De Ja Vu
De Ja Vu is much more of a stripped back to the others in this set list and one that I imagined as being a great opening song in my final performance. The instrumentation is very stripped back and includes myself on piano as well as Ian Tothill on the violin.
The piece is comprised of two sections, however keeps a very similar right hand theme throughout.
In section one, the piece focuses around two chords being F major 7 and A minor 6.
In section two, a similar right hand theme is maintained however the bass notes change to Bb C D and A and the dynamics and density of the music build up and thin out naturally.
The idea behind De Ja Vu was that no matter what happened in section two, as it built up in dynamics and note density, it would aways resolve with the same section one. The idea and experience of De Ja Vu is something that I find very interesting and this is the way that I went about trying to emulate that feeling.
The overall structure of the piece is ABABA.
Here is the original idea for section one of De ja Vu which is a minute of me experimenting with the F and Am chords. There are quite a few aspects of this recording that I like and I am contemplating the idea of a solo piano intro before entering the main theme with the piano.
I called this piece De Ja Vu as although it develops as a song, it always comes back to the same idea and resolves in the same place.
De Ja Vu with Ian – Wednesday 27th March
Here is a great recording of me and Ian playing De Ja Vu all the way through. I’m slightly taken aback by how beautiful it sounds overall and although there are places that I know I can improve when listening back to it such as being more confident and authoritative when playing the second section, it sounds very well structured and has a really nice flow to it. It is a privilege to work with someone as talented as Ian and I am very excited for what else will develop out of this.
Immersion
Immersion is similar to De Ja Vu in that it comprises of two sections, the first is made up of two chords being E minor and G and the second section is made up of chords Am Em and C.
Here is a badly recorded idea of my initial take on this song.
Noah’s Arc – (Previously called Thursday morning in the rain)
Noah’s Arc was another song that was heavily based around the use of the piano and the violin. In this composition, I wanted to explore the best way to build up the texture and dynamics in order to create a natural sense of momentum before peaking and slowly thinning it out and finally fading out.
The beginning of the song consisted of a very minimal approach with few notes being played and very quite dynamics. As the song goes on the amount of notes builds as do the dynamics. They then peak before slowly climbing back down and resolving to a reversal of the original introduction. The piece is therefore in an arc shape if you look at dynamics and intensity which is therefore why I called the song Noah’s Arc.
Noah’s Arc stemmed from an original idea that I had called Thursday morning in the rain, however I slowed down the main idea quite a bit. Here is my initial idea of Thursday in the rain.
Here is the developed idea featuring me and Ian.
Noah’s arc allowed me to develop little ideas throughout the song which was an area of my playing that I was trying to improve upon overall. I liked the middle section with the chromatic chord run and I don’t think this recording does as much justice to the idea, but luckily in our Baby Fungus recording at South Square, I was able to do much more with this idea.
Run and Hide
Run and hide is a dub themed song that I composed on my piano at home.
It is quite a simple structure being made up of only 3 chords.
The structure consists of an intro that is instrumental and begins with only the drums playing, this is quite fast compared to the rest of the tune and therefore there is a fill before going into the chorus. I wrote some lyrics for the chorus which follow the tune that I am playing on the keys.
Here is a run through of myself playing the chords followed by the main chorus riff on my piano.
…
On the evening of Tuesday the 2nd April, I was messing around with the chords and had an idea about a potential rap verse. Originally I was going to rely on ant writing the vocals, however I felt very confident having just written the lyrics to the song stay easy the day before. I understood the flow of the idea that I wanted and I kind of just wrote about some of the ideas I was feeling passionate about. A lot of it has to do with the current political system that we live in and my belief that we should live in a better democratic system and this theme took over. I wanted to put in the message of peaceful change that would come about with us communicating with one another better in our communities and set about to try and achieve this. I had experience of writing jokey rhymes in the past that had always gone down well with people, however I was extremely surprised with how easily the lyrics came to me.
I finished one verse after about 5 minutes and after rapping it whilst playing piano, I set about constructing the second verse. Again, I finished this very quickly and attempted to accompany myself with the piano. There were some sections that I decided to change and edit but overall I was very excited with what I had come up with.
Here are the rap verses that I came up with for run and hide.
Here is the song with keys, bass and drums.
Here is a run through of the song featuring me, Shaun and Ian.
This video features Fraser doing a solo around the changes of Run and Hide as well as Shy’yan singing a chorus afterwards.
I also decided that this song would benefit me and Ian playing a horn riff in the verse. The lines that I wrote were very simple which I thought was good as they didn’t take away from the vocals and made the saxophone solo more unprecedented.
Here is a sound clip of practicing the horn part.
Here is a clip of me and Ian practicing the horn part together.
I used my keyboard looper to give us a backing track which allowed us to work out the timing more accurately. It is quite inconsistent overall, but nothing that a bit of practice can’t fix and the harmony sounds quite cool overall.
Full band Rehearsal
This video was taken from our final practice before our final performance. It features all of the band members except for Fraser and provides the most accurate representation of Run and Hide other than our final performance. It includes the horn lines being played in the band for the first time as well as both vocalists.
The beautiful escape
The beautiful escape was a song that I was working on for over a month. I had come up with the initial idea for the verse and was really excited for the potential of the song. It took me ages to work out the chorus section as I knew what sound I wanted, but didn’t know how to create it. I managed to work out my idea and created a really cool sounding chorus. For the verse, I wanted the sound to be quite bare in comparison to the fuller sound of the chorus and therefore decided to compose a horn part. Me and Ian would take this on and we spent a practice session working out a cool harmony for the song.
I wrote the lyrics in theme of someone running away from something. I have always enjoyed doing descriptive story telling and tried to use some interesting imagery to put across some different ideas. The chorus provided an interesting contrast as it was as if the singer was looking at the rapper from above and created a kind of multi dimensional take on the song.
