Some of you may recognize the title of this tune from a Clint Eastwood movie from years ago. Although not a great movie, I like the title and thought it summed up this weeks tune musically.
About ten years ago I started using manuscript paper notebooks to write down composition ideas, chord voicings etc… Kind of like an artist using a sketch book I suppose. Occasionally I will be browsing through or looking for a particular idea I’ve written down in the notebooks. This weeks tune came about through an idea (first two bars of the bass line) that was a sketch for something else that was from years ago. From there the bass and melody line developed pretty quickly, but I intentionally kept the chord structure open, harmonically speaking. In fact I didn’t really write in chord changes. Not that this is a free tune (music without predefined chord structures.) Rather I thought the melody and bass should imply the chord, giving the improviser freedom and to get away from the chord/scale relationship that sometimes seems too present to me in the improvising processs. In talking about how to approach improvising with my students, I think it is important to remember that a scale merely represents possible note choices to a given harmony, vertically. Musical lines are linear, they exist in time. The challenge is how manage note choices to form these musical lines in time (linear) and also imply the chord changes.
“Rejuvination” is a simple tune that I wrote based on the keyboard groove you hear in the intro -- sort of an “Afro-Pop” type thing. Simple chord changes, simple melody, but a good feeling, thus the title.
If you check out the sheet music, you can see that we ditched the original melody that I wrote in favor of having us both play the keyboard figure. I also play along with the montuno on the bridge some of the time.
Hope you enjoy it -- make sure to stick around for the “reprise” at the end.
A few weeks ago, Clay and I used the last few minutes of a recording session to take a crack at a tune that I had just scribbled out a couple of days before. The song didn’t have a title, systems were scratched out on the paper, and I didn’t really have a form in mind, but somehow we managed to put it together and get what I thought would be a pretty good recording of it.
Unfortunately, while listening back to the mixes, we realized that the piano mics had some distortion due to some radio interference, which made us worry that the tracks might be unusable. But, Clay went to work with ProTools and came away with a track where the interference was barely audible. I thought we were in the clear, but when I started editing the video, I realized that I only had video from one of the cameras. That take clearly wasn’t meant to be.
So now, a few weeks later, we present what I’ve titled “Second Chances” — our second attempt at recording the song. No radio interference this time. Both cameras did their jobs. If you look at the sheet music, though, you still see that system scribbled out.
When going through some of our past episodes, I realized that we had very few songs where we can stretch out on our solos over simple chord changes. Most of our pieces navigate through complex chords (some more than others) rather than just giving us something simple to explore. Especially since many times one of us gets a first look at the song just a few minutes before we record, we end up devoting a lot of concentration to getting through the changes without mistakes.
In order to give us some freedom from the page, I wrote this song based on a McCoy Tyner sort of vibe with long stretches of D minor to play over. Of course (because we just couldn’t resist), we added in some complexity in the melody and how we dealt with the form of the piece. Nonetheless, I think we came away with something a little different than what we’ve done in the past.
On Friday, February 26th we’ll be playing a rare live Duo Chronicles performance at RiverPlace as part of the Portland Jazz Festival.