September song

Saturday September 3rd marked the opening of the third season of the monthly event, the Jazzspinneriet. The autumn term 2011 is still in the planning, but new and exciting local musicians have already marked the dates in their calendars and will be introduced to our audience at the next gigs. On September 3rd, only the backing band;  me, Peter, Pia and Jan Tore were playing. The repertoire consisted of a mix of standard tunes of different shapes and genres.

Kurt Weill’s September song was a natural inclusion in the list. The version we did is from one of the unofficial Real Books and featured some changes which differs from the official of the New Real Books. In particular the static B – section may seem odd in the version we did. Maybe the versions are based on different recordings, I don’t know, but the piano solo was still fun to do, this time in a less-is-more style making an attempt on building meaningful musical phrases. Some double hand licks are dropped towards the end which creates a sort of climax of the impro.

Also a couple of F – major blues forms entered the set lists. Billie’s bounce and Now is the timeare similar as far as changes are concerned, the interesting part is then to compare our performances, one in each set, and to judge if we differ in expression and musical ideas, or if we sound the same. The piano solos are here; Billies_pno , (which features Petrucciani style octave riffs, a quotation of Weather report and some latin montunos)and Now is the time.

In F-minor, there is AfroBlue– a jazz waltz which allows for some McCoy Tyner style quartal chord drops in the left hand after a few waves of choruses – piano solo is found here. Also, typical of the band these days, every solo is given space to grow by reducing the dynamics dramatically in the beginning. Some attempts on “outside playing” can also be heard.

Finally Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage is added for the sake of demonstrating how the many glitches in the beginning are covered up by being added to a musical phrase. The Caravan piano solo is added, as is the full version Caravan.

Ø. Kvinge

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