The verse of the song featured a drop down riff which I was inspired to write after hearing songs like the Chicken by Jaco Pastorius and Strasbourg St Denis by Roy Hargrove. I wanted the verse to sound quite bare compared to the chorus and therefore decided not to play piano and instead play saxophone in the verse. As Ian also plays trumpet alongside Violin, I thought that we could do some interesting horn lines.
Here is a recording of us attempting to play some horn lines that I had written for the beautiful escape –
As you can see for the first attempt we had a few struggles and my counting in definitely could have been better, however after more practice we were able to make this sound more successful.
Here is a play through featuring myself on the piano and on vocals doing the chorus and some of the verse. Unfortunately the verse goes slightly wrong but you should get the chorus.
Here is a play through featuring myself on piano and Ant on vocals in the verse.
Stay Easy
Stay easy was a song that blossomed out of an idea that me and Shaun came up with when jamming together. The chords consisted of a minor 2-5-1 in C.
Therefore the chords were dmb9b5 gb9 and cm9.
The cm 9 then descended chromatically to G dominant.
This had a really rhythmically cool sounding pattern, and therefore we decided to loop it. This pattern would become the verse. The chorus consisted of a chromatic drop for Amajor to Dmajor which happened 3 times. On the 4th it descended again but only to Dmajor where it creeps back up to A and sustains before going back to the verse chords.
After playing around with this a bit in my own practice time, I decided to add a more relaxed, spaced out bridge, which would add a different texture to the song.
This consisted of 4 chords, being Abm7 Db Bbm and Ebm.
Originally I had experimented with a 2-5 which repeated up a time, however the Eb major or dominant sounded wrong and therefore I changed it to the minor.
I sat down for about an hour on Monday 1st April in the evening, in order to try and come up with some lyrics and try and work out a structure to the piece. These voice clips sum up my journey through the evening and the developments of the piece.
Here are the lyrics for stay easy.
Overall, I am very excited by the progress that I made on this song. I never would have thought of myself as a lyricist but I think that I’ve created a song with a good flow and some interesting sections. It will be amazing to see how it sounds with the full band and with Shy’yan on vocals. I think that I did well to piece together the bridge section with the verse s they sound very different overall.
Let me go or take me with you
Let me go or take me with you was a song that I came up with when messing about with sus chords.
The verse and chorus are made up of the chords aminor 9, Esus and C.
Esus consists of a the notes, E, Fsharp , A, B and D.
The solo section consists of purely sus chords, being Esus, Csus, Gsus and Asus. I find sus chords really interesting as they offer up a different tonal quality to major and minor chords as they don’t contain a major or minor 3rd making them tonally ambiguous.
Full band Rehearsal
Show me Heaven
Show me heaven was a song that I began writing after creating a really exciting chord loop.
I thought that it would be a great song for Shy’yan and Ant to perform as it would offer up a lot of potential dialogue as well as allowing the rest of the band to join in. Unfortunately , I didn’t have enough time to finish the track and instead used the loop thatI had created to help out Ant with a song which can be seen in my session piano tab.
Young Grasshopper
Young Grasshopper was an idea for a song that developed out of me playing around with a 2-5-1 progression in C major on a voice on my keyboard called vintage piano which sounds extremely like that of a Rhodes piano.
The loop consists of 4 bars of chords consisting of one bar of D minor 9, G dominant 9, cmajor 9 and then a bar of c major 9 moving to c sharp diminished 7.
The combination of the chord progression, chord voicing’s and rhythm created a really interesting jazzy vibe which I thought would be really interesting to experiment with some lyrics on top of.
Here are our first two initial jams over this progression, there isn’t much of a structure however there are some nice parts of each recording including some interesting guitar licks and drumming.
Unfortunately the audio quality of these songs isn’t amazing and although there is much room for improvement in order to turn this song into a strong final product, it is a very promising first draft.
After writing stay easy, we decided that the structure of the songs was too similar and therefore decided to stop working on this song. However I thin that there is still potential there and after this project, I might look at different ways to revive it.
Afro Blue
Here is the sheet music for Afro Blue.
As you can see it contains quite a lot of chord extensions and therefore I decided to use a tutorial video so as to understand the voicing’s that Robert Glasper would use when playing this piece.
Here are the notes that I wrote down for Afro Blue.
Here is a video of me playing through Afro blue a couple of times on my piano at home. This was after a couple of days of practice and while it’s not perfect, I was impressed with how quickly it took me to learn this song. I hadn’t really played through the chorus before making this video, therefore it is out of time in a lot of parts , however the harmony is mostly correct. When performing this with the band, I will be using a vintage keyboard sound on my roland keyboard in order to emulate the sound of a Fender Rhodes. This will give it more of a similar sound to Robert Glasper’s.
It runs through me – Tom Misch
It runs through me is the first song by Tom Misch on this awesome tiny desk concert. The exciting thing about watching this video for me is that every part of our band is covered in that there is guitar, bass, keys, drums, lead vocals a rap verse (in the studio version) and a horn solo. It also has a great feel to it and isn’t too hard to play. We decided to run this at a practice with me, Jordan and Shaun which sounded really funky and with a full band we could bring a great feel to it. At this point Mother Fungus was taking a more funky route and I wanted to push that idea forward by covering funkier tunes that would involve the whole band.
The chord structure for this piece consists of:
Bm7 D7Sus2 Gmaj 7 Fsharp7 Sharp 5
The D7 sus 2 moves between sus 2 to D7 and back to give that shifting feeling.
Here is our first attempt at covering this song, it is only an instrumental as the people present at the rehearsal were me, Shaun and Jordan.