Jack of Shadows by Tim P Scott

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Thanks to the iPod and the instant availability of millions of tracks at the click of a mouse, music is often just a disposable background noise. In the Old Days (i.e., my days), a record was something more or less precious to keep, remember and return to. Anyway, enough nostalgic bloviating...

Now we return to a "Tim P Scott" career retrospective, biography, and analysis

by Dobroe Utro

The story of composer and producer Tim P Scott is an odd one. This article is an attempt to ferret out the facts from the deliberate obfuscations. I have not yet been able to meet with the actual Tim P Scott (assuming the person even exists) so I have had to piece together this information from a number of other sources.)

There is a persistent rumor that, if there even ever was an individual named "Tim P Scott", he died, retired or stopped composing in about 1999 or 2000. There is plenty of evidence for this if we examine the CDs released under thie name before and after that time. The rumor continues that pranksters who had access to his computer and web site then took it over and continue to maintain it, answer emails, etc., impersonating Scott.

According to legend, Tim P Scott was unexpectedly born to a couple of poor Lapp nomads and christened Besnik Hoxha since his parents thought that by that ruse he would be mistaken for an Albanian and thereby be upwardly mobile.

While his parents were touring with the circus through Finland he was mistakenly substituted for a baby peccary and abandoned near a trainyard outside of Helsinki. Hoboes and gypsies took care of him, passing his from one group to the next, until finally he ended up in St. Louis, Missouri, in the USA and deposited on the doorstep of the famous zoo there.

For the next 30 years he was brought up in the chimpanzee cage where he learned many of the skills and abilities that informed his later development. Specifically, screaming, ensemble playing and deadly accuracy in feces throwing, as many an reviewer has discovered to his or her rue.

Finally rejected by chimpanzee society due to his unacceptable behavior and hygiene, he was removed from the zoo and offered a tenured faculty position as senior lecturer in art, music and culture at a local university.

After 10 years in that position, and tired of the cold Missouri winters that harked back to the frigid winters of his youth, he made the decision to move to the American Southwest, and become a musician. Not having any aptitude for playing an instrument or singing, he made the logical choice to produce electronic music. He picked a suitably nondescript name that would not attract attention in America and set to work to being the next Mike Oldfield.

How the "Jack of Shadows" suite came to be

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During his infancy in Finland, Besnik's father read to him from the only book they owned: a copy of "Jack of Shadows" by the late science fiction master Roger Zelazny. This made a big impression on him, even though neither Besnik nor his father could understand English and the readings were purely phonetic.

One day Scott found an old Sinclair ZX-80 computer in the rubbish and used it to create this cycle of compositions. Rather than employing the conventional method of using MIDI and music composition software, Scott dropped the Sinclair from various carefully measured heights and recorded the resulting impact to get the individual musical tones of the compositions. A very labour-intensive method to be sure.

The result is a complex, textured, many stranded combination of classical, rock and electronic idioms illustrating the characters, places and events from the book. Although this first full length (running time, 49' 18")release is somewhat simpler in form than those that followed, it is still favored by many curators and discriminating music aficionados and collectors around the world.

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