Sean Geist and Michael Pelz-Sherman: Letter From Home

Sean Geist sent us this video of his collaboration with pianist Michael Pelz-Sherman and their tribute/cover of Pat Metheny’s “Letter From Home.”

I’m always a fan of great fretless bass work, and this fits the bill.

Sean shared the background:

“What started as a truly enjoyable and fun project quickly morphed into something altogether challenging, painstaking and time-consuming. (But yes, still fun!) The free-form time; at least how my buddy Michael performed it, made it near impossible to sync up remotely. (We were never in the same room for any part of these recordings.) The bass line took a few dozen takes to get the timing correct. And then he said, ‘Hey, I was hoping you’d hit the melody, too!’ Ugh. Well, again, loving this piece of beautiful music the way I truly do, I went back to my desk and did all I could to give the melody a shot. Well, talk about trying to nail the time (again)! The free-form-feel of Michael’s melody playing, and perhaps the original as well… just makes this piece extraordinarily challenging to tackle, particularly when we’re not looking into each others’ eyes as we’re recording it. Anyway, I digress. It’s music, not science… we love how it came out no matter. Perfect? Nah. Honest? Heck yes. Good friends making a musical tribute to some of our favorite musical heroes.”

Sean added, “There are actually three bass tracks here; the bass line and fretless melody, both played on my 6-string New York Bass Works fretless. At the end, where I am performing volume swells in the video…is actually me mimicking the sounds of my Wilfer upright bass, which I played arco style on the drawn-out Ab there at the end of the piece.”

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