Ah, the undergraduate days. My graduate school days (I did half a degree at Wayne State in jazz studies, then I made my big career change and got my masters degree at Southern Methodist University in Interactive Technology) were more career oriented. I was older, and a bit more focused. While I was a good student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (where I did my bachelor's), I was certainly more connected to the night life, if only because playing gigs as a professional musician demanded it.
So, I would often see Wooster Street at night, when the drunks were shuffling back to their dorms/apartments/rented houses. The slow sections of this tune is a musical representation of the drunk's slow walk. The fast sections... well, those are in there because, well, they sound cool. No artsy reason! Guilty as charged!
However, I should note that the tune borrows heavily from a jazz composition called "Fables of Faubus," by Charles Mingus, shown here (this is a pretty cool rendition by a modern jazz group):
Fables doesn't have the fast double time, but the transition from "two beat" to 4/4 swing makes it feel that way. And while my little tune is about dumb drunks, I should point out that Fables of Faubus is a serious composition about segregation and racism (written during a time when it was very near and present danger in this country).
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