'You Make Me Feel So Young'

You Make Me Feel So Young.mp3






You make me feel so young

you make me feel like there's songs to be sung

bells to rung and a wonderful

a wonderful what?

a wonderful race to be run?

a wonderful man to be hung?

a wonderful crap that is dung?

no...

the lyric is:

you make me feel like there's songs to be sung

bells to be rung

and a wonder fling to be flung.

yes.

and why do i bring this up, other than to be a clever sot?

cuz lyrics, like changes, can take on an extra layer, deeper than first thought.

the first pass through a tune is nothing to take for granted. i'm thinking here about my own process yes, but also the process i imagine when the writer is creating it in the first place.

don't get me wrong; i think i'm creating something as well, maybe not worthy of quite the originality of the ...er...original, but i am creating something right. I mean i'm not simply dotting the i's and crossing the t's here right?

well, i guess that's arguable. my point is that lyrics, like other elements of a tune, have to be just right in order for the song to fly...to be believable.

we've all heard songs that are all right but somehow don't quite hit it, you know? they miss kind of...they don't exactly make sense, don't compel us, don't draw us in, don't make us buy into the song's deal....

lyrics like those above: they need to be good. and yes there is such a thing as good and bad in this craft. i mean music is subjective (at least the individual enjoyment/appreciation of it) but as the Duke himself said:

"there are only two kinds of music in the world: Good and Bad."

anyhow, i'd love to expound more on this but i gotta move; there are multiple pieces of heavy equipment not thirty feet from where i am sitting in my living room here on 5th street in austin, texas and they are making music that i subjectively can't FUCKING STAND!

Well, turns out, i can't really leave. gotta finish this. i blame it on my puritan ancestry. never mind that i'm 100% Italian.

so, i just listened to the tune again. and this is what i think.

value judgement, value judgement. value judgement.

yeah, i think it pretty well sucks. the vocal is too strained, the tempo too quick (both over my head) and the keys are, well that track suffers from the same sickness as do the ones i laid before; just too much. too crowded. too....tooo.

I laid a trumpet track and what can i say? it's me playing trumpet the best i can. which leaves a territory of space between that and GOOD.

in all fairness though, the horn. let's talk about the horn for a minute.

First off, the trumpet: it has only three valves. three things to push down. three chances to change the pitch to reflect GOOD. hmmm.

can you understand how impossible this instrument is?

Don't worry, I'll wait.

yeah, three valves. to play what...something like 50 possible notes? wtf....seriously.......wtf.

yeah, and that's 50 notes on a good horn; one on which the valves behave themselves., i.e., that don't stick, bind, get stuck or leak? right.

and speaking of leaking....holy shit man. i have been trying to play this damn piece of plumbing for what, like a hundred years...since 6th grade right?

and i've never...ever heard of a horn that leaks. i mean leaks, as in spit, water, you know?

but this one, this broken down ancient student model Bach 1001 series with its tired valves and its bent and hammered and soldered bell, and its misshapen lead pipe and its wide ass clearance slides...

which brings me to the leakage.

now you'd expect a horn, if it's gonna leak, to spew from a faulty cork, perhaps on the spit valve. right? right.

no

this one leaks from the tuning slide. yeah, the tuning slide. that huge crook that comes off the lead pipe and connects the mouthpiece to the valves and eventually the bell. damn. i mean i never heard of this let alone saw it before let alone had a freakin horn that exhibited it...for God's sake.

anyway, on top of not being able to play a convincing solo on "you make me feel so young" the fucking horn is leaking spit on my feet!

and as a consequence, sounds like crap. all breathy and out of tune.

yeah man. some day. some day. some day i'm either gonna stop dicking around with shitty horns, or throw the thing under a bus.

and thus, you have my rant-o-the-day.

yay for you.

incidentally, i did get a decent trumpet track down for this tune and keeping in mind the reason i'm doing this in the first place (to develop a practice vehicle for Chet's tunes) it's all good.

i can move on to the next tune taking with me, dragging behind me, my ever growing sack of musical updates: piano fingering, chord placement, harmonic rhythm, trumpet technique and bass-on-a-piano chops.

yeah good luck with that.

Next Up.......the title track for one of my favorite Chet albums: "It Could Happen to You."