

Won’t you allow me to do your PowerPoint
I’m quite happy flying coach
I’ll bring you 8 am Croissanwiches
I’ll stay late without reproach

Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna wear a suit, I wanna work for you

Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna be a suit, I wanna work for you

Ain’t nobody else who can do the job I do
I wanna count your beans, I wanna work for you

Be a part of Pacific Mambo Orchestra’s first studio album! Swimming against the technological current, in 2011 pianist Christian Tumalan and trumpeter Steffen Kuehn formed a 19-member acoustic force to be reckoned with.  One year later, the San Francisco Bay Area is loco for PMO, which plays premier clubs and festivals and is packed with Grammy-recognized musicians.

How can I get in on this?

Ride the wave with us! By April 23, PMO aims to raise at least $10,000 to record 10 songs — 2 covers and 8 originals.

Already 13% fan-funded, the project collects your pledge on Kickstarter. Here’s how it works:

Step 1. Check out the rewards  (from lessons to ore-ordering CDs) here.

Step 2. Sign up (just name and password). Pledge via credit card.

Step 3. If we make our goal, your pledge is charged. Follow the project via updates, collect your rewards… and bask in your awesomeness!!!

Jazz isn’t dead, it’s danceable!

Why am I so excited about PMO? A couple reasons. I’m working with 19 powerful, experienced musicians, among them 2 Grammy winners and a number of nominees. The group is led by two pragmatic, slightly wacky, extremely productive and ambitious composers. I get to sing with several crazy talented singer/percussionists. I love the repertoire. I love the dancers who so elegantly sweat to our sounds.

It’s hard to explain the rush I get when I’m standing on stage and suddenly it all gels. It happens every time. My hairs stand on end, there’s electricity in the air, I feel an intense communication flowing among us all, and an easy-going mutual appreciation. Whenever someone stands to take a solo, I listen. Some play angular pandiatonic lines, others leap about like beboppers, a few remind me of old blues guys. Some “talk” to the band with their trombone or timbal, and the band nods back knowingly.

I’ve always fought this notion that jazz was dead or in need of being kept alive (meaning it was a vegetable on life support). Jazz lives in almost all American music, if not harmonically then rhythmically. You hear it in the comping of guitars, or in bass lines. Jazz has also been indelibly changed by latin music, and as the U.S. becomes more Hispanic, our music has absorbed the contributions of the Caribbean. When you hear these guys soloing on stage, the melodic ideas are essentially jazz. But the powerful rhythm and irresistible tumbao of the bass, piano and percussion is salsa, mambo, cha cha cha. And we love to dance to it.

I keep comparing PMO to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately it appears most people I mention this to have no idea what I’m talking about. Basically, the idea is that more than 20 years ago author Garrison Keillor embarked on an anachronistic venture to produce an old-time radio show that was both nostalgic and contemporary, and it has been quite successful on public radio. I think the same applies to PMO. We’re not old-fashioned, but there’s a beautiful community about it, and a sweeping power to the music that you can’t find naturally anymore except in a symphony hall, where you’re supposed to sit still and listen. Some of the new tunes are hip and modern, but with this big-band instrumentation that is just so American.

I hope you’ll join me in playing a part in the project!

Hi Alexa,

Last week, we launched an exciting new course called Rock History. The course contains the most comprehensive curriculum on the history of rock music ever created. It takes an in-depth look at the highs and lows of rock over the past 60 years—the key heroes and villains, the movers and shakers from the studio and the concert stage, and a behind-the-scenes look at the managers, promoters, and cultural trends that shaped it.

We’re excited to host a Rock History video event, live from Berkleemusic’s studio in Boston, next Thursday, March 8th: an exclusive conversation between course author and instructor Steve Morse and well-known Boston-based DJ and musicologist John Laurenti.

