FLORENTINE ABSTRACT: The Making of Sgt. Giotto’s Gothic Art Club Band

FLORENTINE ABSTRACT: The Making of Sgt. Giotto’s Gothic Art Club Band

The gestation of this album goes back at least to the late 1970s, when fellow LOE member Jim McCusker and I were attending Renaissance Art classes at the University of Lowell (pre-UMass days). These classes opened up a world of obsession based on centuries-old paintings, particularly those of the Italian schools that flourished from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It did not matter that these paintings were almost exclusively Catholic in nature and we were essentially irreligious: their mastery, their profundity, their inherent greatness reached us. Like members of the flock on our humble knees at Mass, we looked on Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian, et al, as divine creators. We made our pilgrimages to the MFA and other museums; we made our own paintings, often borrowing figures or symbolism from those masters. Our obsession with this art by no means ended with graduation; it has hardly waned, really. Only last month, we caught the final hours of the Botticelli exhibition in Boston, soaking in the rare atmosphere of a group of panels and canvases that may never be seen in this country again.

The idea to do an entire album tribute to visual artists of the distant past came a year or two ago. The trigger was a reproduction in a book. I was attending a reading at the home of David Landman, former ULowell English prof, who has conducted informal study groups, usually on early British literature, off and on since the summer of 1980. I don’t recall the specific work we were reading at the time, but fellow attendee Janet Levy had brought along a book called “The World of Giotto,” because it contained a picture that related to a work we were studying. As she passed the book along for everyone to have a look, I caught a glimpse in it of one of Giotto’s masterpieces, the Ognissanti Madonna. Now, I was well-familiar with the painting – anyone who has dipped his toes in the pool of Renaissance Art knows it – but I hadn’t seen it, nor given it thought, for quite a while. The greatness of the work hit me sharply, my mind snapped back instantly to Dr. Cheney’s art classes at ULowell, and I was eye-to-eye again with the immortal master who, somewhere around the first decade of the 1300s, had wrought an epic Mother & Child on a 10-foot high slab of wood for the high altar of a church in Florence, Italy. I had some thoughts along the lines of “Why have I neglected this stuff for so long?”

The more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to create some kind of homage to Giotto and his fellow early Renaissance artists, and to do it through “contemporary” music. I began sharing my ideas with the other LOE members and, getting the sense they were ready to go, I booked studio time with Brent Godin at Night Train.

Don Cogswell was the first to respond to my request for lyrics, but when he, Brian Farrell, and I walked into the studio May 21, 2016, the “words” part of the project was a few mere fragments; the focus that afternoon would be the music. Our friend Gary Gagnon, who helped us create the soundscapes for THE WEEN OF HALLO, would again be the drummer on our project.

I should note, too, that the Gothic Album, as it was called for a long time, was not the only musical concept being developed at Night Train. I had also planned a musical tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, which became the UNFATHOM’D TIDE album by The Four Last Things. The two albums were in fact recorded concurrently for the remainder of the year; I rarely went to the studio to work on one without doing at least a little work on the other.

Almost no actual composition preceded the May 21 session. I had a couple of chord sequences in mind but had given little thought to how they should be incorporated.

The lineup was Brian and myself on guitars, Gary on drums, Brent doubling as bassist and recording engineer, and Don Cogswell plying his energy on stray instruments, including trumpet, glockenspiel, digeridoo, and squeezebox.

We recorded four jams, each lasting between 7 and 10 minutes. The first was a fast one based on an eight-chord sequence bouncing around from D to Eb. Eventually, I decided to develop that chord progression for one of the Poe songs (“The Sleeper”), so in the editing process, we chopped off the opening minute or so and any other references to the D-Eb structure. Jam 2 was a slower, more relaxed piece, the longest of the four jams. In Jam 3, another slow, spacey piece, Brian led off with some thematic material on guitar, which I later doubled via electric piano overdub. Jam 4 was uptempo. In addition, Brent, Gary and I made a trio recording of a heavy rock piece I originally wanted to use in the Gothic Album, for the part called “The Triumph of Death.” Here again, I changed my mind later and decided to cut this from the album and save it for another project.

I mulled over the rough mixes of this first session for a couple of weeks and booked more studio time for June 17. Brian couldn’t make it for the second session, but Jim McCusker could, and longtime musical associate Howlin’ Dave Ambrose added his tenor sax and theremin to the milieu. Don, Gary and Brent were back, and our sextet of musicians produced a quartet of jams to match that of the first session.

