"Do it the Hard Way"

Do it the Hard Way.mp3



Life is surprising sometimes.

Like when i found out that i really didn't know Chet's music as well as i thought.

Yeah that'd be today.

I've listened to every one of Chet's recordings. That's gotta be like 4 million or something.


I've listened to them in the living room,
the bathroom,
out-of-doors,
the bedroom,
the kitchen,
the dining room,
in the car,
on the bus,
while walking,
while running,
on the way to the dentist,
to my folks' house,
to work,
to graduate school,
to church,
to the grocery store,
to the gym,
to concerts,
to the store,
to the park and
to the woods.

I thought i would know his music by now.

Today i got a surprise.

It happened while i was working on "Do it the Hard Way," a tune from Rodgers and Hart's Broadway play Pal Joey."

Now let me say up front that I find Broadway music in Broadway shows, uh...distasteful.
I avoid it like a cowboy avoids a Saturday night bath.

Like a visit to the dentist.

Like a colonoscopy.

Like going to bed when i'm all sofa-snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug watching a 1950s film in glorious Black and White

But i love this tune. despite its origin and so i chose it for my work today. I thought it was going to be a relatively docile activity. Ha!

All right then. Sometimes things don't go the way we think they will. Amen.

I started by thinking i'd change things up, try something new and different; a departure from my usual procedure.

Not that what i've been doing represents anything more than a rather incipient method of learning the skills and techniques pertinent to this project. I love the music, i love what it does and i want to learn what i can from the musicians, the composers, the lyricists.

I want to be a musician able to translate what i feel, what i hear through whatever instrument i am holding. yeah that's what i want and this is the attitude i bring to each session. and indeed to the project's session today.

So, today, working with this very familiar tune, i was not in any way prepared for what happened.

I began today pretty late in the day, having spent a good part of the middle of this hot summer day recording with a musician friend in his home studio.

And this is how it began.

I knew i knew this tune, especially the vocal. especially the melody. i could hear chet's voice even before i started.

turns out i was wrong.

i decided to lay a piano track first. i looked at the chart. it looked pretty simple. mostly ii V I in the key of Eb major. Easy capeasy.

So i practiced a few times through, set the tempo at 170mm and off i went.

jeez, it really didn't go that well.

First of all, the tempo proved to be WAY-too ambitious. Even after a half dozen times through, i was still making lots of mistakes.

I managed to get three or four choruses down on tape though.

So i moved on to laying a drum track. that went pretty well and taking what i had learned previously about keeping the track passes as long as possible. so that was the good news.

The not-so-good news?

After listening to the two tracks i laid, i noticed something: it didn't sound right. the chords. something wasn't gelling.

It dawned on my when i began singing the vocal. Something was pretty wrong with the way the melody was laying inside the changes. the harmony bed was off.

So i looked a little bit deeper. I played--slowly now-- through the changes, playing attention to how the melody fit with the harmony i'd laid down.

Shit. there it was. it didn't take very long. it was pretty immediate. the melody was clashing so violently with a certain segment of the form that i completely lost the line. i didn't know the melody anymore

I didn't know the melody anymore. This tune I had heard and sang in my head countless times, even going so far as to transcribe Chet's vocal solo on it, had flown right out of my head.

holy shit.
My stunned disbelief slowly receded and melded with a plan of action. a distasteful plan, but a plan.

i had to redo the whole harmony bed.

that was an easy conclusion to reach. a much harder task to carry out. i mean before i could fix it i had to figure out what to fix it with...the correct chords. this was much harder than you'd think, given my history with this tune. oh well.

surprises sometimes are fun. this one was not. i was disappointed with myself. i was pissed off too.

but persevere i did. at first i thought i could just listen to the harmony and fit the melody that i had know so well (before today that is) right in where it needed to go.
shit

not so easy. surprisingly not so easy. surprisingly frustratingly difficult.

the first thing i did was burn what i had laid down previously. gone. flushed down the fucking drain.

so next, i had to see about recording a new keys track, this time with the right changes; those that fit properly with the melody.
first thing: slow the tempo down. give myself a fighting chance eh?

that helped immediately. i set about figuring out the correct changes and laying them down. ok. right.

well, an hour later i was still flailing about looking for the correct chords for the turnaround in the B section. Not easy.

Dealing with the negativity foisted upon me by this void of melodic memory i worked my way slowly through the process of trying to get the tune down.

I couldn't yet hear the changes. so i decided what i should do is listen to the tune. i mean how sad is this? i actually have to listen to the song again to hear the changes and melody? my god, what a travesty. surprise.

so that's what i did. i dialed it up on itunes and listened. i wish i could say that this is what brought it all home for me. alas. another surprise.

The 1958 recording of "Do it the Hard Way" as it appeared on Chet's album It Could Happen to You turned out not to be what the doctor ordered to hear the chords that Kenny Drew was laying down. i just couldn't make them out as clearly as i had hoped. so the search continued.

i wish i could say that it went lots faster after that but it really didn't.

To make a long story short, i still have to record the melody line. I did figure out the changes though. I'm not at all convinced that they are the same chords that Russ Freeman plays on the recording. This is upsetting to me.

But i will go at it again. TOmorrow i hope but i'm not sure. tomorrow we leave on a fabulous road trip up through the Texas panhandle, across that little sliver of land called--oddly enough--the panhandle (this time in Oklahoma) and up toward the Colorado mountains.

So..........more later.

Remind me if i forget. I need to blog about comping. Russ Freeman has it down man. Where my comping seems hard, clumpy, sloppy and angular and less than accurate not to mention eloquent, Freeman's is all of this and more. I find it a little daunting but i am going to do it. I am going to do it. I am going to do it. Goddamn it.