Remember/ My Friend, Byron

LinearLineman

Fifty years of deep friendship. Byron wrote novels, musicals and cookbooks. He cooked for Jagger, Kingsley and me. We made a pact at twenty five to visit Greece together. Forty years later El Greco and I were in Athens, and Turkey and Mexico. The smartest guy I ever knew. Too smart to stick around, seventy three turns around the sun and slingshotted back home. Godspeed, my friend.

McD

Nice tribute. You always seem to get something good out of the Casio keyboard on vacations.

You music acts like a musical inkblot for me ("Dr Rorschach, pick up line 3") and I hear some "Aladdin"
themes in this one. Unintended I'm sure. I like the whole tone cadences opening upwards harmonically.

Daveypoo

Gorgeous - really nicely done, sir. Very studied and purposeful. I like the accessibility of this one - the voices help to elevate it as well.

LinearLineman

Thank you, @McD and @Daveypoo. It was interesting to try to find the right piano. I wanted to try the Pure Synth Pianos on this and the recital hall patch came close. RC275 did not work at all and finally the BeatHawk grand did it. It was just the tone . The attack and release weren’t right on the others ( I think).
Thinking about the effects thread while I did it. For me using as little as possible is best.

I don’t know if others have the same experience, but I go and go and go, thinking it is getting better and, often, at the end,it just falls apart and I have to begin again. I wonder what my brain does to trick my ears. I did add a little delay and chorus to the synth lead line. Kleverb as a global send and a 4pockets EQ preset.

[Deleted User]

A nice track.
My view on it is that it would have been even more beautiful with only the piano.
The track is good enough for this.
Minimalism can bring a lot to music.
We can feel you loved this guy in this track.
Thanks for sharing!
Flo

LinearLineman

Thanks for listening @flo26. I have to disagree on the solo piano idea, but for a different reason. After listening to my own solo piano playing for fifty years it is a necessary next chapter (the last)for me to have the fun of arranging and orchestrating. Hopefully I will get better at it as I go along (and before the book comes to a close).

kinkujin

This is so fine. I love the light touch, but I also love (it is one thing I always love about the music you post) the surprises in the harmonic turns and where the piece goes. First I felt, ok, now we are going to restate that opening theme ...nope...we're off somewhere else. Love that!

Something tells me you friend was a funny, unpredictable sort, or wanted to be. Full of surprises but also tender and kind at the core. At least, that's what I get from this tribute. Excellent and thanks again!

LinearLineman

You got him exactly, @kinkujin. Totally sardonic, anti establishment (he attended McGill law school, became class prez after one year and dropped out) card playing, pot/hash head (everything rolled in tobacco of course, upping his smoking to maybe two packs a day for fifty some years). He could debate anything with anyone and usually win. We laughed a lot, debated a lot (I lost) smoked dope a lot, are a lot... everything was a lot with Byron. I remember in a restaurant in Chinatown NY, some diners left most of a plate of crabs in brown sauce. Byron reached over and confiscated it. Crabs in Byron sauce became one of our favorites but we always had to purchase them after that. Here is a bit of his obit from the Montreal Gazette...

A creative bon vivant with an outsized appetite for food and life, Byron Ayanoglu, a former restaurant critic for the Montreal Gazette, died Friday of lung cancer in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts.

Ayanoglu, 73, is survived by his husband, filmmaker Algis Kemezys, his partner for three decades.

A playwright, cookbook author, novelist, documentary maker and travel writer, he appeared on radio and TV as a food critic and chef, catered for film shoots, and even served as Mick Jagger’s personal chef.

Ayanoglu became the Montreal Gazette’s fine-dining critic in September 1997, following the death of Helen Rochester, who died on May 7, 1997, after covering the restaurant scene for 33 years. He left in May 1999 and was followed by long-time food critic Lesley Chesterman.

He was also restaurant critic for Toronto’s Now Magazine from 1985 to 1991, helping to launch the thriving restaurant scene on that city’s Danforth Ave., both in publicizing new restaurants and as a consulting chef.

“Byron’s restaurant reviews were always brimming with erudition and extravagance, of both the culinary and personal variety,” recalled Lucinda Chodan, senior vice-president editorial of Postmedia and editor of the Montreal Gazette.

“He was truly an original — a vivid, generous, life-embracing person,” she added.

“The phrase larger than life is literally the way you would describe Byron,” said Jon Kalina, 71, a former CBC broadcaster and documentary filmmaker who met Ayanoglu when both were students at McGill.

A smoker for 60 years, Ayanoglu ballooned to more than 300 pounds at times.

Kalina recalled being invited to lunch at the Côte des Neiges home of Ayanoglu’s parents, where his mother, a superb cook, would recount tales of life in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

Like his mother, Ayanoglu “was a truly inspired chef,” Kalina said.

“To be invited to Byron’s home was a great treat,” he said.

After leaving the Gazette in 1999, he moved to Crete, where he penned the novel Crete on the Half Shell: A Story About an Island, Good Friends, and Food, published in 2003.

“He was a man you’d have to say who did what he wanted to do,” Kalina said.

And so... I was lucky enough to count him as a friend an ally for half a century with nary a scuffle between us. Yes, very lucky, indeed. ( @McD, @kuhl @rs2000, have a read above)