We Don’t Talk About Bruno

Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this:

It isn’t even my favorite song in the movie; that distinction goes to “Surface Pressure.” But “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the one that’s burning up the pop charts.

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Led Zeppelin, “Ten Years Gone”

I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence.

Number six on Rick’s list is “Ten Years Gone”, a power ballad from Physical Graffiti and a bit of a deep cut. After this video reminded me that it existed, I went and listened to the song with fresh ears, and I very much enjoyed it. Continue reading

Lightnin’ Hopkins – “My California”

I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording.

Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes it easier for you to play along. The big challenge was to figure out the meter, which changes constantly. I aligned the Hopkins track to the grid over a drum machine kick, programmed in the tempo changes, and used audio to MIDI conversion as a starting point for my transcription. Then I sweated out the details in Dorico, before bringing the MIDI back into Ableton to make the visualization. There was necessarily quite a lot of interpretation involved here.

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Starfish and Coffee

My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:

According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.

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Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne

You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this):

This journey has been one long reward for the obsessive-compulsive side of my personality. As of this writing, I can stumble through the whole piece, and can get through the first half in a way that sounds almost musical. If you want to try too, here’s a violin score. Also, here are measures 81 through 117 of the Chaconne from Bach’s manuscript:

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My Favorite Things

My kids have been watching The Sound of Music a lot lately. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I was sitting there going, “Oh snap, that song is from this movie too?” It probably supplied half the repertoire for my elementary general music class. When I sang “My Favorite Things” all those times, I thought about the words, but not much about the tune itself.

John Coltrane, on the other hand, thought very hard about the tune, and radically remade it on his famous album of the same name. The album came out only a year after The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded back then. Like, imagine if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde thirteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana, maybe that would be comparable?

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Swing primer

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington

Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing:

Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African diaspora: ragtime, blues, musical theater, country, R&B, rock, funk, reggae, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and so on. The best way to learn about swing is through aural and hands-on experience. The Groove Pizza is a good way to get started.

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Transcribing Noname

Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.”

The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name.

In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or Lil’ Kim. Noname sings a clear melody on the G-flat major pentatonic scale, so even when her pitch is casual, it’s still obvious what note she’s pointing at. However, Noname’s flow is quite a bit more rhythmically complex and ambiguous than the relatively straightforward sixteenth note grid of boom-bap. The main question for me is how literally to take her performance. There are phrases where it sounds like she might have mentally conceived of a string of straight sixteenths, but then dragged or rushed for effect. Or maybe she did all these complex tuplets deliberately? Rather than try to read her mind, I ultimately opted to write out her performed rhythms as exactly as I could. Continue reading