As I collaborated with my grandpa, I should do the same thing with my dad who passed away earlier this year. But there was a difficulty. I mean, he was a quiet person, also very cranky. So I don't have any recordings that my dad talks about his life. He even didn't told us the last words, and farewell note.

There was only an iphone shoot video of my dad and his mates performing Ohayashi: Japanese traditional percussion music. I only had this choice. Convert the film to audio file. Then, it's processed by iZotope RX 10 advanced and Ozone 11, to isolate and clean the sound. Finally, I got an audio file only contains my dad's taiko - Japanese drum.

Then I faced at another problem. The performance seemed like playing by BPM 103. But the drum is not on the grid. I mean, it was a casual performance and he was drunk then, the drum's beat is very unstable. By sound programming, I can easily make it to sync with the grid, but it does mean I destroy his performance. I didn't have any ideas and I threw it away for awhile.

The solution was to sync with his timing. I added pianos, bass, organ etc... I used those instruments' Midi / Audio quantize not to sync with the DAW grid but with my dad's groove. And this final output came out. Well, is it a composition? I am not confident. It is just a casual session of dad and son.

But it was more session than I did with my grandpa, I could feel we do something together, the music.

This is a very typical 12 bars blues, key is C. No tricky chord progressions. Very easy thing. Fats Domino, Louis Jordan, the Beatles also used this structure: for example "For You Blue. " Very typical but histotircal music structure from 1940s, I believe.

Boogie, New Orleans' blues and jazz. I learnt this musical structure when I was 7 by my friends' father. He was a jazz pianist who frequently play some bars at ginza. I spent six years with him to learn so many basic music knowledges, structures, etc... But mostly no music sheets, improvisation was the base.

So playing this kind of music with my dad means: back to the egg. So, I restart playing the piano from the beginning of my music years. My dad used to say he had a dream to fly to New Orleans for boogie jazz music and glasses of whisky.

I spent 3-4 days to sync my piano with my dad's drum. Bass was easier. Still not perfect but I'm sure I recorded over 50 takes of the piano.

Well, it's been too long. So this is the session with my dad: "20230927"

p.s. - September 30th today is the day my grandma passed away. I don't have any audio materials related to her, but it's good to release this recording on this day.