Bertland
The musical universe of Bert Jackson

This is a little droney tune I wrote in 1984, on the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated (I didn’t know it at the time and named the piece when I found out). This is a “scratch” version I recorded last week in Garage Band to test how it would work with two guitars. The timing is off in places, but some people asked to hear it so here it is.

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Ran a quicky one take of Softly as in a Morning Sunrise (Romberg/Hammerstein) with yours truly playing the trusty Ibanez GB-10 with Band-in-a-Box accompaniment. Not the same as real players, of course, but a lot easier to schedule!

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Another tune that grew out of Jean Coyne’s Roland D-50 keyboard’s extended visit to my house. Started playing around with some stuff and this quasi-classical thing came out. Remember, this was 1987-88 and we had never heard sampled audio patches before. The horn sounds just blew me away. This is all me, all synth recorded on a few tracks.

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This is one of the last iterations of Razor’s Edge in the 80s, with Mike Lurie on bass and Patrick Whatule on drums (Patrick was later replaced by the late great Charles Lynch). This was from a gig we did at the Stouffer Grand Resort in Smith Bay on St. Thomas. The room acoustics were great, as I am pretty sure it was recorded with the internal mic of my cheesy little Hitachi boom box.

Minor Mystery is a Ray Brown tune that I have only heard on Poll Winners Three with Barney Kessel, Brown and Shelley Mann.

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I always loved the sound of this. It was recorded with my cheapo Conrad acoustic guitar with both a mic and a soundhole pickup. The flute sound is from my Roland guitar synth with MKS-50 module, pretty basic. And lots of reverb and delay everywhere. Wall of sound. Phil Spector, eat your heart out. I am eager to record this again with my new Martin.

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This song started out as an acoustic shuffle in 1980, then one day I was inspired to rock it up a bit. This is the result. It predates my Roland drum machine so I think the drums came from one of those cheesy little keyboards. The bass line was probably played on that keyboard as well. It’s all me.

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This is a little rocker I wrote in 1987. Not my usual style but it was fun. I think I’d been listening to some punkish stuff with some of my music pals. Something stuck. Note the odd meter in the bridge! I play everything and programmed the Roland drum machine.

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This is a piece recorded back in the late 80s. My pal, Jean Coyne, had just acquired a new Roland D-50 keyboard synth. It was the first digital synth any of us had tried. And for a while, it stayed with me at my house. So one day I started messing around and pretty soon I was laying down some tracks. My buddy Jake came by and liked what I was doing so he went off in the other room, wrote out lyrics and came back and recorded them. I added a flanged/distorted guitar solo and voila! we were done.

What you hear is a Roland drum machine, me on the D-50 multitracked a few times, including the bass line, Jako on vocals and me on guitar. Very different from most of the stuff we were doing at that time…

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