Steve Morse was the senior rock music critic at the Boston Globe for three decades. He has a rich background in rock, having interviewed and developed strong friendships decades long with dozens of the most important artists and bands in the genre, including the Rolling Stones (first seeing them in 1966), U2, Paul McCartney, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Metallica, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam, Stevie Wonder, Coldplay, Tom Petty, and many more.

Along with Steve, John Laurenti is one of the staples of the Boston music scene. John is a DJ at the #1 classic rock station in Boston, WZLX, and is the music director at University of Massachusetts college station, WUMB. John has also hosted a number of historical music documentaries shown on WGBH in Boston.

Please join us for a conversation with Steve and John on Thursday, March 8th at 4:00PM EST. Registration is required. Please sign up at:

https://www.berkleemusic.com/openhouse-signup/

Hope to see you there!

Michael Moyes
Berkleemusic Student Advisor

Off leash, I see dogs my size or smaller, and it’s my duty to fight ‘em. Who knows why? You had my balls cut off long ago, so it’s not testosterone anymore. It might be the alpha male in me, or maybe it’s my invisible Oakland pit bull genes expressing themselves. Or could it be my anger that you had my balls cut off?! Grrrr…

Anyway, if I lived in a world of dogs who were bigger than me, it’d be a different story. I don’t need to even pretend to want to fight a dog that’s bigger than me.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I weigh 80 pounds. I carry giant logs on our runs, because, like fighting, it allows me to display my manly strength. Some dogs try to interrupt me on my runs when my mouth is full. At that point I don’t even growl, because once I’m in log-carrying mode, I have a singular focus. I go, “Sorry, can’t talk now, it’s critically important that I drag this VERY LARGE LOG two miles back the car. Continue chasing your tennis ball.”

Smaller dogs need to be taught a lesson: I am powerful and easily angered, and if it were not for this leash I’m on, I’d have to hurt you. Larger dogs? They’re really very nice if you don’t look in their general direction.

Lisa Loeb and me

It’s hard to sing in a trade show booth — that is, without all the trappings. At NAMM, everywhere you walked there was a musician playing in a booth, showing off the wares of his or her corporate sponsor.  Some had a better set-up than others: A small wooden circle stage, just 8 inches off the ground, or full-on risers, or a smoke machine, or massive speakers, or a simple sign with their name and brand as an official artist for the company. I had none of these trappings, because it was only last-minute that we decided I should sing in the booth.

On the first official day of the trade show, our neighboring booth brought a guitarist. He played a tune, and then I walked over with my melodica and asked if he wanted to play a standard. I called Autumn Leaves in C minor, and played melodica, then sang the French lyrics. I didn’t have a mic. It was early in the day and not too loud, and n appreciative crowd gathered round.  Little did I know, several of the men listening were French! I ended up having a long conversation with one of them, Algerian musician Djamel Laroussi. He spoke French, I spoke Franspañol.

After that, it was decided that we should rent a mic, mixer and speakers so that I could sing on the other days, as well as save my voice when giving demos of Tiggzi by Exadel. Talking is always harder on my voice than singing, as I tend to strain my neck, talk too loud and also use a lower register than I should. I’m really a soprano, but I speak in an alto range.

So the next day, I dialed up TV tracks of my latest album, I Wanna Work For You, hooked them up to the speaker and started singing. People stopped and listened, but I can’t say the response was the flash mob  some performers generated. I cracked jokes in-between lines of the song about how this was ahigh point of my career, and people laughed. The thing is, music, showmanship, soul — these are only part of the equation when attracting a crowd. There are so many other factors, and the more you perform live, the more you learn about them. For instance: Volume. People who made more noise, sometimes got more attention. I say sometimes, because I did see some black-haired, eye-linered male rockers on electric guitar who were head-banging and thrashing but attracting absolutely no attention.

But comparing my experience on the first day, jamming with the other musician, to the second day, singing alone to tracks, revealed what I already know to be true: Audiences love watching the collaborative aspect of music. Now, if I were a famous person singing a hit song, they might be able to fill in the blanks from memory of other situations where they’d seen or heard the song, and be glad to hear it straight from me only a few feet away from them. But I’m not, and the song’s unknown. Even for people in the music business, they’ll turn their head when they hear something familiar more often than not.

