This is, literally, my musical diary–notes fresh from my pen and recorded in a few hours. You can find my finished works elsewhere; here, it's all about capturing the moment!
A while back, I was playing with the minor blues form. Songs like “Sugar” or “Stolen Moments” are so simple, yet seem to provide endless possibility. I actually sat down at the piano and sketched out a half dozen directions a minor blues tune might go. As I played with each of those, a few songs began to emerge. “Sky Blues” is perhaps the most straight forward of all of them. Not as low down and greasy as “Sugar” or as smooth and mysterious as “Stolen Moments,” but with a charm all its own.
It is a bright tune for a minor blues, hence the name, “Sky Blues.”
After a long absence (from blog posting, not from composing), I am back with a series of new jazz tunes. You may be aware that my jazz group, Outside Pocket, just came out with an album titled Grace Notes. But you know my motto: “Can’t stop. Won’t stop.” Even while Grace Notes was in production I was writing new music. Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting the fruit of that labor, in the form of a casual read-through recording session with Steve Talaga.
Steve Talaga
Today’s song is “Flutter.” It is a breezy tune that ascends, dips, and floats like the butterflies that visit our house’s monarch waystation. On a future recording, I could hear flute on “Flutter,” but for now Steve creates his own magic on the piano.
If you’d like to stay up to date on Outside Pocket’s recordings and gigs, I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter.
A few months ago, I accompanied my wife to Detroit. She attended training for a new job while I stayed behind as a “hotel husband.” Since I had only a bass to work out my musical ideas, I gravitated toward ideas that were playable on that majestic, yet cumbersome instrument.
I called this song “Americana” because it has so many echoes of classic American folk tunes and their roots. It is expansive like “Oh, Shenandoah,” pentatonic like “Were You There,” and bears the same four starting notes as “O Danny Boy.” It is not jazz in the traditional sense, but as you can hear in this recording it lends itself well to improvisation.
I’ve been reading Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave. I highly recommend it. In a series of interviews with Seán O’Hagan, Cave discusses his artistic process, the death of his son, and the way his faith has changed and grown in recent years. I’ve found it immensely inspiring.
Even though neither is “orthodox,” Cave leans toward Christianity and O’Hagan leans toward agnosticism. This makes for some interesting dialogue. At one point, O’Hagan pushes against Cave’s superstition about life’s mysteries, to which Cave responds “Perhaps it is a kind of delusion, I don’t know, but if it is, it is a necessary and benevolent one.” I love that line, and immediately wrote down the phrase, “A Beautiful Delusion.”
You may remember that I’m on a quest to write jazz with deeper lyrics than the typical themes of romance and unrequited love. I thought “A Beautiful Delusion” would be a perfect fit. One of the things I love about the way this song came out is that the first verse could actually be a love song in which a suitor tries to woo a love interest: “You think I’m crazy, but if you listen to your heart you’ll know that we could be lovers.” But verse 2-3 move on to “if you listen to your heart you’ll know there is too much mystery, beauty, joy, and pain in life for humanity to be mere configurations of carbon responding to the world via the chemical soup bowl known as our brain.”
While the lyrical subject is heady, the music is simple and pretty. In fact, when we played it instrumentally at our weekly restaurant gig, a patron rushed up and asked the name of the song. She thought it was a tune from a musical!
Lest you think composing and performing music is always serious, I’ve included an outtake from Thursday’s recording. Even though Ed and Susan are great musicians, there are always snafus when reading a new song. Below is our false start, a conversation about how the song should actually begin, and the successful restart of the song. When I say, “Don’t talk!” I’m not being misogynistic. I’m kidding Susan because every time we record a song she’ll lean over to me and say something during the recording. But even my stern warning didn’t work; you’ll hear on the full recording that she turns to me and says, “So pretty!” at 1:58. I guess the recording could be interrupted in worse ways…
1. A beautiful delusion– maybe that’s all it is. An innocent confusion– that there might be more than this.
A beautiful delusion– that’s all it is to you. And though you may be right, is it your heart or just your mind that can’t believe it’s true?
2. A beautiful delusion? Look all around, you’ll see a thousand aching beauties, a million mysteries.
A billion stars are shining. You catch your breath with awe. When your heart wants to explode with all the longing in your soul, it doesn’t seem delusional at all.
2. Ineffable illusion, a faint remembered dream, a sorrow for no reason, a joy inside a pain.
Questions that search for answers and hearts that yearn for love. Oh, how do you explain the little magic of each day? Maybe this delusion’s enough.
One of the keys to composing is filling a need. Break up songs? Dime a dozen. Songs about Toothpaste? There’s plenty of room there for newcomers. Settings of Psalm 23? Yours needs to be better than the hundreds of well-loved versions that have already been written. But if you set Psalm 7 to music, yours might be the most popular, simply because the competition is so thin.
The same is true with jazz. When working on a new song, I try to write something that will fit the musicians well while filling a gap in the existing repertoire. For example, our violinist loves to play Hoagy Charmichael’s “Georgia.” It’s an irresistible song that lets her get her fiddle on. It also fills a need in a lot of setlists: songs in “two” that bridge the gap between upbeat swing and full-on ballads. But you can only play “Georgia” so many times.
