SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  8/28/01; 11:53:49 AM Msg#:  2118 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  2117/2119 Reads:  1344

Joe Jagelka's New Tunes

 The day before SongTrellis was knocked off the Web on the 8th, Joe Jagelka submitted three very nice originals that you should check out: Last Winter's Waltz, One For A Rainy Day, and One For Elizabeth Kathyrn (An Old Fashioned Waltz). Way to go, Joe!

How does it feel?

I've spent all week worrying about the site.

I finally decided that download speed for the home page is too slow on the backup server that we're running on. We usually set the number of home page updates to display to be very high so that you can see a lot of the history of what's been submitted. While we are running slow, I'm setting the home page to show only the last 8 updates rather than the usual 40. When we are back on our usual setup, I'll set that high again.

Please send me mail if the site is getting too slow to be comfortable. Verizon tells me its at least two more weeks before we'll be back to normal.

The Newest Chord Changes

Decided that productive labor was in order, after all the worry. I did an arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael's Up A Lazy River the day after we came up as a request from a subscriber. After that, Clifford Brown's The Blues Walk.

The first few hundred changes submitted to the site belonged to songs that I knew well enough to sing. That made chord entry very fast because I could sing along with the chords and could usually hear when I'd made a mistake. More and more frequently, whenever I submit new changes I've had to learn the entire song that those changes accompany. It's the only way I know to make sure that I'm not making a stupid typo when I enter the chords.

On Friday I learned Cole Porter's I Concentrate On You. What a neat discovery! I don't believe I've ever heard this performed. This was composed in the late 30's. To me, especially in its A sections it sounds like the Bossa Nova tunes that Jobim started writing twenty years later. I'm getting back in stride now. Last night I did three of Charlie Parker's blues: Bluebird, Buzzy and Cheryl. Cheryl is very interesting because it's a tune that is just barely a blues. It's kind of at the outer fringe of what your ear will accept as being a blues form. Also, did Sonny Stitt's Eternal Triangle, a tune he wrote for a session he did with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. This morning, I did Lionel Hampton's Midnight Sun with its unusual form and harmonies and Jules Styne's It's You Or No One, a tune Dexter Gordon liked to play.

Please join our community at SongTrellis. Our contributors welcome your comments, suggestions and requests. As soon as you join the site (or login if you are a member) a response form will appear here.