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jazzicology · 3 years

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JAZZPRING!

This will seem topsy-turvy to those of you in the Northern hemisphere - but in New Zealand, Spring is just around the corner. And here at Jazzicology headquarters in Queenstown, we’re busy preparing for our Spring jazz gigs. Putting together a set on a specific theme is a great incentive to search for and learn new material. Here’s our ‘Jazzpring’ setlist with some notes on each. We’ve aimed for a mix of tempos and contrasting jazz styles. In amongst some old standards are some quirky additions: possibly the only song written from the perspective of a frightened tomato (Hang on Little Tomato); and a wonderful number that perfectly sets Shakespeare’s ‘It was a lover and his lass’ to a catchy melody and jazz chords – it deserves to be in everyone’s Spring set list. I was amazed how many jazz songs there are on topics relating to Spring – far too many to include in just one gig!

Joyspring. 1954 composition by Clifford Brown, jazz trumpeter and a key figure in the Hard Bop movement. The lyrics I use are by Jezra Kay. This is a super-fast-paced, up-beat tune. I discovered, rather too late for this gig, that there are also some wonderfully poetic lyrics by Jon Hendricks, a leading jazz lyricist who is responsible for the lyrics for many well-known jazz songs composed as instrumentals. You can read about Hendrick’s lyrics for JoySpring here.

You must believe in Spring. Composed by Michel LeGrand (1964), this song shares some features with his other, better-known compositions (Windmills of Your Mind; What Are You Doing For The Rest of Your Life). The chords and melody strike a reflective and melancholy, yet hopeful, mood. It is a truly beautiful number that I had not previously been aware of. I have been listening to Bill Evans’s instrumental version of it – it just incredible - and this vocal performance by Sarah McKenzie. It was originally called La Chanson de Maxence and was written for the French film ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’. Looking at the original French lyrics, it is clear the English lyrics are not a translation; the song’s theme of Spring is entirely attributable to the authors of the English language lyricists Bergman and Bergman. Indeed, these lyrics are so well crafted that it is difficult to believe the phrase ‘You Must Believe in Spring’ wasn’t originally in Le Grand’s mind when he wrote it! Listening to various vocal recordings over the last few weeks, I discovered some additional lyrics that, as far as I can tell, appear only in a recording by Barbra Streisand. I don’t know who wrote them (possibly Streisand), but they seem apt for a troubled world, so here they are for other singers who may be interested in using them:

When angry voices drown the music of the spheres

And children face a world that’s far beyond their years

Above the darkest skies, The far horizons lie

With all the reasons why you must believe in Spring.

Spring can really hang you up the most. Composer Tommy Wolf (1955), lyrics Fran Landesman. Spring isn’t all rainbows and daffodils – like all fun times of year, for those who are down or lonely it can serve to underline your own misery. The title of the song is a jazz twist on the opening line of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "April is the cruellest month". My favourite version of this song is by Carmen McCrae – it’s like a masterclass in jazz vocals. I was surprised how difficult this song was to learn – and was relieved to find an entire blog written about it, claiming that the obscene number of verses and lyrics, and wide vocal range and unusual phrasings are clearly the work of someone who hates singers! Fortunately, I love a challenge.

Blue Skies. Irving Berlin (1926). Blue Skies is probably the best-known and certainly the oldest song in this set. Thelonious Monk wrote a Be-Bop number, ‘Suddenly in Walked Bud’, based on the chord progressions in Blue Skies, as a tribute to his friend, the jazz pianist, Bud Powell. The lyrics are a virtual who’s-who list of jazz greats from that time. Monk’s ‘In Walked Bud’ is an example of a jazz ‘contrafact’: where a new melody is laid over existing chords (in this case, Blue Skies). There are lots of examples of this in Bop from the 1940s, because it was a way for jazz musicians to create new pieces “for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be)”. Since the lyrics and melody for ‘In Walked Bud’ work perfectly well over the chords for ‘Blue Skies’ (apart from the bridge) I’ll incorporate elements of them into our performance.