Goodbye “Georgia.” Hello “Charlotte”!
“Charlotte” is close to Georgia on the map and it’s similar to “Georgia” in musical style. Though it shares the easy swing feel and opening rising minor third of “Georgia,” it quickly parts musical ways. Some of the traits that make “Charlotte” “Charlotte” are the syncopated rising lines that end each phrase of the melody and a few sudden shifts in harmony, especially in the B section. Those shifts tripped up the musicians during solos because the song was brand new to them. I have no doubt it will become second nature when “Charlotte” takes its rightful place in the pantheon of jazz standards.*
“Sehnsucht,” is the German word for “longing.” It connotes more than a garden variety longing, though. It carries the deeper sense of longing for something that is out of reach or a longing that can’t even be put into words.
I decided to name the song “Sehnsucht” because the melody is built on a series of non-harmonic notes that give it a deep sense of yearning–of reaching but never quite arriving.
This recording has all the background noise and botched notes you’d expect from sight-reading a new song in a restaurant, but hopefully you can hear the longing in this jazz ballad despite the racket.
Here we are, starting the year off right with a new song!
I was away in Detroit with my wife this week. She was training for a new job, so we decided it would be fun to work during the day and vacation at night. I didn’t expect to compose anything while I was away. My plan was to catch up on business and bass practice. (The hotel guests and staff were probably surprised to hear the sound of a string bass coming from one of the rooms!)
Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman’s hotel husband
The fact is, though, that when I play I usually end up writing something, too. In this case, I jotted down some ideas for a simple jazz tune. I was inspired by listening to Oscar Peterson’s Night Train. The songs are so simple but are a wonderful launching pad for the musicians to solo. I began to think of the many great jazz tunes that are short and simple–Solar, Blue Bossa, All Blues, etc–they are no more than 16 measures long but they pack perfection into such a tight frame.
While I wouldn’t call “Hotel Husband” perfection, I was pleased that it was compact, coherent, and (dare I say) quite a pleasant tune.
You may be wondering how I got the title “Hotel Husband.” You’ve heard of a “stay-at-home dad” or maybe a “house husband” of a working woman. Jen decided that coming back to me in our hotel room made me her “hotel husband.”
Sometimes a great title is just too good to resist.* In this case, my wife and I drove past a billboard that mentioned Stollen, the German answer to fruitcake, and I immediately knew I was destined to compose a jazz Christmas song entitled, “Stollen Moments.”
A Moment of Stollen
This destiny was fulfilled a few days later when I produced this song. Like “Stolen Moments,” the jazz standard to which it pays tribute, my song begins with a four-chord riff. (But my song is in C major, rather than C minor–Christmas is supposed to be a happy time!)
A further confirmation that I was destined to write “Stollen Moments” was a shopping trip to Aldi on a recent vacation in Freiburg, Germany. As you can see in this picture, I encountered genuine German Stollen, sold in the days leading up to Christmas. Those luscious little loaves fairly cried out to me, “Compose us a theme song!”
Oh, the house is quiet, all the kids in bed, wondering what the morn may bring. So we’re cuddled here, eating Santa’s snack in the glow of the Christmas tree.
The only gift on my Christmas list, the only present that I need are these times with you– they’re my wish come true and my only Christmas dream.
All these Stollen moments with you make my Christmas dreams come true. Every season is grand, you and me, hand in hand. Oh, how I love these Stollen moments with you.
One of the great joys of composing is when a fine musician performs one of my pieces in a way that really makes it come alive. In the case of this recording, there were three fine musicians: Hunter Morris on violin, Kathy Johnson at the piano, and Chris Martin on cello.
This was the prelude at a recent Baylor University Advent service, and I couldn’t be happier with how it sounds!
If you need a last minute instrumental piece for your Advent or Christmas services, you can find the music at www.gregscheer.com. The original was written for violin. I recently completed a version for cello solo.
A few weeks ago I had a cold that kept me down for nearly two weeks. It was so bad that I even canceled a gig! I never cancel a gig.
I was downing DayQuil and NyQuil faster than a drunk doing shots on payday. At some point, an idea broke through the fog: “‘Night and DayQuil’ would make a great song title.” Of course, this is a play on Cole Porter’s classic song, “Night and Day.”
Once I had the title, all I had to do was write the song. So I put on my work pajamas and sat down at the piano to write. If you listen closely you will hear faint echoes of Cole Porter’s tune, but mostly it’s its own thing.
A few things I especially like: The rising fourths at the beginning of the tune are bold and create an instantly recognizable musical fingerprint, but don’t sound overly pedantic. Throughout the whole song, the melody floats above the harmony like oil on water; it makes total sense to the ear, but I would pity the freshman theory student who had to figure out how the melody relates to the harmony! Most importantly, it worked. A jazz tune can be a great and interesting tune, but just not feel natural when you improvise over the changes. When we played this Thursday night, it felt like an old friend.
