"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" as ambient electronica - Carlo Mezzanotte

I recorded this song several years ago, as part of one of the Music Player Network compilations. I thought to resurrect it, with the addition of a little homemade video.

Charles Mingus wrote "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" in 1959, as an elegy for the great Lester Young, who had just died. It combines a large, evocative bluesy melody with a rather intricate set of changes.
Along the years, it became one of the most played standards of modern jazz, and several sets of lyrics were applied to it - the most notable by Joni Mitchell in her 1979 album, "Mingus".

For this version, I took inspiration from the original theme, but I totally discarded the chord progression, creating instead an hypnotic electronic bed on which the melody develops with extreme slowness.

I played the theme on a DSI Mono Evolver Keyboard, with a sound based on tuned feedback (similar to a comb filter), with mod wheel and aftertouch driving various parameters at once. Sometimes it was difficult to control the wild sidebands, but that's part of the game I guess.

The main sequence comes from the Evolver too, with additional sequences and sounds from the Kurzweil K2600 - mainly sampled voices and ambient noises which add to the dreamy sonic ambientation.

Four stereo track were used; no MIDI was involved. Every rhythm which needed synchronization was performed by playing in real time on the audio track.