It might as well be Spring. Composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1945) for the movie State Fair, for which it won an Academy Award for best original song. Many people have recorded this, but I’ve been listening to Ella Fitzerald and this lovely French version by (the aptly Spring-named) Blossom Dearie.

They say its Spring. Composers Bob Haymes and Marty Clark (1950s). With a melody and lyrics that are as light and floaty as a feather, this is a quintessential Spring song about being in love. Blossom Dearie appears to have been the first to record it, in 1957.

Nature Boy/Nardis. Composed by Eden Ahbez (1947). Nature boy is on Jazzicology’s set list – but with a twist! We will perform it using the principal motif from Miles Davis’ Nardis in both the Intro and coda. This was an idea developed by me and UK jazz pianist Sid Thomas, and you can listen to Sid and I performing it here. The ‘back story’ to Nature Boy is pretty interesting in its own right and can be found in a previous Jazzicology blog penned by Sid, ‘The one hit wonders of jazz’.

I love Paris in the Springtime. Cole Porter (1954). A classic recording of this by Ella Fitzgerald. However, I very much like this version, which has a Parisian café feel. This is a relatively simple melody to learn, with the chief challenge for the vocalist being the wide vocal range needed to change register.

Timeless Place. Composed by Jimmy Rowles in the 1970s as an instrumental (‘The Peacocks’) and recorded by him and sax legend Stan Getz in the 1975 album of the same name. The wonderful, reflective lyrics were added much later by UK jazz vocalist, Norma Winstone, and included on her 1993 album Well Kept Secret. This song is technically very challenging for a vocalist: the melody over the ‘bridge’ is a little non-intuitive and sits outside the harmony – it creates a tension which resolves into the main refrain. The word Spring appears nowhere in the song, but I’m going to justify its inclusion here because the lyrics include a beautiful formal garden with flowers and trees.

Double Rainbow. Composed by Brazilian jazz maestro, Antonio Jobim in 1970. This is one of his lesser-known numbers. It perfectly captures a spring garden, after a sudden rain-shower, with rainbows, puddles and a little robin hopping about. Actually, because the song is written in Portugese, the little bird in the song is a chico-chico, so robin is used as the equivalent in the English translation (maybe I should use a bellbird instead?). In Portugese, the title is Chovendo na Roseira (the rain is falling on the roses) and I perform it using first the Portugese and then the English lyrics – both are lovely, and the different languages each lend a slightly different feel to song.

Hang on Little Tomato. Music and lyrics by Patrick Abbey, China Forbes and Thomas Lauderdale and released on the Pink Martini album of the same name in 2004. For those who have gotten their tomato seedlings off to an early start, this the song you need to sing to them when they get planted outside. It’s a scary world out there for a little tomato. It’s a seriously cute little song, and a reminder that we all need to keep hanging on to the vine. The song title is apparently a reference to a Hunt's Ketchup ad campaign "Hang On, Little Tomato!" in a 1964 issue of Life magazine. (Is it a coincidence that Pink Martini’s named their own record label Heinz, I wonder?)

Hey Nonny No! Composed by UK jazz composer and pianist Sid Thomas, this up-beat, toe-tappin’ number captures the feel of Spring brilliantly and the melody and chords provide a fabulous setting for Shakespeare’s ‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As you Like it. You’ll be humming this one on the way home.

Seed Leaves. Another Sid Thomas composition, this one setting to music the poem ‘Seed Leaves’ by Poet Laureate and two times Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur. You can find the poem here. Anyone wishing to request the music for ‘Hey Nonny No’ or ‘Seed Leaves’ can contact Sid Thomas here.

Surrey with the Fringe on top. Rogers and Hammerstein, from Oklahoma (1946). Is it a little bit twee? Maybe, but hey – it is also very sweet. And it was a part of Miles Davis’ repertoire in the 1950s, so there’s no arguing with that!

