12/07/20 - week 5
Tune
Darn That Dream is one of the more sophisticated Great American Songbook tunes. Modulating down a major 3rd for the bridge and a tritone 2-5 before you even reach bar 2 makes it a tricky progression. Searching for versions of this standard, I came across Johnny Smith's awesome chord melody which features some beautiful contrapuntal movement. Watch out for tasty harmonics at the end of the bridge! Here are some dots.
Twang
Thought
I've participated in masterclasses from 3 mega musicians this week: Rob Luft, Jacob Collier and Alvin Chea. While I gained enough nuggets of wisdom from these sessions to write a self-help book, one notion particularly hit the spot.
Alvin, the bassist of 8-time Grammy winning a cappella vocal group Take 6, stated that "Options = Happiness". He suggested that possessing the skills to contribute to an array of musical situations is likely to pave way for a more fruitful career due to the spectrum of arenas you're able to participate in. Being able to decide where to invest your time and energy is a luxury worth working towards.
Equating options to happiness may be a step too far, but it reinforced the mantra that being versatile and practicing lots of styles is a good thing. Hearing Alvin talk was hugely inspiring and a brilliant way to round off the academic year!