This was also evident in the evening shows. I watched a rock duo playing in the packed hotel lobby. The singer kept apologizing for bringing just a duo. It was clear that even though she was thrashing on her various guitars and playing an exciting set of music, that crowd wanted the energy of a full rock band. She finally brought the whole band up for the last song, and then the crowd fully focused and basked in the mutual energy exchange.

Without a car and working hard all day, NAMM’s nightlife was not much of a temptation. I needed my sleep or my voice wouldn’t last five days. And the crowds on the upper floors were hard to take for more than an hour at a time. Some musicians later were criticizing the electric, gear-heavy rock vibe of the conference. Since it was my first time, I expected it and enjoyed it. I’ve only ever gone to jazz, salsa, Afro-Cuban or Brazilian music conferences where acoustic music is the norm. But I adore music stores, and this was like being in a massive music store filled with sublime inventions. I love the innovative ways musicians come up with learning music, or making new sounds. It seems like a very healthy business, and I’m in need of a very healthy business!

The Remo percussion booth was vast and very orange!

The most special moment of NAMM came on the last day, as I was power-walking through the floor Sunday morning. I had a flight to catch in just a few hours, and had coordinated with my taxi to have him pick me up straight from the conference and take me to Long Beach airport (love flying from Long Beach to Oakland — that’s the low-key way to travel!). I had just discovered an amazing sounding melodica made by Hammond and another by Suzuki (in fact I suspect they are both made by Suzuki). Now I was high-tailing it down the carpeted aisles trying to get to the Tiggzi booth to cover for my co-worker for a few minutes.

I came across a crowd and some burly security guards standing between me and a grand piano.

“Who would need security?” I wondered. I asked someone who was behind the guards. “It’s Stevie Wonder,” he whispered.

I moved to the right a bit and sure enough there he was, playing jazzy chords on the piano, testing it out. I stood there in awe. He began to play various snippets of his songs such as Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing (which I’ve sung for years on gigs). Then he broke into singing Ma Cherie Amour (with no mic, of course).

When he began to sing, tears started to roll down my face. I can’t explain exactly why. I never understood those films of young girls screaming and crying for the Beatles. Perhaps now I do. There he was, a genius, a man who has written unforgettable songs since before I was born. His voice is impeccable, unchanged. I aspire to that. His persona, unforgettable. There he was, 10 feet away, singing “You’re the only one that I adore, how I wish that you were mine…” Testing a piano.

It was a good show.

Alexa and the Giant DI Box

“I never struggled a day in this business,” said Steve Vai. “I’ve been so blessed. It was always, how can I do this thing on guitar, and you work until you can do that.” Vai was honored at the 27th annual TEC awards, receiving the 2011 Les Paul award for the creative application of music technology. 

I was the guest of Exadel, whose Tigzzi mobile app-building software I was endorsing at NAMM. The show took me back ten years to when I used to preside over the Jolt Awards for software development tools. There were similarly geeky and esoteric categories. A couple in front of us told us they’d been nominated four times for their software for real-time sound system measurement, analysis and optimization, Smaart.

We cheered loudly for them when their category came up; unfortunately they didn’t win. The show wasn’t nearly as glitzy as we’d imagined, but it was saved by the incredible quality of the band, led by Larry Batiste. Al Yankovic was a very funny presenter, and I was a bit star-struck by songwriter Lisa Loeb, who later told me she has a new record wrapped, some children’s music and a line of eyewear. She only told me this because I ran into her by the Blue microphone booth the next day and asked her partner to take a picture of us together, after which I thought to do my journalistic duty and find out what she was currently working on.