Up Jumped Spring. Composed by US jazz trumpet player Freddie Hubbard in 1962, and included in his album Backlash. The lyrics were added later by vocalist US jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. This clip of the song being sung live by Audrey Silver is really worth listening to - what a confident, flawless performance.

So, there you have it: an eclectic Spring jazz set involving Shakespeare, tomatoes, rainbows, birds, toads, seedlings, melting snow, new love and a little sprinkling of melancholy. The lyrics in this set contain the words ‘isinglass’ and ‘yggdrasil’ – not words you hear every day – come to our gig on September 5th (assuming Queenstown is out of lockdown by then!) and see if you can spot them!

Other suggestions for Spring songs can be found here:

https://jazz.fm/classic-jazz-songs-about-spring/

https://www.wrti.org/post/10-jazz-tunes-remind-you-its-spring

Nance Wilson

Nance Wilson is one half of Queenstown-based jazz duo, Jazzicology, together with pianist Mark Rendall-Wilson.

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nance-wilson-trio

Facebook: Jazzicology

#jazzmusic #jazz vocals

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theastrophilearchitect · 3 years

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Every book on my TBR.

So. Every single book on my TBR (to-be-read). It’s not as dramatically long as most you’ll see - but then most BookTubers and Bookstagrammers are basically book hoarders. I started properly reading about three and a half years ago, August of 2017, and, at the time, I definitely wanted to eventually build a book collection so big I could line an entire wall with custom bookshelves, fill those bookshelves with my sixteen copies of every one of my favourite books and still have stacks and stacks either side of my desk. Then I came to the realisation than that’s insane. Books are expensive. So are bookshelves. And no-one wants to have to pack up boxes and boxes of books and set up new shelves when you move. So, now, I try to get most of my books from the library or BorrowBox, which always has a better selection, or I buy the eBook - it’s usually cheaper and means I don’t end up with a physical object to carry from place to place, all in my phone (though I usually read eBooks on my iPad).

Anyway, I have only about 30 books on my Goodreads want-to-read, 8 of which are on my physical TBR, which is what I’m going over today.

The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan

This is the first book in Rick Riordan’s third Percy Jackson (I guess?) series, The Trials of Apollo. I don’t know too much about what this book’s about, and I’m going to keep it that way - I loved Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and I loved Heroes of Olympus, so I’m not really concerned. I do know, however, that the god Apollo gets put into the body of a demigod named Lester (I thought as I was writing this that Lester was just the name he took as a mortal, but now I’m worrying that maybe Lester is a demigod whose body Apollo gets put into, which would be weird, but we’ll see) and its main characters are the lovely Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, and Will Solace, son of Apollo.

I can’t wait to get to this, but I did just finish Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, so I’m pacing myself. I don’t want to burn out on Riordan.

Evenfall by Gaja J Kos & Boris Kos

Honestly, the description for this book is quite vague. Nope, incredibly vague. I could’ve sworn it wasn’t this vague when I put it on my TBR. I’m not sure how to summarise it, so here’s the Goodreads description:

A monster does not deserve the intimacy of a name As if waking up in an unfamiliar world isn’t enough of a surprise, Ember gains a new title to her name. Saviour. Hunted by the Crescent Prince and his lethal shadows, she accepts a young Mage’s help to navigate the land of blood magic and its many illusions. But where Ada sees the good in her power, Ember discovers something else. An icy darkness, designed to take lives, not save them. The only thing worse than not being able to rely on her senses—or the reality she had once believed to be true—is knowing that she cannot trust her heart. Especially as it seems to draw her to the one person in whose hands she can never fall… Will Ember escape the thrall of darkness or will she reign in it?

This is currently the oldest book on my TBR, which, were I anyone else, could mean it’s been on my TBR for literal years, which it technically has been, but only two.

