You Don't Know What Love Is

You Don't Know What Love Is.mp3


This is the only piece of music so far that I have shared with anyone on purpose.

My reaction seemed to belie the quasi-empirical vibe that has characterized much of my work on this project thus far. I cried.

Why?

Emotion. Pure and simple.

In fact if you listen closely in the second verse, my voice gets a little shaky and then trails off prematurely at the end of phrase. Human emotion meets Musical performance; a curious event.

It was the lyrics of the tune. They caught me with my pants down. hardly surprising given how little experience i've had with words in music. Most likely won't be the last time.

Lyrics like these aren't for the faint of heart.

You don't know how hearts burn
For love that cannot live
Yet never die
Until you've faced each dawn
With sleepless eyes
You don't know what love is.



Now, I've written about this phenomenon before, where the music takes on an entirely new meaning once i start singing the lyrics.

But this time....this time was different.

Because not only did my voice go limp from the emotions when i was recording, they were reconstituted when i played it for her...this time with much greater intensity.

Why?

Of course i don't know for sure but from where i sit now, some three days later, i think that the heart-wrenching sentimentality that i felt when i recorded the tune was augmented by something else as i listened to myself playing and singing an entire day later.

I think it was in fact a response to a universal human condition. Everyone with a heart has had it broken.

You Don't know how lips hurt
Until you've loved and had to pay the cost
Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost
You don't know what love is.

I think now that the tears that welled up in me were tears shed for all of us for whom love has touched. Compassion drove them to brim over my lower lids. Compassion for every man, woman and child whose heart bears the scars of living a full life.

This tune, while not being the only one that has illicited such a response, is especially suited for strong emotion.

It's the perfect cross-over tune between blues and jazz. that is, the harmony and the melody lend themselves to a rather seamless confluence of tension notes (blues melodies: flatted fifths and thirds) and harmonic complexity (unexpected cadences and major seventh tonic chords)


Do you know how a lost heart fears
The thoughts of reminiscing
And how lips that taste of tears
Lost their taste for kissing.

The lyrics of a song...

Being an instrumentalist all these years, i've not paid too much attention to the words assigned to the melody. (just the way i phrased that gives you a hint about my nonchalance heretofore; 'assigned to the melody?' Is that all lyrics are? just words tagged for a melody line?)

Thanks to this Chet Baker Project, i now know differently.

If you'll forgive a rather banal simile, they seem to me kind of like a cooking recipe's dry ingredients.
Nothing much happening; they don't reflect the intent of the dish, their appeal to the palate--at least at this stage-- is almost negligible.

But add the wet ingredients: water, milk, oil...and everything changes. the tastes come alive, the cook's original intention for the dish is reconstituted and voila! we eat. and hopefully we understand and enjoy the chef's idea of a good gastronomical experience, be it sweet or savory.

Likewise a song's lyrics. By themselves they don't have nearly the juice as does the entire song made complete by the composer's melody line, rhythm and harmony.

This one (as my mother would say) knocked me for a loop from start to finish.

It began when i was feeling pretty low this past friday morning.

It's not unusual really, for me to have some low spots these days. being out of work for months can be like that sometimes.

But this day, i actually had a lot on my plate. For one thing i had to continue preparing music (woodshedding) for a new group with which i was making my debut the following day. i was pretty wound up about it and had been working on the music all week; actually i had two gigs the next day, with two completely different groups, for both of which i was shedding big time.

About this process of preparing for a gig.

For me, it's kind of like a scene in that Robin William's film TOYS. the one where he is in a golf cart driving up and down the hills and valleys of a narrow astro-turfed hallway inside that awesomely phantasmagorical Toy factory. (Great movie btw especially if you happen to be a fan of L.L.Cool J. or Joan Cusak)

Yeah, so this up and down psychology of mine when i'm faced with a personal challenge i see as a rollercoaster of emotion and psychology.

'Man, I got this. I'm in great shape'

Oops.....

'What the hell was I thinking, i'm friggin screwed!'

that was the theme ... up to friday morning.

I was teetering on the lower of edge of that rollercoaster when a thought shouldered itself into my crowded head, muttering something about the Chet Project. i hadn't done anything on the project all week so it seemed to come from nowhere.

'Do another Chet tune. Now. Do this one right here.
"You Don't Know What Love Is." 'Do it now.'

So i did.

And as soon as I began, i knew it was exactly the right thing to do.

Yes i had all this shedding to do on these new tunes on which i was playing trumpet and flugelhorn, with lots of exposed parts, lots of solos and TONS of unfamiliar keys, but PAY ATTENTION to this little thought that had the courage and fortitude to insinuate itself into a--'we know what he should be doing right now'-- consciousness, I DID.

I think this tune picked me this day because it knew that within it lie the strong emotional content that mirrored what i was feeling inside. I needed to play this particular song because its content and original recipe had within it the requisite feelings that would allow me to process all the stuff going on inside me.

In other words, this tune, this "You Don't Know What Love Is" would give me the raw materials out of which i could deconstruct the heaviness in my breast.

You don't know what love is
Until you've learned the meaning of the blues
Until you've loved a love you've had to lose
You don't know what love is.


Right from the start it was different. different from all the other tunes i'd done in this Chet Baker Project. for one thing, i didn't record against a clic or a drum track. in fact there's no drum track at all on the finished mix.

What this means of course is that i relied on the melody and the harmony to frame the entire piece. and although it's not a new idea, I had attempted this in previous tunes, working without a net--without a time reference, aka, a rhythm track--was an entirely new experience.

What it ended up giving me was the flexibility of phrasing; i could stretch out or lay behind the lyrics as much as i wanted. i could let the emotion of the words and sentiments linger long enough to let it breathe...to give the meaning of the words time to resonate with my memories and thus affect my delivery.

and i guess that's why my voice kept breaking. the trouble is it came at unanticipated times. trouble because i'm no enough of singer to know what the hell to do when it happens.

i'd be singing along, trying to keep each note in tune, each word understandable, each line in rhythm, then a word would snag one of those memories and one by one, the wheels would come off. my voice would melt, the pitch would sag and the consonants crumble until i'd simply have to stop.

And although this has happened many times now, it still catches me by surprise because i never know what words are going to trigger a tender spot in my heart/mind.

I think this is why i decided to share it that night; because of this strong and somewhat startling sentiment.

And how does this relate to my experience with music in my life? Where do i put this information so i can find it and use it in the future?

This is the question that lies at the heart of this whole project.

After all these years of letting my curiosity drive my musical endeavors, learning new instruments, seeing what it means to be a bass player or a drummer, or a piano player or a trumpet player or a percussionist, i think that maybe now it has come to seeing what it means to sing.

Moreover, to put vocal musical expression in situ with instrumental musical expression.

What does it feel like to be the trumpet player in the band? the pianist? the percussionist? the bass player? the drummer? the singer?

What does it mean to be a musician?

That said, i have no ambition whatsoever to sing in public. i do however plan to let this strange emotional response to the lyrics of a song lead me to another experience of this connection between human emotions and the art of music.

we'll see.

'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."

"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.