A long, long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far away, I released an album called Study of Light. Actually, it was 2003, and right here in Boston. Way back then, the human genome project was being completed, the Concorde stopped flying, war seemed to be everywhere, and Lance Armstrong was in his glory.  This recording was a huge endeavor for me.  It was the first time I recorded as a leader, it included a couple of original compositions and a daring arrangement of the second movement of Ravel’s string quartet.  What made it easy was the musical partnership found in the group which, for lack of a better band name, we called Rick McLaughlin Trio.  Greg Burk on piano and Jeremy Udden on alto saxophone were – and still are – two of my favorite musicians.  Their musical audaciousness, uniqueness and originality, and the trust and sensitivity we built into the music made this recording a magical experience.

Leading up to the recording in 2002, I was coming to the end of a period of searching for what was next. Having finished my Bachelor of Music degree in 1999, I spent the next few years trying to balance between performing and touring with a “real job”, while looking for balance at home also. That “real job” was a good one, and for someone interested in technology and corporate best business practices, it had a bright future. In my case, this good job in technology was just not a good fit, and eventually I left in order to focus on music.

What “focusing on music” meant was writing, practicing, performing, returning to school for my Master of Music degree, and playing tons of sessions (def.: informal gatherings of musicians to work on music)…most of the time with Greg Burk and Jeremy Udden. One day, we were at Greg’s house and we were working through a normal piece of music, for us. We would take three songs in different keys and of different lengths and string them together. Those three songs would become the form of our “composition” and would govern the length of each solo. Then we would go around trading fours, threes, sixes, etc.

Imagine that for a second. Take “It Could Happen to You,” a medium swing tune in E flat, and “Straight, No Chaser,” a blues in B flat (original key), and “Easy Living”, a ballad in F. Put them together and you have 32+12+32= a 76 bar form in three different keys and three different tempi. Now take a solo over the whole form, which we tried to do from memory. Then, trade four measure phrases across three people.

One day, with steam coming out of our ears, I thought it would be great to get this documented, so I booked some time at Peter Kontrimas’s studio in Westwood, MA – PBS Studios. We recorded the whole record in a couple of sessions, I returned to mix, and then I mastered at Futura Sound in Roslindale. And while touring with the Either/Orchestra, I played the rough mixes for the band, and Russ Gershon offered to put it out on his label, Accurate Records.

The track list is:

1. Assev Vif – Tres rhythm – Typos are really frustrating. This always was, and always should be “Assez” but hey, human intervention. This is the second movement of Ravel’s string quartet, and in 2002, it was everywhere. I think, most importantly, it was in the opening credits of “The Royal Tenenbaums”. I became transfixed by this piece and arranged it for the Trio. The development section was a bit of a puzzle to put together, but, borrowing from an idea that Paul Bley gave me, I assigned new melodic themes from the original composition to different people in the Trio, and we improvised freely from one idea to the next.
2. Ink – Composed by Greg Burk for our Trio. This composition is built similarly to the development section of “Assev Vif”, in that we improvise from one composed idea to another. To my knowledge, this has never been recorded elsewhere.
3. Marina – This song is named for my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. It began as a solo bass composition, which remains the introduction of the song.  This piece was originally an improvisation on the great song “Nature Boy.” Most of my composing, especially for several years after this, tended to stem from a groove or bass line, which is exactly what happens here.   I came up with the bass line first, then wrote a melody, then harmonized it.
4. O.P. – Named for Oscar Pettiford, this Sam Jones song was one of my favorites during this time. I loved it because it is on one of my favorite Cannonball Adderley records (CD-only extra track, Cannonball Adderley Quintet Plus), because Jones plays cello, and because the bass player was Ron Carter, who I had recently finished studying with. This is the first thing we recorded.
5. Blink To Be – Written by Greg Burk while he was living in Japan. It also appears on his own album, Ivy Trio.
6. Delicate – This is another bass piece, but the structure and intention stem from “Prayer” by Keith Jarrett.
7. Colours of Chloe – Even farther back in time, probably 1989, I was looking through the Phonolog we had at the record store where I was working.  A “Phonolog” is a gigantic paper catalog of recordings available to order from major and a few independent labels.  It was the kind of thing that was interesting to read through if a) you had no customers in the store, b) you are a bit obsessive about records, and c) you have library-leanings. I stumbled across this fascinating name, “Eberhard Weber,” and then later read his name again in a jazz history book.  It might have been Leonard Feather’s The Passion for Jazz, where he refers to Weber as “the German virtuoso of the six-stringed bass,” which Weber doesn’t play.  Anyway, this was a section about ECM, the European jazz record label and I LOVE ECM records. I love their sound, the musicians, the most common musical language (if such a thing could be said to exist), the album covers, and on and on. Eberhard Weber’s album The Colours of Chloe was both an early hit for the label, and an album of profound importance to me. At the time of Study of Light, this was the only recording of “The Colours of Chloe” that Weber was not on.
8. Isfahan – Jazz musicians around my age checked out the Joe Henderson record Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn. “Checked out” is probably an understatement.  You know those records that seem to be common knowledge among a specific age group?  This is one of those records. I love Lush Life, and his version of “Isfahan” is the second greatest, after the amazing Johnny Hodges performance on The Far East Suite. We take it at the more bouncy tempo of Henderson’s.
9. Without A Song – I think that Sonny Rollins’ album The Bridge is perfect. Seriously. That album is amazing, top to bottom, back to front, the whole thing. Our version of “Without a Song” borrows a few things from Rollins version.

After recording and mixing, but before dealing with graphics and liner notes, my girlfriend (now wife) and I went to Italy for a vacation.  One night, while walking around Florence, we stopped to look at the Ponte Vecchio and the Arno river.  The album cover is a long exposure photograph I took while resting my Pentax K1000 on a stone balustrade bordering the river.

After Study of Light was released, things went pretty well, as far as reviews were concerned.  It was heralded as “thoughtful and lucid yet spontaneous” and (my favorite) “non-dogmatic” by AllMusic.  All About Jazz said that ours was an “immensely serious project” but despite that, we “convey[ed] a youthful good humor,” which made sense since we were all kids.  Greg and I were just barely in our 30s, and Jeremy was still in the very early part of his 20s.  The record also got a few spins on jazz radio, and I even did an interview on WGBH…

…but then, Napster happened.  It wasn’t just Napster that walloped the music industry, but Napster is a nice metaphor for the gigantic downturn that happened.  The problem was that while people like Lars Ulrich were worried about protecting their millions, I was left wondering if anyone would ever hear this CD.  Accurate Records did the best they could, but one distributor after another went bankrupt, and eventually my CDs became dust collectors on a shelf in a closet.  Fast forward to 2019, and Accurate agreed that I had “satisfied the terms of my contract” with them, and the CD came back into my world, 100%.  

Let’s go.