released April 1, 2024
NOTES

i. Bank Note$: On Me & Your Ameros/£s/€s/et al.

This being a cover — of which, for howsoever long Panops-series freshets haste intermittent to the internet sea (and, who knows, I could drop dead tomorrow), more (along with some originals and divers “experiments”) are in train — I’m obliged to stump up for the rights. As always with me and my Bandcamp-specific pay-what-you-like digital-content policy, you absolutely may download these gratis — but perhaps those of you benevoli uditori with the means and inclination might settle on me the wholly-nonprescriptively-suggested sum of a buck per cut to help defray this particular expense attendant on submitting to the judgement of the generality (i.e., you) music made, the nemesis of commerciality unrecked, pour l’art. Thanks!

ii. Note (and interval and fermata and cluster and … ) Notes

The parts in the body of the song pretty much just evince my baggily idiosyncratic voicings of the Ur-composition’s underlying harmony, but the intro and outro are something rather different: a copping (strictly by ear, be it known, as I really don’t read) of the said sections of the big-band accompaniment provided by Pete Rugolo — Kenton alum and composer of the theme to one of ’60s TV's touchstones, the epochal Quinn Martin series The Fugitive — for June Christy’s 1954 recording of the tune. The structural relation of Rugolo’s brassy sprawl to my reductionist schematization of his original is in some sort analogous to that which certain songs and dances in the (proto-)operas of Louis XIV’s court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (a/k/a Giovanni Battista Lulli, of Firenze, scion of millers) bear to the adaptations thereof for five-course guitarre (two of which, from the tragédie mise en musique Atys, I have performed, FWIW) arranged by the Tuscan transplant's contemporary Rémy Médard; make of that what you will. Having failed to exhume copyright/publishing data for the orchestration, I've highhandedly arrogated to myself leave to issue my “interpretation” and, with all the ingenuousness in the world, now wait to see if I get, shall we say, dunned. Be all that as it may, I felt it was incumbent on me to acknowledge that both of those bits are every decibel of them a derivation, be it never so brutalistic, from Maestro Rugolo’s clangorously propulsive midcentury substrate. (From the which, BTW — or so I am informed by a pair of ears far more learned than mine — Frank Zappa himself did not scruple to lift; so there ya go.)

-- K.McF.D./1.iv.2024