Common Ground is a set of continuous variations (ciaccona) over a bass pattern that was quite common in Italian compositions from the baroque period. Revisiting this pattern was a way of looking for some common musical ground that might yield fresh results for both the composer and
improvisor in me.

I Dreamed About You Last Night was improvised into existence over the period of a few hours. It is based on a very small trick that most folk guitarists know well. That little trick was the pathway for me to this piece.

As an adolescent I was quite drawn to the music of Paul Simon, particularly his early work with Art Garfunkel. Boppin' is my little homage to both that music and that time period in my life.

Still Life in Wood and Wire is the only piece on this recording where I use a steel string guitar. My friend and luthier colleague Jeff Elliott, whose marvelous instrument I play, loaned me one of his steel string guitars so I could truly be playing on wire strings.

Several years ago I composed an ambitious work for two guitars titled 13 Ways of Looking at 12 Strings. The work includes two guitar solo movements that serve to divide the three main parts of the work. I cast the two solos together to form a two movement mini-drama titled The Philosopher and the Fly. The first movement, A Philosopher's Song finds one of our heros at work in his thinking room. The second movement, From the Diary of a Fly, finds our other hero doing his own work in the same room. The movements are meant to be simultaneous slices from two lives leading up to the moment, at the conclusion of the second part, when they at last meet.

Like the title track, Magic Serenade is an improvised composition that was the result of another small discovery about the guitar.

My adorable mother-in-law lives in Winnipeg, which is located in the very coldest part of Canada. Our family visits there obviously occur in the summer. When traveling back to Portland in the summer of 2005, I loosened the strings of my guitar before getting on the plane. When we arrived home I found that the bizarre tuning I had quickly subjected the guitar to had some very interesting properties. A very apt description of the tuning I use for this piece comes from my grandmother. When she had been dealt a particularly bad hand of cards when playing poker, she always said she had A Dog From Every Town.

Jeff Elliott, my guitar-loaning luthier pal recently made me a new instrument (after waiting on his list for 13 years). Before he put it together he gave me the opportunity to seal something on the inside. A message in a bottle, as it were. He called me on a Thursday morning and said he would make the sides, top and back into a box that afternoon. If I wanted to put something inside I had to have it to him that afternoon. I improvised a short little piece that I copied onto two pieces of parchment and gave them to him. (That score is now glued on the inside of my instrument.) Before I gave him the parchment score I made a single xerox copy of it so that I could play it at a later date. I wanted to keep this little prelude as a private, secret musical message known only to me and a few friends. In order to seal the fate of this private piece I decided that when I did give that single performance, I would shred the only copy. The shredding turned out to be quite a ritual with many members of the audience shouting at me not to do it. My resolve was firm and out of the shredder came strips of paper that held their individual strands of written music from which I had just performed. Audience members took the strips with them, scattering the score to parts unknown. That single performance has remained a very strong memory for me. I have often felt that shredding the score was a mistake, that I had sealed away a nice piece of music. My Pentimento, recorded here, is an attempt to improvise a facsimile of that piece. I have no illusion that I came close to playing what is sealed to the inside of my instrument, but I think I captured the essence of it.

The final work on the recording, Open Up Your Ears, was written for David Starobin and brilliantly recorded on his CD titled New Dance. Since I wanted to bring something fresh to my own recording I decided to improvise a few little side-trips. The work is a fantasy based on what I thought Jimi Hendrix might have written if he had lived past the age of 27 and learned to play classical guitar. I felt that improvising some new material would not violate the foundation of the original construction.

Bryan Johanson
Portland, Oregon
February 2007