'Dancing on the Ceiling"

Dancing on the Ceiling.mp3

Another tune from that ridiculously cool 1958 album It Could Happen to You.

Chet Baker (tp, vo) Kenny Drew (p) Sam Jones (b) Philly Joe Jones (d)

NYC, August, 1958

Hope you aren't getting bored with this. I'll be covering every tune on this definitive record.

Dancing on the ceiling is of course the name of another tune (a totally totally totally different song made popular by none other than Lionel Ritchie sometime in the mid-80s); two pieces of music that couldn't possibly be farther apart. Impossible.

I recently told my daughter (herself a gifted musician with an incredible ear for language in addition to music) about this blog. She, nor anyone else for that matter, has read it. I haven't shared it. On purpose.

Even though she hasn't read any of this blog, i do tell her which tunes i am working on. the other day i told her that i had just recorded 'Dancing on the Ceiling.' She immediately quoted the entire lyric.

Turns out i had given her Chet's music (an amalgamation of tunes called Chet Baker Sings) for her birthday. She was in middle school at the time and was used to listening to Bobby Brown (before his unfortunate slide into his own rendition of too rich, too famous too libidinous too soon).

She now tells me that she listened to that tape (yes this would have during the Middle Ages--a time when the state-of-the-art in music delivery was a narrow (stretchy) ribbon of used-to-be-oil-in-the-ground-most-likely-somewhere-on-foreign-soil) for hours and hours. Hence, she knows all the lyrics and all the solos.

In fact she and I transcribed many of Chet's solos from that album together. That's why i know she has such an accurate ear--that and the fact that she can speak three languages with complete linguistic and phonological accuracy.

more about the tunes we transcribed and how we did it later on.

The first thing i did on my Reaper recording of "Dancing on the Ceiling" (not Ritchie's but Chet's) was to see if i could make a template of my track setup for future use. i'll be revisiting this part of the project (setting up and assigning tracks) like 50 times so i thought it would be a real boon to see about doing it once and then dialing it up to use on each successive tune.

well, it was a good idea. in fact i think, i think, i actually succeeded in making a template; now if i could only find it.

turns out my friend charlie was right when he told me years ago that the first and perhaps most important rule when it comes to doing anything on a computer is:

'save the damn file and make sure you know where the fuck you put it'

yeah now i know that he was right. but do i do it each and every time? naw.
should.
but don't.

anyway, after i spent a little while setting up my now fugitive recording template, which i can visualize running around like Richard Jantzen--you remember him right?, the protagonist in the 1960's TV series The Fugitive...the star of which was this sandy-haired white guy, very laconic, capable and clever....definitely NOT guilty of the crime for which he was convicted--that of killing his wife. It was a compelling drama told in weekly installments about this doctor whose wife was brutally murdered by...i forget what brand of devil the producers hung this horrible crime on, maybe organized crime, maybe adultery, maybe greed.

Each episode told a little story about his running away from justice, the police dogs and the mob (or the adulterer or the loan sharks). He was in fact and in deed:
THE FUGITIVE
And so is my poor Track Template. Is the Richard Jantzen of Reaper. Yes. That's what it is.

How interesting, this diversion must have been for you, the reader. how simply fascinating. all right then...

This tune is a lively one. I chose it specifically because of this. I felt i needed to give myself a different experience, a more upbeat vibe so to speak.

So how'd it go?
Differently.

It was different from the other tunes thus far. and it wasn't just because it was an "up" tune (translation: 'up tempo', faster tempo than....uh....a slower tempo song).

For one thing, i began work on it pretty late Monday night (that would be the last night in August for those of you who care about such things).

So that represented a departure from the norm. beginning to work on a tune at the end of the day, when i've had a dinner and a few beers and the experience of the day up to that time, is quite a different thing from beginning a tune first thing, right out of the shoot, fresh and well-rested.

And how did it go?
--echo--echo--

I had a helluva time getting the intro down. only 8 bars but what a bugger to record. the tempo (the speed of the beat, remember?) was pretty brisk...around 150bpm. that might not sound ambitious but given that the introduction that i had in mind involved 16th-notes over lots of chords, it was, shall we say, a bit challenging.

at 150 mm (metronome marking..mm...do you find it useful or annoying when i define a term with which you may or may not be familiar?...be sure to write me and let me know...k?) things fly by pretty fast. and it's not so much the first couple of beats mind you...it's the ones that come after the first couple of beats, measures, bars etc...that put you behind real quick.

And indeed this is what happened: each time i got ready to record the intro, punched the red record button waited the two bars the metronome gives me for free, and begin playing, i get bowled right over...

It's like a train, chugging inexorably toward the station...it's coming. it's coming steadily and predictably and it's not at all stopping. so you're either prepared and take it as it comes or you get snowed under.

And it wasn't as if it would happen right away, this overwhelm-ation i'm describing; sometimes it would be going all right, i was keeping up with the changes pretty well for awhile until i reached a certain spot in the music, which wasn't always about that particular spot, more like a combination, a result, an accumulation of the scores of notes that came before.

In any event, at this point, the point of saturation when my legs wouldn't carry me any faster and i was about to get run over, i would suck my teeth, turn from the keyboard and punch the space bar of the Mac, stopping the locomotive.

Then i would regroup as best i could and begin again, making several passes like this, i was able to finally obtain a semi-workable intro for the tune.

mind you, it wasn't very long: only 8 bars. neither was it a complicated chord progression: I VI/ ii V/iii VI/ ii V/ I leading directly into the first verse, which starts with the lyrics:

She dances overhead
On the ceiling near my bed
In my sight
through the night

Nice image huh? I love these tunes.

More about 'Dancing on the Ceiling' in the next post.