12/02/2021 Note: I started reading this book on the 11th, and just couldn’t get into it. It felt like the world had just spawned into existence when Ember arrived in it. I tried to push myself to at least 50 pages, but I just couldn’t do it, so I DNF-ed it. Putting this note here because I wrote this post a while before it’s actually going up, and I don’t want to include a DNF in my wrap-up.

The Diviners by Libba Bray

I own this book in a really uncommon cover; I got it on amazon a couple years ago, and this just happened to be the one available at the time. Irrelevant. This is one of those books everyone has read, and I’m looking forward to eventually getting into it.

This book is set in a paranormal 1926 New York City, and a girl named Evie O’Neill has to live with her occult-obsessed uncle. When a girl turns up dead with some kind of cryptic branding, Evie’s uncle is called to the scene and she realises her power could help catch the murderer. That’s as simply as it can be put, but I get the impression there’s a lot more to this book, and despite the fact I’ve been desperate to read this book since I heard of it, I somehow still haven’t read it.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

I love Leigh Bardugo. In truth, I didn’t particularly enjoy the Grisha trilogy, but I loved both Six of Crows and King of Scars, and am currently rereading Crooked Kingdom on audiobook. This is her first take at an adult book, and follows Alex Stern, the only survivor of an unsolved multiple homicide who was offered a place at Yale by a mysterious benefactor, with the catch of monitoring the university’s secret societies, whose occult activities turn out to be more sinister than she could have expected.

This is a book that went onto my TBR immediately after I heard about it, and I’ve been waiting to read it for the last year and a half.

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

I tried to read Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy a couple years ago, and failed to get into it, partly because it didn’t interest me that much, but I love the idea of Skyward, and it’s gone down so well in the book community.

It’s set in a future where the human race is on the verge of extinction, trapped on a planet constantly attacked by alien warriors. Spensa, a teenage girl stuck on the planet, wants to be a pilot, but it seems far-off. Then, she finds the wreckage of a ship that appears to have a soul, and she must figure out how to repair it, and persuade it to help her navigate flight school. Again, I get the impression there’s much more to this story, especially since it’s planned to be part of a four-book series.

Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J Maas

Honestly, the reason I bought this book was that I had a £10 reward on my Waterstones card, and I didn’t, at the time, have any books on my Goodreads want-to-read I hadn’t already bought, so, having recently become interested in the Avengers movies, I figured, why not? (Even though this is DC, not marvel, but not the point.)

This is book 3 in the DC Icons companion series, where every book is by a different author - I’m also panning to read Wonderwoman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo, and probably some of the others in the series, but for now, this is the one I own.

Selina Kyle returns to Gotham City under a new alias, and, with Batman off on a mission, only Batwing is left to defend the city from notorious criminals. Meanwhile, Batwing, trying to prove himself, targets Selina under her alias, who has teamed up with Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

This is the only regular, probably-sane contemporary novel on my TBR - I tend to lean towards escapism, but this caught my interest.

This follows Eliza Mirk, who, online, is LadyConstellation, anonymous creator of popular webcomic Monstrous Sea. She’s your typical outcast, and isn’t interested in trying to live in the real world. Wallace Warland, the comic’s biggest fanfiction writer then transfers to Eliza’s school, and, believing her to be a fan, begins to draw her out of shell, until her secret is revealed.

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

Let’s be honest, everyone just knows this book as Crescent City. This is Maas’s first proper-adult series - I say that because A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) is technically new adult, though it’s marketed as young adult. I loved both Throne of Glass and ACOTAR the first time I read them, and am honestly now more slightly apprehensive at how seriously Maas’s books take themselves - I also just finished listening to all the Throne of Glass audiobooks. Unlike her previous fantasy books, this is a sci-fi.

Bryce Quinlan finds herself investigating her friends’ deaths in an attempt to avenge them after they were taken from her by a demon. Hunt Athalar is a Fallen angel, enslaved by Archangels, forced to assassinate their enemies, when he’s offered a deal to assist Bryce in exchange for his freedom.

And that, is every book currently on my TBR.

(12/02/2021)

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