Just the chorus and bridge…
To maximize your listening experience, it’s best to listen with earphones.
I have just completed the lyrics for a song about a very important person in my life and her influence on a personal and landmark discovery for me. JoAnn is a professional musician and piano teacher mentor who introduced me to Jazz and nurtured me while I experimented with it. In looking back over my Music career, I wouldn’t be where I am in music without her and my mom encouraging me to study with her. Mom was afraid that I was getting disenchanted with studying music conventionally. JoAnn was exceptional. She felt connected to and inspired by Charlie Chaplin. She taught in an unconventional location in the Hollywood Hills. I even played a jazz version of Chaplin’s Smile with her. She was the consummate musician, not constrained by any particular music genre. She was just what I needed when I was 16 years old. I wanted to be free of the constraints of my classical music training. So musically she listened to how I felt and to my playing and led me into jazz. For me jazz is like the combination of a perfectly fitting soft leather glove and the woman I have been dreaming of meeting side by side. With jazz my piano skills blossom and develop and my curiosity is pushed forward like a bald eagle gliding and buoyed up with the wind and coming in for a landing on a tree stump in a beautiful lake in Ketchikan and then quickly taking off again. In more than 23 years I have not lost my interest and enthusiasm playing jazz. It is not the least bit boring since I am always creating my sound. I have not named a song up to now after anyone, but this song I call JoAnn for her, out of my deep respect for her. From the chorus: Jazz is a part of me/From my soul to my fingers/As I hit each piano key …It’s perfection/Between the notes and the silence/That is where I feel like I am at home And from the 3rd verse: She showed me what it meant to improvise/So when I write and play/ You can understand what I have to say. JoAnn is straight ahead jazz in the key of C. It drives like a well-tuned car. I built the song on a 12 bar blues pattern, the first jazz motif I learned,.. but the lyrics are anything but blues. Listen up. I am putting a snippet from the song at the top of this blog. For some reason this song was hard to musicalize right. It shouldn’t have been though because JoAnn was my perfect teacher. The right people are the people who care. I think she now is in the Pacific Northwest. There are lots of lucky people up there! I want to thank Susie Fisher in Australia for becoming my fan after listening to A Game I Shouldn’t Have Played Along With. The song resonates with many. It seems like many of us have been there.. those from the land down under, too. The political season in the USA in 2016 is a real statement of discord and the need for big change. So I think that is where I am going with my music next. Well, I didn’t go there yet. I sat down at the piano today after jamming with some jazz musicians from Local 47 yesterday and a new melody joined my brain to my fingers. It is not the usual development for me since my chicken and the egg is lyrics before the music. It is a beautiful melody. I wonder where it will take me. Thank you, everyone, who are now walking over with your fingers to visit with me and my writings in this blog. Thanks for listening to my music and reading about me at joshuaelimusic.com or under Joshua Eli Kranz at soundcloud.com or being one of my 3000 listeners on radioairplay.com under my preferred performance name Joshua Eli or tuning me in on YouTube.com under Joshua Eli Kranz.
Until the next time when we can talk music again..
Sincerely,
Joshua Eli
August 8, 2016
This post first appeared on What's Up With Joshua Eli Kranz L.A. Composer/Perf, please read the originial post: here
