Phil & Jim -from gift to insult at a stroke (original) (raw)

Having listened again to Aymeric’s interview with Jim Dvorak, which I edited several years ago, I was reminded of this story:
Back in the day, Jim had given Phil a composition of his to look at. Phil was in the habit of occasionally including compositions from members of his band into the band’s repertoire which also sometimes ended up on CD and I imagine that was why Jim had given this piece to Phil to look at. Maybe Phil had asked him if he wanted to include a piece of his for the band to play.
Phil told me about it and said that it was a really interesting piece but it was flawed by a single chord that joined one section to another. He said the chord nearly worked but that it didn’t really work and that he was looking to see if he could find a chord that did. This turned out to be a whole lot more difficult than Phil had first thought and he ended up working for over a week before he managed to devise a chord that worked perfectly with the composition. He was rather pleased with the result and felt it had been worth spending so much time on it because the piece was so good.
The next time they met, Phil gave Jim back his composition and showed him the new chord he had devised. He told me that Jim had snatched it back, rather crossly, and said something to the effect of “I thought it was perfectly all right as it was”. Phil said he felt well rebuffed.

What a sad story. It started off as a rather nice illustration of how musicians worked together and showed how much Phil had admired Jim’s piece to have spent so much time to perfect it, whereas Jim, on the other hand, felt insulted that Phil had the effrontery to interfere, unasked, with his composition and had dared to alter it.
So, sadly, we were never able to hear In Cahoots play Jim’s piece, either live or recorded.