When pianist Charles Farrell took his Dutch terrier Nick out for a walk on a gorgeous afternoon late last year, he brought along his keen ear, perfect pitch and restless artistic temperament. As the pair strolled along the Hillsborough River near the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, a sound in the distance piqued Farrell's interest.
ShzzzzzoooooOOOOOOOoooo.
He soon realized it was coming from the bridge up ahead. Farrell did not, however, just hear cars driving over grated metal. He heard a chord. He heard music. "It was a perfect fifth [interval], probably a B-Flat and an F-natural," he says. "It sounded very much like male voices in a Gregorian chant. I didn't remember ever hearing music from a bridge."
Farrell walked Nick to the foot of the graffiti-marked Cass Street Bridge. He didn't notice the University of Tampa spires or the Beer Can Building in the distance; he homed in on the sounds, the notes, most of which fit tidily into the diatonic (do-re-mi) scale. He also heard chords, created by two cars crossing the bridge at the same time. Then he started constructing melodies in his head.
Within minutes, Farrell had hatched a musical project. He didn't know what, exactly, other than it would involve those whooshy bridge sounds and improvised piano. That afternoon, Farrell e-mailed his friend and regular collaborator John Stephan, a recording engineer/producer who owns the Springs Theatre, a recording studio/performance space in Sulphur Springs. "He got it immediately," Farrell says. "My guess is, if I didn't know John, I would've seen it as an interesting sonic phenomenon and dropped it there."
Stephan and Farrell returned to the bridge a few days later with a couple of high-end microphones and a digital recorder. Stephan placed one mic just under the grates and dangled another about 10 feet lower. "If it went too far down, I'd start to get river sounds," he explains. He recorded until his batteries died and walked away with about a half hour of beautiful ambient sound.
Next up: piano.
Cass Street Bridge — Tampa, as Farrell and Stephan have tentatively titled their project, is not a particularly groundbreaking endeavor. Musicians have been using found sounds for a very long time. In fact, the two artists previously collaborated on a CD called Hope Springs Eternal, which intersperses loops of answering-machine conversations with music performed on instruments. You can make the case that the project is an extension of the avant-garde "Musique Concrete" movement that emerged in the late 1940s, or is a perhaps an urban counterpart to the nature recordings heard in massage rooms.
Farrell offers a less predictable comparison. "The 1812 Overture, the one with the cannons, that's not all that different from what we're doing, taking a sound source that's clearly not musical and incorporating it into music," he says. "It sounds quite different, of course, but contextually it's pretty much the same."
When it came time for the piano phase, Farrell was acutely aware of possible pitfalls. He's an artist who tries his best to exist in a nether region where genre does not apply. His resume includes jazz stints with the likes of Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Evan Parker and Steve Swallow. But over the years, he's become increasingly resistant to any manner of pigeonhole — while he could easily sit down and play a lovely rendition of "Autumn Leaves," the exercise no longer stirs him. At the keyboard, Farrell possesses staggering technique and imagination, but places originality above all else. "It's of no interest to me to replicate grounds that have already been covered," he says. "The only thing that appeals to me is innovation."
As a result, he did not want his piano-playing for Cass Street Bridge — Tampa to emerge as anything "representational, like jazz or neoclassical."
The collaborators met at the Springs Theatre on a chilly afternoon. While Stephan helmed the soundboard in an upstairs control room, Farrell sat at a state-of-the-art Steinway grand in the cavernous, nearly dark studio downstairs. He kept his parka on, while Stephan fed him the bridge sounds through headphones.
Farrell probed with a few plaintive long tones and slid into a nervous, staccato motif. He then improvised non-stop for an hour, running the gamut from jittery cascades to knotty clusters to dissonant chords to near stillness.
Afterward, he entered the control room in a pensive mood, unsure if his playing had worked. The next day he had his verdict: The session was a failure. "The piano was coming [into my headphones] very loudly," he explains. "I felt like my playing was stiff. Another problem was that I unconsciously assigned the bridge sounds a compositional intelligence that was maybe missing one ingredient, and then I tried to supply the missing ingredient."
For a subsequent piano session two days later, Farrell played sans headphones, instead conjuring up the bridge sounds in his memory. He laid down a series of improvisations that comprised a kind "toolbox of sounds" that could be manipulated and looped later via computer. Much better, he thought.
Then it was Stephan's turn. As with the tandem's prior projects, Farrell gave his producer virtual autonomy when it came to looping, effects and other post-production. His only suggestion: He didn't want the music to come out chronologically, as a long piano solo played over real-time bridge sounds. When it comes to manipulating soundwaves on his Pro-Tools computer program, Stephan is better off working in solitude. "Charles is such an interesting character that we invariably get on tangents and don't get much done," he says with a chuckle. "Alone, I can sit and think about things."
Stephan began by lowering some of the bridge sounds a couple of octaves. "The samples that I dropped the pitch on, I was trying to create an extra layer of low-frequency sound to give the feeling of vibration that you get on the actual bridge, a feeling of massiveness," he says. "I see the pitch-shifted bridge sounds as another one of the 'instruments.'"
After that came the painstaking process of selecting snippets of piano music and bridge sounds and fitting them together like sonic puzzle pieces. "Nothing much ended up in sequential order," Stephan says. "I look for pieces — maybe 30 seconds, micro-compositions — and make constructions out of them. Once you get a bunch of those made, you re-edit and assemble them into a whole."
Stephan mixed his version in five-channel surround sound, creating "the effect of sound moving across the bridge."
With the help of a recently awarded $3,000 Hillsborough County Arts Council grant, the collaborators hope to have completed Cass Street Bridge — Tampa by May. The plan is to include Stephan's "producer's version," Farrell's "artist's version" and, hopefully, "the one that really interests me," the pianist says, "which will effectively contain both and make itself available for the user to create their own versions. At that point, both John and I cede artistic control over the product. It's ours, and it's not ours."
In Farrell's view, his most successful music makes a larger commentary on the culture at large — in this case, the music's emphasis on place and time. "Part of the way we know a place is what we hear from a place," he says. "And if you were to drive over that bridge in the 1950s, it would've produced different sounds. That bridge produces sounds endemic to downtown Tampa, Florida in the early 21st century."
Do You Hear What I Hear?
"One of the ways we understand and can discuss where we are is the sounds that emerge from that place," says pianist Charles Farrell. What are the sounds that define Tampa Bay for you? Share them at senses@creativeloafing.com or add a comment to this story at the bottom of the page.
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This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.
