Fractal Jazz (the way we do it) combines melodies spontaneously generated by a computer using Chaos Theory and real musicians improvising live.

When we first did it we had not heard of all the people who had done it before. I guess it's an aquired taste. Boy did we get in trouble for suggesting we might have been first! We may have been first to do it in Australia though (who cares).

Some people who beat us to the punch;

- George E. Lewis

Trombone player, check him out on the Avante lable.

- New World Chaos

Don't know much about them but you can mail Mick from the band like this.

If you know of anyone else who's into this sort of stuff I'd like to hear from you.

We performed our first example of Fractal Jazz at Her Majesties Bar of the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane Australia on 16 August 1995.

On this occasion Omar's Basement performed a four minute piece entitled Omar's Fractal in which drums, bass, guitar and alto sax were played by the humans and synthesized piano was played by a computer running the software "Omar's Fractal PreRelease version 0.7" a fairly spartan sort of beast whose bigger, smarter brother is available here.

Omar's Fractal version 1.0 is now out and is available with info files, configs, and even a helper app. The text file by it's self is also here to whet your appetite at slightly lower bandwidth.

Notes on Omar's Fractal 10K omarfrac.zip 19K

example; song02.mid 7K

You'll also need midi1.vbx part of MIDI Cool Tools from Arctic Software and vbrun300.dll and cmdialog.vbx from Microsoft in your windows\system directory . Here they are if you don't already have them.

midi1.zip 12.5K vbrun300.zip 230K cmdialog.zip 9K

Learn more about fractals and chaos theory by clicking here.

Learn more about fractal music by clicking here.

Back to the Omar's Basement Home Page