Tourniquet Time

This tune was written in 2001, during a period when me and some friends where meeting every Monday at Joe Bagg’s house in Riverside to rehearse. For a while me and Joe had a deal where we would write a tune every week and we’d match each other or else the negligent composer would buy the other guy lunch. Somewhere along the way my friends noticed (and started making fun of of me) that a lot of my tunes were in the medium up range (maybe 160bpm-ish). This tune was an attempt to push that tempo a bit. For years I’ve kept a list (now on a notes app) of potential titles for tunes. Some titles inspire actual tunes and others just look like they might fit a tune that I’ve already finished. In the case of this tune, I have a feeling I had already written the tune and looked at the list and thought that this title might fit. This title has no real significance except that it sounded marginally funny to me at the time. The tune uses some harmonic devices that I think are fun to improvise on like parallel modal chords a half step apart and major7#5 chords and also some formal elements like 3 bar phrases. Around this time we had seen Kneebody play and were inspired by how they had memorized all of their very complicated tunes. Me and Joe memorized a bunch of our tunes and this was one of them but we never really performed it for listening audiences. I remember playing it at a few background music gigs but that’s about it. I should also note that Joe wrote some lyrics to it.

“Surgeon,

Cutting below the knee,

‘Cause it’s time,

Break out the tourniquet and

Twist it…”

Still waiting for the second verse…