Kelly’s Theme, part 2

Yesterday, I started talking about track #9 on evolution, “Kelly’s Theme.” This track was recorded September 24, 2005. I put a lot of work into it before I ever began to play it, however.

I am fascinated by the sound of the melodic minor scale. It is so common in Jazz that I call it the “jazz scale”; when I was working on this idea, I therefore named it “C Jazz.” If you want an insight into how to play this tune, or you’re just curious what you’re hearing, have a look at the page from my music notebook in which I planned the chords:

This page was written on September 17, 2006 (music notebook #11, page 7).

OK, those of you who’ve looked at the image are probably thinking, “How did he get such nice music engraving into a notebook?” Simple; cut and paste. I used GNU Lilypond to create the page, printed it, cut the page to size, and pasted it in my notebook.

Too complicated? Ha. If you know how to read sheet music, this is an unambiguous memory tool for complicated chord progressions and voicings. I tried writing them out by hand in the old days — but then, tragically, I’d make a mistake. Now I ask: how do you scribble out a wrong note in a chord without ruining the reading of the chord? After all, a black dot scribbled through is . . . just a bigger black dot. I found I worked faster by typing it in the computer, if only for the simplicity of previewing the page and correcting mistakes painlessly.

Now, you can see this song took at least a week to come together. The crystallization point was, unfortunately, a phone conversation with my father which reminded me of Kelly’s suicide.

This tune was originally a groovin Hammond organ soul jazz arrangement.  Suddenly, I wasn’t “up” enough to make it work. I played the chords slower, and kept singing a sort of wordless melody (the one you hear in the song) in my head. On the original recording I made, I stumbled quite a bit on the piano part; a few days later, when the pain had gone down but the tune was still fresh in my head, I made the final recording, the one you hear on the album.