Me and Weird Al Yankovic

But the true surprise of the night was Steve Vai. I’ll have to be honest — I am not a rock-guitar-follower and I didn’t know who he was. But he gave a heartfelt speech that was genuinely inspiring. He started with some anecdotes about Frank Zappa, with whom he started at age 18, transcribing solos and later touring. “Most of us take equipment home, we find a few presets, and that’s it,” he said. Zappa, he said, took gear and squeezed and prodded it and then called the manufacturer and told them what it was missing.

“Zappa had a saying, and I look at it every day on my computer. He said, ‘There are two secrets to the music business: Don’t stop, and keep going.’”

He thanked many for the extremely long trajectories they shared, including his wife of 32 years and bass player Billy Sheehan. But in rock ‘n’ roll it’s accepted that a sentence or two later he referred to sex and drugs as perks of the biz.

He went on to cite Einstein’s “Thoughts are things” and the idea that what you imagine and the positive thoughts you project become reality, with his career as a perfect example. What inspired me was that I think we tend to view the music world along two axes: celebrity and virtuosity. It showed me another side to the business — and not a seamy underbelly but a passionate, irrepressible creative desire to invent new sounds, technology and instruments. And it also was about to be very clear that the man could play the shit out of the guitar.

The stage was soon populated by guitarists — I’ll have to go back and get the names of the all the musicians. One new face was Orianthi, the blond female guitarist who was in Michael Jackson’s last tour and movie This Is It. But Vai simply riffed in every possible way on the guitar, in ways that seemed not schticky or cheesy but, along the lines of the Zappa experience, merely the result of 30 years of squeezing and shaping the guitar beyond its humble beginnings. Whether it was switching hands on the neck or playing two handed on the frets as if it were piano keys, or bending a note impossibly long, Vai embodied the words of another of his heroes, Tom Waits: “Be good at something, and then exaggerate it.”

I gave the demo of Tiggzi mobile apps builder to many amazed folks, who were impressed that they would not have to learn XCode, Apple’s iOS development environment, or Objective C. One guy told me he’d already spent months learning the language. But most agreed that this was a way better way to build an app — and then get back to making music!

I also did an impromptu jam with Scottish guitarist Martin Taylor, who was the artist working with the booth next door to us. I played melodica on a standard, then sang in French. Luckily I didn’t know three of the men in the audience that spontaneously formed were French! One of them ended up visiting with me for quite awhile, and I understood all his French! My French vocabulary quickly ran out and I kept trying to Franc-o-phy Spanish.

I tweeted a bunch of pictures and fun moments (giant bass stomp box, a stylist who looked like a Russian Dita von Teese, a famous drummer, crystal-clear molecular drums, my wardrobe malfunction). Follow me on Twitter for all the fun!

I walked the floor a bit… It’s more massive than anything I’ve been to in recent history. In my first magazine job years ago for a Spanish- and Portuguese-language publication, I used to attend a vast radiology conference at McCormick Place in Chicago every November. This seems bigger. There are floor after floor of exhibits. Every instrument you can imagine. Gear you can’t imagine!

Today I wanted to buy some retractable XLR cords, a cord wrapping spool with storage compartments and a cool extension cord for gigs. Also saw an amazing-sounding Remo pandeiro with an interesting rough skin (reindeer something or other?) that made it very easy for me to do a roll. Their orange booth made me think, “And they say there’s no money in music!” Some nice maracas. Lots of books I’d like to buy. A bust of Chopin. Total iPad envy, app after app and Bluetooth page-turning pedals for iPad gig books.

I’d like to see keyboards and melodicas.

Meanwhile there were interesting performances both large and small. Watched a heavy metal soundcheck. The drummer was shirtless with black-rimmed eyes and a crazy headscarf. I realized that the way people play bass in heavy metal is not ergonomic.

I took a massive haul of magazines back to my hotel room. Makes me happy to see so many magazines about the business I love!

Now I’m going to practice before I get my sleep. Today was a bit hard on the voice and it’s only going to get louder tomorrow!