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Tonight, I went out to Rob's place, and the two of us worked on a few songs. Shahin and I have talked a few times about having a second bass player sit in with us, and I thought Rob would be a good fit for the upcoming show.
The two songs we decided upon in advance was the Bass Extremes's Not A 3 and Jaco Pastorius's Liberty City. Having Vic, Steve and Oteil storm through both of those tunes recently, I'm confident that we can pull it off at a show. Not that we're there, but they've shown the path; all we have to do is learn to walk on it.
We started off with Not A 3. Rob and I both had been learning the Vic part. I suggested to Rob that he take the Steve part, as his bass has the more appropriate range (5 string vs. 4). I also thought it would be a good tune to inrtoduce him with, as the Steve part carries almost the entire melody. The slight catch for the tune is that it's in 15/8.
We got through a good bit of the tune before moving on. I showed Rob the basic chord progression to 75% of the original tunes (A-min, D-min, G-maj, C-dom, F-maj, Bb-maj, E-halfdim). Rob then pointed out that it was almost the same as Autumn Leaves. So, we noodled around with that a bit. I think the idea that I like with this is to have a little crowd participation. Just have Brett hold a steady beat, take turns soloing or chording the tune and then as we wrap up a phrase, ask someone to call out a style. If someone yells "reggae", then we dub it up and go with that for a bit. If "punk", then trash around. That sort of thing.
Finally, we got to Liberty City. Nothing like a complex tune to make your head spin; particularly one arranged for about twenty more musicians than we are going to have. We broke it down into four parts: the A section (the horn \head), the B section (the horn piece at about 3:40 into the tune), a C section (walking bass line with solos) and a D section (the bridge). Then, we pieced together how we were going to string all the sections together, who was going to solo when and other general blocking issues.
Having finished the arrangements, we started to work on the music itself. It's a bit of a challenge, this tune.
Posted by Casper at December 2, 2004 11:28 PM