Welcome and bienvenidos to The Sequoia Saga—
As a free subscriber to The Sequoia Saga, you’ll receive one posting each week of excerpts from my novels, poems, songs, and short fiction. Readers can also buy e-book versions of my novels and e-book collections of my poetry. Read some excerpts below.
Thank you so much for your interest.
Sincerely, David
DKrancher@icloud.com
https://twitter.com/drancher
DavidKrancher.com
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Silly Bicycle Haiku My bike lost his grip on the way home in the dark. We must be over the moon
Cantab Tango, The Live Album, a novel by David Krancher
Cantab Tango, is a literary black comedy about Cambridge's most creatively deranged and diverse art band and its creative leader, Jack. Jack is a songwriter whose dislocated mind struggles to create despite his feelings of suicide. He must recreate himself and his music to make it all work. This is a dark-humored novel of literary fiction with a love story—as told by Jack. He struggles with his own existential death wish while recovering from the loss of his family and his previous lover.
From Cantab Tango, The Live Album, a novel by David Krancher
1.
Tony and I sit before a guy called Satchmo in a music studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He is auditioning with us, but we are more nervous than he is. An hour of the studio's day schedule is too expensive for our meager budget, so we have to record him at night, as the sun rises. Tony says we need to work quickly and yet capture a sound good enough to make a wise choice about Satchmo. We already like him, but we are too insecure to be wise. He's talented but young—so he would be a long-shot for us. He's our one prospective recording artist for our one record company of zero artists so far. Our name should be Virgin Records, but somebody has already felt that way.
He faces us with a guitar and a charming grin, but how charming does his voice sound? How crisp and complex is his sense of rhythm? Can he sing well at four in the morning?
This would be Satchmo's first song on his first album with us—maybe—if we like him well enough. And if we think he can save our new business from going bankrupt. And if he likes us enough to sign a contract and move to Cambridge. But before we listen to him sing, I set the mics while Tony tries to impress our expertise on him by lecturing me on his theory of songwriting. I let him rant—it does impress me that Tony’s often right.
“You could use a parallel modulation on your new tune,” he tells me. “Or just change that section to the relative minor, but since it’s an anguished song, we should add a 13th-note voice to the one-chord to just leave it hanging: you actually did that in “Coyote,” remember? Though it works more like an altered fifth than anything else. But it did work that time and you even doubled that in the final chorus of your other song. 'Insane' was perfect to double.”
Don't Quincy Jones me, Tony (I don't say that out loud).
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