9-8 (+512). This is the third consecutive time I’ve finished the 17-round Western Canadian Scrabble Championship with a 9-8 record in Division 2—an indication of a personal plateau if I’ve ever seen one. Here’s the photographic evidence for your inspiration or mocking amusement, depending on how good you are.
Every year, the month of October hits me upside the head and I come to the sudden and unwelcome realization that I haven’t studied or practised in months. The fact that I’ve been letting my word knowledge atrophy is probably the biggest reason my rating has been hovering around the 1300 zone for years now, and cramming the week or the night or the morning before the tournament doesn’t tend to help—because after all, what should you cram? With this in mind, the preparation I did for the tournament amounted to a lot of sleep, a lot of tea, and several hours at a Yamaha grand.
I don’t like writing obituaries—not just for the obvious reason that it’s generally unappealing to write about dead people all the time, but primarily because there are too many people out there who make an impact on our lives or culture, however large or small. Somebody important—distant, personal, or somewhere in between—is going to die every week, maybe even every day.
That said, I received the news of Doug Riley’s passing with profound regret. (That’s Hammond B3 master Doug Riley to you, mister. And he’s no slouch at the pianner either.) And wherefore regret? It’s quite simple: he played in Edmonton so often, but I never took the opportunity to see him. I’ve certainly heard him on CBC’s jazz programmes often enough to revere his acumen as one of our country’s premier keyboardists, but it’s not quite the same thing.
The experience of a live jazz concert differs from recorded music in a way that is, in my reckoning, quite different from how most other genres operate. Perhaps the most instructive testament to this, or at least, the one freshest in my memory, is the modern jazz legend I did see: guitarist Bill Frisell, who played with his trio in Calgary last Thursday in the delightful venue that is Quincy’s on Seventh.
Never seen me interpret video game music? YouTube to the rescue!
If you’ve had a Wii for any amount of time, you’ve probably spent a couple hours in the Mii Channel making caricatures of friends and celebrities alike to fill up your ragtag baseball team. (Dan Lazin, for one, sent me a most excellent Lieutenant Worf.) And if you have, then it’s almost a certainty that the Mii-making music has been stuck in your head at least once. Naturally, I set about figuring it out on the keyboard, only to discover that I couldn’t quite get all the chord progressions right by ear.
So the other night, I turned on my Wii, set it to the Mii Channel, and did a rough transcription of the music as it played, mostly to figure out what was going on harmonically. Like most of the repetitive but catchy incidental music that comes out of Nintendo, there’s a great deal of complexity under those unassuming bleeps and bloops. So I switched up the rhythmic feel from Latin to a medium swing, jotted down some fancy chord substitutions, and decided to see where I could take the tune. Here’s the result:
I’m not all that happy with my solo, but I almost never am, and given that most listeners are absurdly easy to impress, I doubt a lot of people will complain. I gave myself a fairly challenging set of chord changes to play over, so the take I recorded was more about surviving four choruses and staying in time than actually taking risks and coming up with lovely melodic architectures. It’s easy to stretch out and aim for the pretty notes when you’re just jamming, but recording a complete take creates considerably more room for error. Apart from cutting back on the arpeggiation and going for longer melodic lines, there are two other things I’d change should I do this again. First, it swings a bit hard for a two-beat feel, and probably isn’t as laid back as it should be. Second, my left hand is mostly preoccupied with spelling out the bass line here, so the chord voicings are quite sparse; if I were to do a bassless recording, it would free up the left hand to highlight some of the more interesting substitutions I found.
As I said earlier, this is a surprisingly deep tune, compositionally speaking. I’ll go into some specific analysis for the benefit of the musically literate.
The biggest wrench in the whole affair is the oddball 25-bar form. There’s a straightforward 16-bar A-section that modulates to the subdominant (in the original, from A to D major; in my version, from B-flat to E-flat), followed by a 1-bar break and an 8-bar B-section (the only part in the original that really casts a melodic line into the foreground). In the video, I chose to keep the break at bar 17 in the solo choruses just to keep the tune quirky, and encountered all of the expected difficulties. I may do another take at some point that keeps bar 17 when playing through the head, but removes it for a more predictable (and playable) 24-bar solo form.
