Famous composer limericks, pt. deux

Frau J.S. Bach, Mrs., the second
One night as her new husband beckoned
Thought "Johnny's first wife
Was deprived of her life
'Cause his organ's got no stops, I reckon."

Here's one I could see possibly catching some hell for:

Herr Beethoven had it in mind
To the deaf you should always be kind,
And try not to shout
Or let words tumble out.
I said, TRY NOT TO... oh, never mind.

3-octave pentatonic scales on 6-string bass

A way of looking at pentatonic scales on bass, breaking them up into trichords. A possible way of getting at a more Arabic maqaam/jins approach, or Prez' way of making three notes do the maximum work over the most time. It should be possible to "develop" a given trichord (adding, sharping, or flatting notes for instance) the way one uses ajnas within a maqaam. Also just a good position-shifting exercise.

Low-B players (that would be, like, everyone but me) can just add 1 to any 6th-string fret number on the TAB staff.

Ice Cream with Ben E. King

One night early in '85 I was onstage with a top-40 band in Lancaster CA, out in the middle of the desert in a nautical-themed motel lounge. One of the staples of cover bands then was the "Ice Cream Changes Medley."  "Ice Cream Changes" are what musicians call a sequence of four chords that show up in almost every tin pan alley tune, and comprise a large chunk of the early rock 'n roll repertoire.  In C, for instance you would be looking at: C - Am - Dm (or F) - G, or variations of it. The leader calls "Ice Cream!" and you find a key, get in a dreamy 12/8 feel and:

Darlin yoooooo-wooo-wooooooo.  Send me….

("hey I got one," says the guitar player)

Cherry.  Che-erry pie….Gi-i-mme. Gimme so-ome…

(the saxman steps to the mic and…)

Devil or Ay-hnngel, I can't make. Up my mi-ind…

(and back to the lead singer)

Count every wave, on the stormy sea….

…and so on, for as long as paying customers are dancing and we can come up with tunes. There's usually a bridge section to contend with, but they usually fall into a couple of set patterns which can pretty much be divined with a word or two from across the stage.  So in response to raised eyebrows someone'd yell "rhythm!" or "go to the four!" With an Ice Cream Changes tune, that's usually enough to you started. What I do with guitar players who need a chord is point to a fret on my bass up or down the E-string. 

So anyway, this one night, there's a tap on my arm - I was easy to reach at my position on the very left of the stand - and this guy says "I'm Ben E. King, can I sit in?"  To which I naturally respond "getcher butt up here!" and he's great. Now I'm not sure if back then I'd have known  whether or not he was who he said he was, but he had an undeniably stentorian doowop voice, knew the bag, and could do all the stage moves.  Three nights later, I'm at a restaurant somewhere in Orange county, with a different band but in my usual spot on the left side of the bandstand and this guy taps me on the arm, "Hey I'm Ben E. King…"  Different guy, same response, "getcher butt on up here."  Same thing: great singer, smooth performer.  Thinking back on it, and the fact that this was Southern California after all, I doubt either one actually was the Ben E. King.

And a few years later, back in Richmond, I found out why.  I was at that time in a band with 10 of my best buddies, good good band, and we were hired to do a big corporate bash at a downtown hotel. The clients had gone so far as to hire The Drifters and Bowzer (of Sha-Na-Na and TV fame), and members of our rhythm section were supposed to fill in for whatever chairs the name guys needed covered, then play a dance set with our full band.  The Drifters, such as they were (no chick, no one even claiming to be Ben E. King) had their own drummer and guitarist, and pretty much just chord charts, so it was a pretty easy show.  Of course the lead singer was more of an Otis Redding clone than a Ben E. King, but there was a great old-school bass singer, and then a couple of younger guys filling it out; I sort of figured we were backing the Central Atlantic Drifters Troupe or something. With which I have no problem - these Drifter guys were pros. But I guess there's a bunch of guys who, at one time or another in their professional lives, "were" Ben E. King.

