New YouTube Performance Videos! "Love Is Just Around The Corner" and "So Danco Samba!"

Since my leg breaking incident in February I haven't done much musically other than put in lots of practice time while laid-up on the couch. I've slowly gotten back to feeling more normal and decided to finally record some tunes.  That practicing seems to have paid off though: Here are a couple of videos of tunes I recorded on May 8th. I was really only expecting to use the video to see what my practicing and playing was sounding like currently, but I ended up pulling off a couple of good performances of two of the most recent tunes I've learned. I hope you enjoy them both! They are both very different tunes from very different periods in time and styles within jazz!

First of all, an old swing era tune with a vocal: "Love Is Just Around The Corner:"

I fell in love with this old 1930's tune just over a month ago when I stumbled across one of Marty Grosz's versions on YouTube. Its a fun, cool little tune with silly lyrics and I really like the chord progression. It is just different enough to be quite interesting, particularly during the bridge (the "Venus de Milo" section). The toughest part of the whole tune was getting the improvisation together. As many other jazz musicians will attest, it can be very hard to get variety out of fast moving two-chord-per-bar progressions like this one has. I think it has come together really well though.  As with most things, the more you do it, the better you will get at it!

The other tune I did was a bossa nova tune called "So Danco Samba:"

This is one of my favorite bossa nova tunes. I learned it quite some time ago from the classic album "Getz/Gilberto," the 1965 release that also features the famous original version of "The Girl From Ipanema." But it was this summery tune, "So Danco Samba" that got stuck in my head again even after not hearing it in many months. I actually remembered enough of it to be able to re-create the whole thing from memory. Maybe it was inspired by my yearning for warmer weather, I'm not sure! The chord melody arrangement required a bit of octave transposition and some creative chord forms (OK, more like simple triads) to make it possible in this style of guitar playing, but I like the results very much. The improvised choruses are always a blast to play through on this tune as well. Now I just need to find a small group to play it with so I can play the rhythm chords too!