Harmonically, the most interesting part is probably how the B-section modulates back to the original key (again, A in the original, and B-flat in my version). The tonal centre moves up a major third: there’s a II-V-I in E-flat followed by a II-V-I that resolves to G major, which then drops to a minor and proceeds down the circle of fifths until we’ve returned to the key of B-flat. Jazz musicians will recognize the major-third jump as one of Coltrane’s “giant steps,” which most obviously predates Coltrane in Rodgers and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?” and becomes commonplace in a lot of post-Coltrane compositions by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and the like. Here, we don’t take the tonal centres all the way through a circle of thirds (which is more of a triangle), but the modulation from E-flat to G suffices to make the tune particularly susceptible to jazz improvisation with a modern sound, and generally fun to play.
I hope Nintendo lets the cat out of the bag regarding the composer of all the Wii’s onboard music, as I’d really like to give credit where credit is due. I’m sure some people have speculated that it’s the work of Nintendo legend Koji Kondo, but I’m inclined to put my money on Kazumi Totaka, or Totakeke to his legion of Animal Crossing devotees. No sign of Totaka’s Song yet, though.
Nobody known to me who reads this space was there to see it, but I guarantee you that my jaunt to the Yardbird tonight led to what is unquestionably the worst I have played in years. For some reason, I just flat-out forgot how to work a piano (in a profoundly public situation, no less). It may have been because the B-flat feedback on my monitor sent me into a timid corner wherein I performed with an impotent absence of confidence and conviction, or because I hadn’t so much as touched a keyboard in three days and had committed my fingers to more rudimentary motor functions like the inspection and sorting of resistors, or because the hundred-some tunes I’d taken to the woodshed in the past half a year curiously did not include much in the way of rhythm changes (let alone a head as tricky as “Oleo”), or because I’ve fully diverted the attention of my Creative Processing Unit to the writing of fast-food prose (which is going quite smoothly, thank you), or because of that Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile (I remain convinced I play better after a drink or two, but maybe that only applies when I’ve had dinner), but no matter the cause, that was an embarrassment on the order of a slaughter on the sandlot with Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound.
Well, let us make the best of this debacle and not smother the furious passion of disappointment, but stoke it into a phoenix of a bonfire. I have a 50,000-word trek ahead of me, and I need fuel.
Confession: I’m not entirely sure, but I think I played with six-time Grammy nominee Mark Murphy last night and had no idea who he was. Consider the circumstantial evidence and decide for yourself: he was a singer, he looked like Mark Murphy (now that I’ve sifted through some recent publicity materials and am in a position to say that), and Mark Murphy happens to be headlining two shows at the Yardbird Suite this weekend. I won’t be able to attend, as I’ll be busy playing Scrabble.
Did you know he wrote the effectively canonical lyrics to “Stolen Moments”? Neither did I. I was too busy dreading having to play in a jam band with a vocalist. Of the jams at the Yardbird I’ve been to this year, there have been at least two or three nights where I had to say to myself, “Why did I have to get the band with a singer?”
See, I’m really glad I play for a choir of fun and agreeable individuals. If it weren’t for them, I suspect I’d have an unrestrained hate-on for singers right now, which is saying something, considering how it was primarily vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald who got me into jazz in the first place. Virtually every jam-session set I’ve played where there was a singer involved has been an experience somewhere along the spectrum between minor irritation and full-on Rocky Mountain trainwreck, and only so much of it could be my fault.
Last night’s set went a lot better. We only had time for one tune with vocals (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” for those of you keeping score), but most of the usual problems were absent. It was in a reasonable key. It stayed at a reasonable tempo. The chart was readable enough that the form was reasonably clear. Nobody got completely lost. These might seem like pretty basic expectations, but I’ve learned not to take them for granted. I’ve learned it the hard way.
The only hiccup was a bit of a miscommunication to the band in terms of whether or not we were supposed to give the vocalist an intro, and if so, for how long – so we just hit some chords for about eight bars, wondering why he hadn’t come in. Then he came in.
Decent singer, the guy who upon reflection may or may not have been Mark Murphy.
Decent singers are considerate of their bands. If you ever show up with charts marked in some ridiculous sharp key and ambiguously defined solo sections, then count us off in a tempo you can’t handle without letting us know when you want to come in – all of which I’ve seen happen, while onstage, no less – we’ll take you for a prima donna, and we will break you. More accurately, you’ll break yourself.