I ended up playing The Drifters, The Bowz, and my band's long set with no break. And of course for a bass player, that also pretty much means playing almost every second of every tune, and by the end I thought my arms were gonna fall off.

Great lyrics (not mine)

The literature of the great Calypsonians, from what I've been able to find, is woefully underrepresented on the internet and libraries.  For the lyrics below I don't make any particular effort to transcribe the sound of the language, except in specific instances of Trinbagonian English words or syntax, for example "distill water" or "Du."   

"Concertina" (The Roaring Lion) 

I beg yuh Miss Millie

For goodness sake take it easy

And please have some patience

And don't torture me with your long endurance.

(chorus) Oh no Miss Millie

For heaven's sake take it easy

Du don't advance any further

And kill me dead with your concertina

Last week you give me fever

All night long was the same maneuver

You had me piston in fire

Trying to fiddle your concertina

Oh no...

Your engine always in action

Day and night you want lubrication

Not me any longer

Your battery need too much distill water

Oh no...

Night and day you('re) complainin

Every minute your valve want grindin

If not your carriage your throttle

I'm too afraid of your old crank handle

Oh no Miss Millie

For heaven's sake take it easy

Du don't advance any further

And kill me dead with your concertina

A Truly Backhanded Compliment

My acupuncturist back in the Twin Cities, N, after sticking you full of needles will customarily (also being a musician) put on some music and leave the room for a bit to let the magic work. She told me she had my guitar CD in the rotation, and that one of her regular patients, a woman with dementia, gave it an emphatic  thumbs-down. "I don't like this music." she said, "It makes my toes hurt."

Turns out her toes got sore where she'd been snapping them in time. 

Uh-oh.

I have this seemingly unerring instinct for when an otherwise happily humming-along regular gig is about to end.

I've been part of a trio that played every Thursday at a small bar in Jersey. I'm coming to really like Jersey, especially after all the crap the state usually comes in for. I'm reminded in a way of a totally unexpected comment a singer friend of mine in Minnesota made about bikers (I admit I just didn't expect it coming from an African-American); we were playing a party where everybody rode up in their Harleys, dressed the part, and she said "I like bikers. They're some real people."And it was indeed a nice crowd. Anyway, I'm just constantly reminded of this when I'm in New Jersey: real folks, nice crowds, albeit labor-intensive highways. So at this particular bar, right off the highway, there are pickup trucks parked outside; inside, truckers, people playing pool, watching football, white, non-white, mostly guys but some families, everybody getting along famously. Once I had a long chat there with a blues-guitar loving trucker who spoke with a fascinating, subtly delicious accent, kind of corn-pone in a way I couldn't place. Turns out he grew up in Ireland and has spent the last 30 years in Georgia. And these guys all love our jazz/samba/reggae/Beatles mix.

Anyhow, the other night, it really came together. Being the guitar player in a "guitar trio" has been an evolving thing for me. I put my book together thinking "Put bass parts to my solo stuff, tell the drummer to stay out of the way, and Bob's-yer-uncle." Simple concept, except that it doesn't work. For one thing, the bass player is usurping the gig previously held by my right thumb, for another, in a band setting, even when I'm leading it, I lose a lot of the absolute power I had over things like texture, form and sound. So it's been a bit of a learning-curve, getting to where I can "delegate" musically. But Thursday it was happ'nin! People were loving it and I thought to myself this is it. We got our sound, we can really build from here.... then, I swear to you, my next thought was "uh-oh."

