Phil Miller’s HARD SHOULDER – it’s hard to play – hence the title

This week I want to give some insight into how Phil approached recording his compositions. I recently came across an article that Dave Stewart wrote about Hard Shoulder – a piece of Phil’s you can find on the Cutting Both Ways CD Phil’s first CD featuring his band In Cahoots. The second CD was Split Second. Both albums contained some compositions played by In Cahoots and some put together with Dave Stewart using what was then very new music technology. To quote from the excellent interview Phil Howitt published in issue 15 of Facelift Phil said “I had written some rather awkward material, unsuitable for the band that I decided to do with Dave Stewart having had the first glimpses of what machines could do to facilitate playing certain sorts of music. I had written some pieces that I could only just about play on guitar if I practiced very hard because of their sheer statistical density (to borrow a quote from Zappa).  That’s why the Figures of Speech track I did with Dave on Cutting Both Ways was something you could only do properly with a machine. Not that I wrote it for a machine, it just happened that I had all these chiming polyrhythmic things going on that needed a dead steady beat. The titles Cutting Both Ways and Split Second acknowledge this dual approach although I often think that, with these two albums, it would have been better to have done a whole album without a band and then a whole album with a band.”

Here is what Dave Stewart wrote in his article:

Can sequencers and drum machines play jazz? Folks, you’d be surprised at what these expensive little boxes can do after you’ve put in the requisite weeks of programming. Observe the appended blast of fly excrement. Written by my friend Phil Miller (once guitarist with analogue group of yore Hatfield & The North in which I played keyboards). These eight bars are a selection from a long complex piece of his entitled Hard Shoulder. Initial attempts to perform this opus with live musicians produced a depressing maelstrom of wrong notes and approximate rhythms, especially in one densely written contra-Puntel section in which three fast melodic lines interweave in fugal style over syncopated chord changes. It’s hard to play – hence the title. After some thought Phil decided to record the piece with an automated rhythm section. Below, in score form, you can see the details of the drum and bass programming that he and I evolved for one section. The rhythmic feel is a kind of fast walking bass with driving ride cymbal and snare accents a la bebop, but the drum sounds, courtesy of 12-bit sampling, are of the ‘80s. Those of you who own drum machines and sequencers should try programming this beast into your machines. You’ll have fun with this one!”

Click the image or this text for the score as a PDF.