Holiday Music Favorites (Addendum 2)

I’ve prepared another new Christmas arrangement. This one is “The First Noel” and is done is a sort of “Smooth Jazz” style:

The First Noel

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Holiday Music Favorites (Addendum)

This past week I added a new arrangement to my arsenal of Christmas tunes. It is the familiar, traditional carol, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. If you listen to it, you will note the unmistakable influence of the great Wes Montgomery.

Holiday Music Favorites

I’m really not sure why, but every year I still enjoy it when everyone starts playing the holiday music again. Not counting the traditional carols , there are hundreds of holiday songs – I have a fake book with 275. However, there are a relative few that seem to get the most attention year in and year out. So every year I start playing my arrangements of my favorites again. I never have written them down, so each year I need to remember and often reconstruct the arrangements. This actually works out well, as every year I seem to be able to add one or two enhancements to each.

Three of my consistent favorites are “The Christmas Song” (also known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) with music written by Mel Torme, “Christmas Time is Here” with music written by Vince Guaraldi for the original “Charlie Brown Christmas” TV special from 1965, and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie.

Teen Idols Addendum

This past weekend I arranged and recorded “Sealed with a Kiss”. Written by Gerry Geld and Peter Udell, it went to three on the charts in 1962 for Brian Hyland. Bryan Hyland was another of the teen idols. Born in 1943 in Queens, his first hit was the novelty number “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” which hit number one in 1960 – when Hyland was just seventeen.

Teen Idols and Plane Crashes

Trying to target young teen and preteen girls is not new for the music industry. In recent years this has been the goal of the boy bands like New Kids on the Block, Menudo, ‘NSync, and the Backstreet Boys. While there are certainly examples of bands from the 50’s and 60’s with this type of appeal (Herman’s Hermits comes to mind, and the Beatles certainly appealed to this demographic as well), there are more numerous examples of individuals who fit this mold. For the purposes of this discussion, we can think of a teen idol as someone specifically created and groomed by a record company to sell records to this particular market.

50’s Instrumental Hits

The 1950’s saw the birth of Rock’n'Roll, evolving from Rhythm and Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and Country, while simultaneously influencing all those genres as well. It should be no surprise that there were a large number of instrumental hits from the 50’s that reflect all of those styles. This post will look at three of them: Sleepwalk, Honky Tonk, and Night Train.

Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar is an unusual “western” movie from 1954. Starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden and Mercedes McCambridge, it is very untypical of the genre. Although Sterling Hayden portrays the title character, — Johnny “Guitar” Logan – he is really an observer to the action. The film’s most important and strongest characters are women. The film was also highly regarded by critics for its allegorical qualities (some viewed it as an indictment of MyCarthyism) as well as its cinematography. Wikipedia has a good article about the film.

Trying My Hand

I like to consider myself something of a composer as well as a guitarist and arranger. Check the links at the end of this post should you wish to investigate or sample any of my original material.

The topic of this post is two original songs that I wrote attempting to channel the style of the classic surf/rock/rockabilly material that I have spent the past year arranging. I wanted to see if I could merge those styles with some of my personal musical vocabulary, which is quite firmly rooted in jazz. Here are the links to listen (and review the notation should you be interested):

Double Nickels	Stream	Mp3	Notation
Surfin’ the Mon	Stream	Mp3	Notation

Double Nickels is essentially a rockabilly tune. It has a quick shuffle/boogie feel, and is based on a standard 12-bar blues. There are three main sections, separated by the same recurring rhythmic accents and altered dominant 7^th chords. The first section is a boogie riff, played on the lower strings – perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the main lick from Hot Rod Lincoln. That similarity is what inspired the name of my song. By the way, if you are not familiar with Bill Kirchen, the “diesel-billy” guitarist whose playing drove that hit, you must check him out. He is still going strong, touring frequently and is also a super nice guy.

The second section borrows heavily from Duane Eddy’s classic, Rebel Rouser. The third section is a contrasting interlude with rather heavily and tonally ambiguous altered chords. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you think the whole thing works together.