Again, the music was largely improvisational. Jim manned the piano and traded off with Don on glockenspiel from track to track. Don represented the brass section, playing both trumpet and trombone. Jam 5 was medium tempo, based on a simple A-Bb-G sequence. Jam 6 was completely ad-libbed but I referred to it as the “Jazz” number because of its 9th chords. Jam 7 was the longest of the day and was based on a progression running F-E-D, C-B-A, an easy to follow pattern that allowed for a variety of tonal sidetrips. Finally came Jam 8, very slow & dark, which I referred to temporarily as “Twilight Zone.” I had a pre-written Em guitar theme which I repeated throughout while everyone else added spooky atmosphere on top.

I was in for a shock when Brent emailed me the rough mixes later, as some kind of technical glitch had caused all my guitar parts to disappear. Everything, the whole session. Everyone else was there loud & clear; but no guitar.

My initial dismay dissipated when I realized that, since I had mostly played chords in fairly regular patterns during the session, my parts could rather easily be replaced, and – in fact – could be improved upon. So, I took the guitarless basic tracks Brent had sent me, and, after some further study, recorded my own digital overdubs at home for Jams 5-8.

With only a single exception, the remaining studio sessions were devoted to adding home-recorded overdubs and editing. On July 19 and August 2, guitar overdubs were added to the guitarless Jams, and keyboards to Jam 3. Sessions for the next two months

were devoted to the Poe album. On October 8, I invited Howlin’ Dave to add a flute part to Jam 2. He had never heard the track before and there was absolutely no written-out material to go by. He just played with the track as it went along, listening and responding as if he were a part of the original jam. One of the most amazing improv performances I’ve ever witnessed. At the same studio session, Lori Pestana added an alto sax counterpoint which I had written to go with Dave’s tenor sax in Jam 5.

Two further October sessions were devoted to editing and assembling the eight jams into two separate suites, each about 20 minutes long. In total, about 10 minutes of music were shaved off the original jams. Suite #1 was crafted from Jams 2, 3, 4 & 6, while Suite #2 was constructed from Jams 1, 5, 7 & 8. Meanwhile, I made home recordings of the individual LOE members reciting the various Gothic lyrics. Three studio sessions in November were given over to placing these vocals in the context of the two “Gothic Suites.”

There were moments when I nearly regretted adding the vocals, as I really thought the Gothic jams were very entertaining just as instrumentals. I listened to the rough mixes over & over while driving in my car and got quite accustomed to them in that form. (I still have a tape of the “naked” jams that I listen to now & then.) But of course, the lyrics had to be there, as they told the story of the artists and the artwork that were the inspiration to begin with.

I have already mentioned that Don Cogswell was the first to turn in lyrics for the project. I thought the “Triumph of Death” segment would be right up his alley (morbid fellow that he is), and indeed, his poem on that subject is replete with the garish horror of the famous frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa (the identity of whose painter is still uncertain: perhaps Orcagna, perhaps Traini, perhaps Buonamico Buffalmacco).

Jim McCusker contributed a surprisingly reverent tripartite meditation touching on Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto. He said he wanted to bring out the spiritual aspects of the art, and he was clearly successful. His lyrics are split between the two Suites, and it is his mystic conversation with Giotto which concludes the album.

Stephen McMillen, who did not play on the album but did record vocals for it, made his poetic imprint with a unique set of stanzas based on the perennial Renaissance subject of the Annunciation (Simone Martini’s 1333 panel being the exemplar). Metrically muscular, peppered with alliteration and wordplay, his very contemporary reaction to the antique topic turns casually into not completely cynical musing on the current state of the Western World.

Brian Farrell brought his more abstract, stream-of-consciousness style to the section concerning Berlinghieri’s early 13th Century St. Francis Altarpiece. He also lent his highly imagistic bent to a series of short lyrics he and I concocted to commemorate several of the lesser painters such as Guido da Siena, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and Bernardo Daddi.

My own poetic shares wound up scattered hither & thither, the major foci being Cimabue’s great Crucifixion in Assisi (the painting behind the main page on this site), the Arno Flood that devastated thousands of artworks in 1966, and the relatively little-known Ugolino di Nerio, whose Polyptich in Williamstown, Mass., I first saw in the early 1980s.

The mixdown and mastering sessions for what had finally been titled SGT. GIOTTO’S GOTHIC ART CLUB BAND took place December 12 and 19, 2016. CD manufacture and release came two months later during the wintry weeks of February 2017. We can only hope that the nearly 250 lines of poetry from the pens of five different writers, and the 40-odd minutes of music, created mostly in spontaneity by eight different musicians, convey at least a modest idea of the greatness that was Renaissance painting in its earliest bloom, when Art with a capital “A” really mattered.