I don't know why it is, but when get I an email that says what a blessing it is that I'm in the band, a text that says it's an honor to play with me, or when 2 or 3 guys from the band tell me after the gig how much they enjoyed what I did, I think "uh-oh." Sometimes a compliment just sounds like the first shoe dropping. Once I had a more-or-less regular stint with a singer in Minneapolis, including a regular Wednesday night at Cafe Havana. I was in the enviable position of playing either bass or guitar for her, depending on which chair she couldn't fill. Get Jocko and go from there, y'know? One Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the gig, the singer called and said she was sick, there wasn't time to find a sub, and could I just lead the trio on guitar to hold the gig down? No problem, and it went great. I'm not prepared to say how "great" I was in particular, but "it" - the evening - was a heck of a lot of fun. The guys in the band said they'd love to do it some more, and one of the bartenders even said I looked like Carl Perkins when I was playing (you know I loved that!). And the singer never called me again. Whoa... when you get fired as a multi-instrument guy, you really get fired!

So there I am in Jersey, in the middle of a tune, thinking a) wow, this is the best we've sounded and b) uh-oh, this is the best we've sounded. And not a half-hour later the door opens and a guy starts schlepping in gear. We talked to him on break, a perfectly nice guy, and he said they got him in to do some dj-ing, starting at 8. Of course, we go from 6 - 9.

Turns out (based apparently on the recommendation of this very young, new bartender) they want to try the dj out for a while, maybe move us to another night? They're trying to draw from a college in the area, and I totally get them wanting to try stuff.  The owner told the bandleader they really do like us (which I believe) and he'd call him in a week or two... for which, upon hearing this, I had but one word.

Uh-oh. Or is that two words?

We musicians learn early about life's transitory nature: all gigs end, except if you're in the Rolling Stones. This one was fun, and I learned some things.

   

Lester Young's solo on "Pennies From Heaven" (transcribed for banjo)

http://youtu.be/9vDW0ANRim8

This is the link to a gorgeous solo that Lester Young (aka "Prez") played in 1950 over the chord changes to "Pennies From Heaven" (see transcription and TAB below). Believe it or not, the recording is pitched in B major. Knowing of most musicians' aversion to the key of B-major and looking at the different players' hands (even though they're trying to "lip-synch" to a pre-recorded track), I'm guessing it was really in Bb, though I've rendered it in C, which seems to be the "stock" key these days, and makes the lowest note in this transcription our open low D. All the articulations in the notation staff are conjectural; the ones I'm suggesting for the banjo are in the TAB staff.  

   I'm hesitant to get too analytical with Lester Young. Not that there isn't a lot here to pick apart, it's just that it's so much more fun to ponder the mysteries: the way he can make three notes do the work of two bars, how two bars can be all about one note, or how he'll seemingly "toss off" a simple fragment - say, CDEFG in eighth-notes - and it sounds like the lost Eleventh Commandment. The casual-sounding way he can make musical statements that are, upon inspection, breathtaking in their organization and balance - there's nothing "casual" about them! Listen for how he scoops up to some notes, and how he hits some right on the money, also how he changes his relationship to the beat. The received wisdom is that he tended to play his solos "behind the beat," but then you hear at measure 27 for example, the way he stabs the D on beat one a little bit in front.  

   As you play through this, keep in mind that accents in jazz usually occur on the peaks in the melodic contour, and on the last note in phrases ending on the "and." Listen in this solo for the interplay between downbeat and upbeat accents. Above all, listen to the way that it all seems to be wrapped in a calm assurance that this note, this one right here, is precisely the one that needs to be played at precisely this instant.

   One of my favorite moments is at measure 63 and 64; I've notated it as a B, and theoretically speaking B or Bb would work just fine here, but he plays basically a B half-flat, which he smears up a tiny bit (but not up to B), then down towards the following A. My suggestion is to play it as a Bb, bent up slightly. It's a fascinating moment! I like the idea that, having made prominent use of Bb in bars 56 and 57, and knowing a B-natural is imminent (it's in three of the solo's last four bars), he split the difference in bar 63, neither repeating the Bb nor reaching the B-natural too soon.

   Prez once said that it bugged him to be at jam sessions and have the piano player calling out chord changes because "that's not what I hear." He knew what the changes were, but he seems rather to have gone to the DNA of the tune (perhaps this accounts for the illusion of simplicity), and is showing us how to really hear it.

Can you tell I love Lester Young?