· Can you believe it's been 5 years (as of April 3rd) since Catherine and I were married? In mid-May we were still on our honeymoon and enjoying every moment. Read all about it.
· The Epiphany project, from January and February, is still arousing interest. Fifty songs in fifty days. When I started it, I heard from lots of folks that it was an awfully ambitious project. It certainly was, but not a moment of it felt like drudgery. Just a pleasure to do. Glad it's over, though. To see the whole thing, go to the Epiphany page.
· you can reach me at barrybrake [at] gmail.com, and that's for good.
Since I first composed and shared it, several people have asked when and how they can get a good recording of it, rather than just the radio show feed. But in the past few days, since I shared it in conjunction with things i did in 08, there's been a real demand.
So, I've got it up and running, and you can now purchase a good recording of the Sacred Harp Suite. All nine songs, plus extensive liner notes that build on the information you hear in the radio show, for nine bucks even. You can pay with credit card or through PayPal, and download it immediately.
Just in time for Lent! It's things i did in 08!!! Read all about my stupendous year. (And catch up on your favorite episodes from previous years.)
I've got to say that 09 has been busy for me so far, particularly because of the Epiphany project. To see it all in one place and read more about what's behind it, go to this spiffy page, where you can see them all at a glance.
EPIPHANY: 50 Days, 50 Songs
Day 50: The Sound Of Music
This is the song I often end gigs with. It's a tradition in jazz clubs for the pianist and the singer to linger over a few slow songs after the gig is officially over while the band is packing up. It dates back to the days when the singer and the pianist didn't have anything to pack up; in this age of electronic keyboards and portable sound systems, that tradition is pretty much gone. But I still do it at gigs where they have a piano. It's a nice way to ease the goodbye for the audience as well as the musicians.
As for the song itself, it's part of another long-standing tradition among jazz musicians: taking a song previously thought of as dorky and presenting it as a serious work of art, reworking the audience's mental associations with it. Miles Davis did this with "Surrey With The Fringe On Top" and "Someday My Prince Will Come." Composers like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter didn't like what jazz musicians did to their work — Porter famously couldn't think of a nice thing to say about Ella Fitzgerald's immortal recordings of his oeuvre, finally settling on "at least she's in tune" — but it's because of jazz musicians that songs previously considered frivolous, like Porter's "Embraceable You," were framed as 20th century masterpieces.
No doubt Rodgers and Hammerstein would complain about what I've done to their gorgeous melody (which is the picture of complex simplicity, going stepwise up and down for almost a third of the song before there's a single melodic leap), not to mention their favorite chord, the diminished major-seven. (Sing "Bali-HAI," or "If I LOVED YOU.") I replaced it with a jazzclubbier sharp 11, and taken other liberties too, as I always do with a tune. But one thing I have left unchanged: a beautiful celebration of the power of music — the ear that perceives in Nature not just birds and brooks and stones and larks but their distinctive sounds, and the human heart that eternally yearns to transform those impressions into its own song.
So it was entirely fitting that, right as I got to the final note, a bird chirped outside. You can hear it if you listen closely.
And the song is a fitting way to end this particular gig, this fifty-day feast, nearly four hours of recorded and produced music from beginning to end, surrounded as always by a great cloud of musical minds and hearts.
Click below to play it. And remember you can always click again anywhere on the picture to take you to the Youtube site, where you can see related videos and select watch in high quality to get better pictures and sound.
EPIPHANY: 50 Days, 50 Songs
Day 49: Chim Chim Cheree
When I make an unusual song choice and interpret it freshly for people, my second favorite thing to hear is, "Man, I love what you did with that!"
My favorite is, "Man, that's a great song."
This one has had a place in my canon for a long time. Besides the fact that it has charming lyrics and a beautiful melody, and hits so many satisfying emotional tones, I think I'm gravitated to it because it's the closest thing I can possibly get to explaining to you what it feels like to be a jazz musician.
For this performance, I decided to use a saloon piano and record it with enough room ambience that you can hear the shuffling around and breathing that you don't normally hear in studio recordings.
Click below to play it. And remember you can always click again anywhere on the picture to take you to the Youtube site, where you can see related videos and select watch in high quality to get better pictures and sound.
EPIPHANY: 50 Days, 50 Songs
Day 48: This Love Affair Has Just Begun
I write a song for Catherine every year for her birthday. So far, the six songs I've written for her have been a couple of slow bossas, a riffy piano thing with minimal lyrics, a pop ballad, a Chinese flute melody, and this one, her 2007 birthday gift.
It starts off with the story of how we met, edited for song as always. (I'd rather lie than tell a truth that doesn't fit the tune.) But it speaks the truth of how I feel about her, and, as I told her just today, it doesn't just speak the truth, it sings it.
The pictures are from some of our travels, which is the only time we ever think to take pictures.
Click below to play it. And remember you can always click again anywhere on the picture to take you to the Youtube site, where you can see related videos and select watch in high quality to get better pictures and sound.
EPIPHANY: 50 Days, 50 Songs
Day 47: Green-Eyed Boy
Composers often like musical puzzles. Sometimes they even insert coded messages into their music. Bach has a piece that's exactly the same played forward and backward. But the problem is that when lesser artists do that kind of thing it can end up sounding pleasing *only* to the intellect, and doesn't touch the heart at all.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote an amazing book called "Gödel Escher Bach," a tribute to these three great thinkers (the mathematician, the artist, and the composer). It's huge, serious, funny, and a celebration of intellectual pleasure. I wrote a couple of songs (the other one is called "Evergreen Blues") as a tribute to Hofstadter.
The A section contains references to the book; the B section contains a tribute to JS Bach, who actually did the same tribute to himself. It was fun putting the whole thing in a slightly chicken-fried jazz style.
Click below to play it. And remember you can always click again anywhere on the picture to take you to the Youtube site, where you can see related videos and select watch in high quality to get better pictures and sound.
EPIPHANY: 50 Days, 50 Songs
Day 46: Awake, My Soul
One of my favorite hymns from the Sacred Harp is a simple minor-key song that uses a call-and-answer pattern: each phrase is answered by "Halle, Hallelujah." I suspect that, in its original version, one leader sang the lyric and the congregation sang the hallelujahs.
My church does this in a contemporary worship style. (The fact that a "traditional" style, with organ and piano and common-practice harmony, is nearly impossible with this hymn is a condemnation of our traditions.) But it doesn't take a huge leap to arrange it for jazz trio.
Herewith, the Jazz Protagonists. I'm especially pleased by Greg Norris's dang-cool bass solo, and by Darren Kuper's syncopated turn with brushes that follows. And there's a great part during my solo where Greg does something I've never heard a bassist do: he actually dips into playing the melody while I'm soloing. Always an adventure.
The image here is an ancient fresco that depicts people sailing to a Greek festival. Selah.
Click below to play it. And remember you can always click again anywhere on the picture to take you to the Youtube site, where you can see related videos and select watch in high quality to get better pictures and sound.
For some time I've thought I should write a new head to the changes of "The Girl From Ipanema," that would make you totally forget about the original. Definitely a tall order: those changes are so distinctive it would be hard to rid your brain of the original song.
Nonetheless, I occasionally fool around with the changes, seeing what I can come up with. Today I sat down ...CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE
