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DOGPATCH AFTER DARK

from NORDIQUE by QRN

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about

The industrial neighborhood where I was raised in Jersey City NJ was informally and derisively called “Dogpatch”.  A mess of train tracks, trucking depots, natural gas tanks, and wrecking yards in the ass-end of Jersey City, it’s bordered by a swamp, a river, and an elevated highway (the one you see at the beginning of the Sopranos). It was (and still is) a VERY blue-collar neighborhood, and in the earliest years of the 20th century, the first American home of many immigrants coming off the boat at Ellis Island, or Castle Gardens. It was isolated and industrial, becoming a dumping ground for chemicals, unwanted pets, and on two occasions, bodies from mob hits. (The FBI were looking for Jimmy Hoffa's remains a few hundred yards from my house.) A couple of small, dead end, residential streets clung to the polluted dirt for dear life, one of them being mine.

This little instrumental, then, is an homage to my old neighborhood, particularly the summer evenings with fireflies and that ever-present, ever-clinging  humidity. The sound samples at the start include freight cars linking at the train crossing a block away from my home, and the redwing blackbirds that would seem to stray in from the meadowlands. At the end, there are the ‘evening devotion’ church bells of my parish church (St Ann’s Polish), the ever-present evening crickets, a brief mandolin phrase, such as I would occasionally hear my childhood buddy play through an open window of his house, and lastly, the seemingly eternal rhythm of traffic on the Pulaski Skyway as it passed over my neighborhood. Oh, and the tinkling bells at the beginning of the guitar solo are from the Good Humor ice cream truck that would come around daily. The song uses a six-chord motif passed from piano to guitar to brass in various cadences to shift the mood, and incorporates a vaguely ‘Steely Dan’ harmonic style.

This piece is dedicated to my childhood friends Johnny Colaneri and Tom Pirecki.

This music is Copyright©2020 by Peter Tutak. All Rights Reserved.

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from NORDIQUE, released November 20, 2022
Peter Tutak: All real-time and virtual instruments and samples.

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QRN Seattle, Washington

My name is Peter Tutak. I'm originally from Jersey City NJ, and now live in Seattle, WA. I studied bass and classical composition at the university level in New Jersey and Chicago, and I've been a bassist for over 50 years. I write and record my own progressive rock music, in the 1970s/80s style of the progressive rock genre, incorporating influences from classical music, world music, and jazz. ... more

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