Alesis Q49

I haven't been producing any music at home for a long time. One reason is that my creative mind seems to be dwarfed by the intellectual need of my MBA courses, but the real reason is that I don't have the means to create music. My old MIDI keyboard controller simply will not connect to my computer via a USB interface. After successfully ignoring this fact for several months, I thought it about time that I do something about it, and so instructed my wife that the next time that she is in Tel Aviv, she should enter a certain musical instrument shop and buy me a keyboard.

She was in Tel Aviv on Monday and bought me an Alesis Q49 usb/midi keyboard controller, for the princely sum of about 650 NIS (about $180); this might seem a lot, but the keyboard is going to last for years. As its name hints, the keyboard has 49 keys, which makes it at least twice the size of my previous keyboard. I can put it on the computer desk in front of the monitor and play it there, but storing it is going to be a slight problem. The main thing is that the keyboard works perfectly with all my software; sometimes there are small problems in detecting the keyboard, but I'm learning to overcome those.

In honour of the new keyboard, I am in the process of resurrecting a very old song which I wrote in 1972 called 'The road to Antibes'. The song itself is not particularly special, which is probably why I haven't given it a second thought for the last 38 years. So what suddenly brought it to mind?

A few weeks ago, I decided to burn a compilation disk composed of ballads performed by King Crimson. Yes, them heavy people knew how to turn out a deft ballad. Listening to this to and from my studies reminded me what a deft hand Robert Fripp had (still has?) with the acoustic guitar. What jigged my memory was the song "Cascade and Cascade"; I was very enamoured of this song when it came out in 1970, so much so that a year or so later, I had the idea of creating a band whose musical direction would be similar to that of C&C, along with Sandy's "Who knows where the time goes" and "The sea" - lots of open guitar chords along with a sunny flute (true, there's no flute on the Sandy songs, but the guitar obbligatos could easily be transformed to warbling on the flute). The group would be called Antibes - because of the jazz festival held in the city on the French riviera (Côte d'Azur). It seemed the perfect sunny name for the sunny music that I had in mind.

The idea never reached fruition primarily because I didn't know anyone who played the flute! Somehow a female violinist was suggested, and I remember that one rehearsal was held with the violinist and a bassist (and me on acoustic guitar), playing my song "Sunday Rain", but nothing else came of this. I know that I wrote 'The road to Antibes' so that the group would have some material, but looking back on it now, TRTA was not really the right kind of song.

Exhuming the song, I performed a kind of Lennon-McCartney trick; one would bring the other an almost completed song, whereupon the other would change a chord here or there, add a middle section and possibly write the words for another verse. That's what I've done: almost automatically I changed the chords for one sequence, making it much more interesting. I have yet to add a middle section (which is sorely lacking) and I may well write another verse. I'm trying to give the song a sunny arrangement, but that seems more difficult than it sounds.

I wonder what it's like in Antibes.