Like many rock guitarists of my generation, the first classical-style guitar piece I got to know was Steve Howe's "Mood for a Day" from the Fragile album by Yes. I love Steve Howe. I even forgive his catastrophic use of a RockmanTM (a paperback-size guitar amplifier invented by Boston guitarist Tom Scholz) on the 1989 Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe record. Almost. But I digress.
The first time I heard "Mood for a Day" was probably when I was 14 or so; I had been given a mix-tape of Yes songs by my guitar teacher. I loved that tape. I still think of summer days under the backyard awning when I hear "Heart of the Sunrise". But I never learned "Mood", or Howe's other famous guitar solo, "The Clap". (Nice title. What was with the VD rock songs of the 70's? Talking about it makes you feel better? At least Deep Purple's VD track was obliquely titled: "A 200" from 1974's LP Burn (hm...) was named for a topical ointment.) But again, I digress.
In terms of its composition, "Mood for a Day" is an odd piece, and not in any way conventional "classical" guitar. It contains elements of flamenco, pop and Renaissance music, and the style of the playing doesn't meet the polished standard of the classical musician, but rather the rough and earthy technique of rock or folk.
Structurally, it is a concatenation of parts that can seem at best tangentially related to one another. But despite, or perhaps because of the anachronisms, the seams and the improbability of "Mood", it remains memorable, interesting, and evocative. Maybe it's not great art, but it's good enough for me.
I never learned "Mood" or "Clap" because prior to 2002 I had always been a pick player, and those pieces require a fingerstyle technique. ("Fingerstyle" means that instead of strumming the strings with a pick, three fingers and the thumb of the right hand pluck the strings independently.) But in that year I had the opportunity to record a few tunes that called for fingerstyle: "Flowin' Tide" on the Grand Mal album Bad Timing, and "The Smallest Star" and "The Promise" on The Billy Nayer Show's Goodbye Straplight Sarentino, I Will Miss You. I did some cramming and got my parts together.
It wasn't long afterward that I put down the pick and started playing fingerstyle almost exclusively, much to my own surprise.
"Stellar Rushes" was originally one of the "Easy Pieces" mentioned in the post for "At the Foothills", and in the initial version scheduled for Astral Law, that designation still applied. But after a number of listens to the piece in the context of the album it seemed too short and insubstantial. So I set about re-writing it. I changed the key, added a new middle section and worked out some new details in the original part. The version of the piece posted here is the new one, recorded in October '09.
"Stellar Rushes" is a descendant of "Mood for a Day". It's not "classical" -- that term is so haphazardly over-applied as to be useful only in the vaguest (or most rigorous) terms anyway. And it's not really a "folk" piece -- can there be such a thing as a yet-unheard, original "folk" piece? Another inexact term. But I'm not going to get crazy trying to drill down into the right classification.
The style of "Stellar Rushes" is a result of something as fantastic and mundane as the intersection of one person's experience, personality, craft, talent and limitations. I love Yes and (some!) Deep Purple. Andres Segovia and Andrew Hill. Jimmy Page and Jim Hall. David Bowie and David Tanenbaum. John Coltrane and John Cage and John Lennon and John Paul Jones and Johan Sebastian Bach. What genre is that? -- James Beaudreau
