...nwood...

Last night I finally got around to ripping, editing and transcoding video of a performance a few weeks ago at Jazz Camp West. Jazz Camp West is "band camp" for adults. It's a gas.

This was my third visit in four years (I went to Stanford Jazz Residency last year). Each day before dinner people have the opportunity to perform. If your name gets drawn for an Open Mic performance you have about a day to put a band together and maybe run through your tune once or twice - if you can talk the others into sacrificing some of their lunch hour. Since there are so many great musicians around who will play for free(!), performing is a pleasure. An added bonus on this performance is that Tootie Heath jumped in a played percussion with us.

This is an obscure tune by Charles Kynard - a forgotten organ player who was active in the late 60's and early 70's. I learned about Kynard from Big Dewey one evening while strolling through San Francisco's historic Fillmore district and talking about (what else?) jazz. Kynard's strongest albums were The Soul Brotherhood and Reelin' with the Feelin'. I came across the tune Sweetheart on a Legends of Acid Jazz compilation. It's a simple little tune. The melody stuck with me after a first listen - playful, funky and straight to the point. Many "soul jazz" tunes are either blues or static one-chord explorations. I like Sweetheart for it's non-blues, bluesy harmony over a 16 bar form. Another fun aspect of this tune are the modulations. The head is played 3 times modulating up a half step each time: Bb minor, then B, then C. The solos happen over C minor. It'd be cool to keep modulating during solos, but Kynard didn't do this, and I don't quite have that in my bag...yet. On the out head the tune does a retrograde: C, B, Bb.

I had a lot of fun transcribing Sweetheart and creating an arrangement using the following open source tools: Audacity, Rosegarden and Musescore. I will try to post more about my process. I don't actually own the track, I used Audacity to rip it off Rhapsody.

This was also the first time I ripped DVD video. After a lot of research and trial and error I extracted and transcoded the video using dvd::rip on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. VLC is another option for this process. I'll try to post my notes on how to do this soon.