Surfin’ the Mon is my attempt at a surf-rock instrumental. It borrows its drum introduction from Hawaii Five-O and leans heavily on the Pipeline and Penetration tradition of surf tunes. Again I have merged into my composition some chord changes one would not likely have heard in the originals, but I tried to do so without compromising the surf-rock mood. Again, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you think the whole thing works. The title refers to a river that runs through my home town.

I hope you like the tunes and certainly welcome comments on them.

Should you want to investigate or sample the original material from my commercially released albums, I suggest starting at http://www.shufflocity.com/. There are samples on the site and links to places to either purchase CDs or download entire tracks should you like the music enough.

Surf Rock/Guitar Instrumentals Part 3 – One Hit Wonders

A number of the biggest rock/surf guitar hits in the early sixties were released by groups that were unable to follow up their chart toppers with another success.

This entry examines four of those: Pipeline, Telstar, Penetration, and Out of Limits. Here are links to my arrangements of these four classic hits:

Pipeline	Stream	Mp3
Telstar	Stream	Mp3
Penetration	Stream	Mp3
Out of Limits	Stream	Mp3

Cool Cats Medley

This entry is about the background of one of my arrangements, which I call “Cool Cats Medley”. I encourage you to listen to it before reading futher – to see if you can identify the “cool cat” behind each part of the medley:

Cool Cats Medley

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I think this medley is lots of fun for those who can remember the originals. They are all excellent, classic and memorable themes.

Foreign Language Hits

The popular music charts over the years have been very much dominated by vocal music. There is something that about the human voice that is arguably superior to any musical instrument. The addition of lyrics adds further to the listening experience. Lyrics allow the sharing of common experiences and emotions, and in the hands of a master lyricist blend seamlessly with the music into what can be a significant aesthetic event for the listener.

Much of my interest in instrumental music that was sufficiently popular to chart is rooted in the overwhemingly greater overall popularity of vocal material. What it is about these instrumental hits that allowed them to achieve popularity in spite of the handicap of being instrumental?

Surf Rock/Guitar Instrumentals 2 – Hank Marvin and the Shadows

If you lived in Europe in the 1960’s, then the chances are you are far more familiar with Hank Marvin and the Shadows than with the Ventures. With the same instrumentation (Lead Guitar, Rhythm Guitar, Bass and Drums) Hank Marvin and the Shadows sold millions of records as an instrumental quartet in the UK and Europe.

Top-40 Jazz

While widely respected as a genre, Jazz has seen relatively few of its artists cross over into the mainstream without their also having largely abandoned the genre. Both Nat King Cole and George Benson – to note two examples – achieved major success as popular artists, but the material with which they did so was popular, not jazz. This is not to be critical of their decisions to seek more popularity or the musical results – their popular music is first rate. George Benson, of course, also remains active as a jazz artist as well.

Occasionally, however, a “real” jazz song recorded by a “real” jazz artist will crack the top-40. This happened a few times in the first half of the the 1960’s.

Surf Rock/Guitar Instrumentals Part 1 – The Ventures

For most Americans, surf-rock guitar instrumental music is most associated with the Ventures. Along with Hank Marvin and the Shadows in England, they pretty much set the standard in this genre. By the way, Swedish surf-rock fans, I have not forgotten about the Spotnicks, who I will also cover in a future post. The Ventures certainly owe a great deal to Dick Dale, who probably deserves credit for introducing surf rock, and other instrumental guitar pioneers like Link Wray, whose release Rumble was one of the first instrumental guitar hits, and Duane Eddy.

British Invasion Songwriting

The “British Invasion”, which began in 1963 and which was led and dominated by the Beatles, coincided with my musical awakening at the age of eleven. While I had certainly listened to lots of music before that time (my father had been a successful pianist and teacher), the arrival of the Beatles and other bands like the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, Hermans Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, etc., was an enormous event in my life. It is why I took up the guitar. The hits came fast and furious back then, with new singles and albums released at a dizzying pace. While much of what we listened to fell well short of the pinnacle of Western music, there were some remarkably well-written songs mixed in.