Tomorrow will be the first day I see my boss in almost three weeks. All the senior people at my company are using all the vacation days they have saved up, before the company changes its vacation policy in September. I\u2019d imagine productivity is down, but hey it\u2019s August. Anyway, I don\u2019t have to worry about that until tomorrow. I had a long weekend, the first of the whole summer without travel or other commitments. I spent a lot of it learning new songs. I must say learning new music has gotten a lot easier with the internet and the iTunes store. Gone are the days of putting together mix tapes and figuring out the chords by ear.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m doing this because last weekend I auditioned\/sat in with the aforementioned classic rock party band. It went really well. They sound good, particularly the lead guitarist and the lead singer, who also plays harmonica. They do an interesting mix of songs. One whole set is old soul music: Sam and Dave, Wilson Picket, Otis Redding, the Temptations and that kind of thing. Most of this is great music to play sax on, so bringing the horn really brings the whole sound up a notch. Another category is sixties rock with an R&B influence. Stuff like Gimme Some Lovin\u2019 and Hush. And closely related to this is more sixties rock by groups like the Zombies and the Doors. I\u2019m rediscovering a lot of great pop songs I haven\u2019t thought about in a long time.<\/p>\n
I ended up playing a ton of organ. This is kinda funny to me because I\u2019ve spent years working on piano playing, to the point where I tend to think of organ as a separate thing, and something I don\u2019t really do. In fact I never even learned my way around the organ presets on the keyboard I bought a couple years ago. But hey, when you\u2019re on the stand you gotta go for it. Luckily my keyboard has a lot of great organ sounds, just right for the occasion.<\/p>\n
The band said I nailed Light My Fire, even though I only really learned the opening riff. For the solo, I copped what Ray Manzarek did. I call this the Ray Manzarek thing. Start the solo on a particular scale tone, and riff around for a while and then after eight bars come up to the next higher tone of the scale. This builds the intensity and lets you take a long, laid back solo that seems to have some direction. He does the same thing on Riders on the Storm, btw.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the band has a lot of songs. They also have an 80\u2019s set and a surf medley. Not all of them are particularly interesting for keyboard, but even those have good harmony vocals. This next rehearsal I want to start drilling down on getting the harmonies tight.<\/p>\n
I had decided before I showed up that I want to sing lead on a song or two each set. When I got there, I wondered how that idea would go over, since they have a full-time lead singer. Before I had a chance to ask, the singer asked my if I\u2019d like to do a song or two a set, explaining that by the end of the night his voice can get pretty shot, so it\u2019s good to have a break in the middle of a set. So now the question is what to sing. They asked if I knew any piano songs. Probably too early to lay some of my originals on them, but I suggested some Steely Dan (of course).<\/p>\n
They also asked if I know any Billy Joel. I know a few of his songs, and they\u2019re all in my vocal range. As it happens I\u2019m sort of in a Billy Joel phase right now. It\u2019s been creeping up on me, having played a few of his songs in various musicals the last few years, and coming to see how popular he is around here. A hometown hero, like Rush when I was growing up. Then Billy played the concert after Hurricane Sandy last fall and blew everyone else away. I\u2019d seen him a couple time live back in the day (he\u2019s Jeannie\u2019s favorite band) but he never came close to this level of performance. Somehow, after fifteen years of retirement he\u2019s entered the ranks of the all-time greats.<\/p>\n
Finally Michelle asked me to play Vienna for her, and that\u2019s one song I can\u2019t do justice to just by googling the chords. So I went to the store and bought a couple of books of his sheet music. I made sure to get the actual piano arrangements so I could learn his voicings and all, the full intro to New York State of Mind and everything. There\u2019s a lot of great music in there. Still, the problem with Billy Joel is a lot of his hits are ballads, so I don\u2019t know how it\u2019d go over in a rock club. The only thing I have down now that\u2019s uptempo enough is Miami 2017. Meanwhile playing all that organ inspired me to learn A Whiter Shade of Pale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tomorrow will be the first day I see my boss in almost three weeks. All the senior people at my company are using all the vacation days they have saved up, before the company changes its vacation policy in September. I\u2019d imagine productivity is down, but hey it\u2019s August. Anyway, I don\u2019t have to worry … Continue reading “Classic Rock Rhythm and Blues”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}