Afterlife, Blue Bar is where my journey first started I suppose. Jose Padilla phoned me up at my studio and said he’d like me to write something for Cafe Del Mar volume three. One of the things I most admired and respected about Jose, is that out of all the compilers I’ve ever met, he’s the only one that has taken a very deep interest in new music, to the point where he would hunt down people who were very much unheard of. There is a tendency among what you might term, Balearic, to go backwards in time with music. To try and find the rarest record, rare groove or obtuse classic. However, the scene has thrived on new sounds too.
So, this was before the term chill out was invented by Chris Coco and myself, (quite by chance), Jose called me to produce this track. I had been to his house before, and as I went through his record collection, I noticed that it was scarily similar to mine. All vinyl, of course. There was a synergy there already. So I said, great! I’m gonna write it and call it Blue Bar, because I’ve just come back from Blue Bar in Formentera.
How did the session go?
I went into the studio with a friend of mine called Tudor Moore, who is an excellent horn player, and keyboard player for that matter. We had no idea where we were going to start and he just sat at the keyboard, called up a grand piano patch and played the beginning of blue bar, which is a very classical piano piece.
So I was recording the MIDI just as he’s playing it. Running it back, we were both in agreement, that it was going to work. I am at the desk and telling him “this sounds really good and then you just stopped and you went, I don’t know how to finish it.” So, I played the one simple note several times to finish it, as I brought the strings in, and then very quickly found a B. The best ideas are about simplicity and feeling. It was all done on a Roland W30 workstation sampler with floppy disks. With the keys done, I found this beat very quickly and wrote the string parts.
Where is the vocal sample from?
I found the vocal on one of these floppy disks that I had brought back from Los Angeles. Prior to the internet in 1990, they had what they called the bulletin board in Los Angeles. Almost a precursor to the internet. I was working part time at the guitar center on Hollywood Boulevard. I used to hang out there and play keyboards so much, they just said, why don’t you just come and demo because we noticed you’re actually demoing for people because you’re excited about stuff. So why don’t we make this formal so you can get commission? There was a load of boxes of floppy disks knocking around and when I was leaving to go come back to the UK, they gave me this box.
These disks were full of audio clips from people like the Stevie Wonder studio and Michael Jackson’s studio. So the sounds are all samples that they’ve selected to put on the bulletin board. And we’ve downloaded them, and we’ve made our own box, which they presented to me. Among the discs, I found this female sort of operatic, almost vocal, and I played that on various notes of the sampler to create a melody with a bit of pitch bend, and that became the vocal.
So by lunchtime, that was all done. During lunch I ask Tudor, “So you’ve got your horn with you, right? So, if you’ve got a mute with you, I think what we need is a really cool horn Solo with a mute.”
He actually played a blinding solo all in one take. That was it. We committed it to DAT. Although we are both thinking, that’s weird, it’s just fallen together. There’s nothing needs to be tweaked on the mix or anything. I played it the next morning, and I said, “well, I think this is done. I’m going to send it for mastering”.
Sometimes tracks want to exist and we are simply a conduit…
Enjoy this slice of Afterlife Music – You can find out more About Afterlife Music Here.
Til Next Time
Steve Miller (Afterlife)