This can't be love.

Dante came down last night, and we recorded 3 tracks with Christea for a jazz vocal competition she's doing down in Maryland. Really simple live setup--2 mics on piano, 1 on vocals, through a mixer into a single recording input so I couldn't mix later except for some EQ--but it came out stompin' ass good. Good enough that I've pretty much spent today since I woke up listening to Anita O'Day and Sarah Vaughan. This is going to make me get back into doing more jazz, which is a very good thing--I've been kind of focused on my rock and popular music influences lately, but bringing back a jazz sensibility should even help out that aspect of my writing a lot.

So, lately I've been thinking more seriously about an idea that sprung up from the floor I'm on in my dorm, which is what's called at NYU an "Explorations Floor"--based around a specific theme, people apply to get into the floor and a community results. Mine's the music floor, but it's not all musicians necessarily. We have everything from aspiring music video directors to producers such as myself, plus of course seven thousand guitarists (most of which are actually really quite good; that, I guess, is the difference between this floor and your average college floor).

So last semester sometime, in a fit of appreciating the people around me, I got to thinkin' about applying the same principle to a post-college situation. Specifically I was thinking about something like this: get 10 to 20 people all in the music realm in different ways--some on the business side, some on the artist side, some A/V types--and get some sort of space to live in, splitting the rent. The idea would be that eventually between the group, we'd be able to set up sort of a whole music enterprise. A few people could head up a label and publishing sort of company, through which everyone's music would be released... all the songwriters would collaborate, and play on each others' records... we could pool our equipment and skills to pull off things we would never be able to do otherwise. Ideally, depending on the sort of space we were in, we would have shows each Friday and/or Saturday with our artists and other "guests" which would gradually grow to the point where they provided the rent money. Just imagine the sort of cult following a group of musicians like that would get. You'd have absolutely rabid fans.

Of course when it started out everyone'd probably have to keep day jobs for some time in order to keep up the rent and food money. But gradually, something like that could legitimately be a way to make your music work--and the artistic growth coming from an environment like that, particularly after the shows started bringing in the rent money so you could ease up on the outside work a bit, would be just monstrous. It would be, in a way, sort of like the early days of SNL, back when they all lived 5 days a week or so in the studio together, just fuckin' around.

Just something I'm thinking about... but actually just beginning to legitimately consider. It's workable, you know? Between that many people, a house in Brooklyn wouldn't be that expensive to rent... I'll keep thinking on it.

I am hungry so I take my leave of thee. Begone!