It’s been a Chapel-filled week here on the blog, so I’m dashing off this quick Lazy Sunday before dashing off to play bass at church:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
I was working on an alto saxophone arrangement of the hymn “Softly and Tenderly” by Will L. Thompson last week, as I am planning on playing it for Chapel this week at school. I’ve always liked the hymn, and I recently attempted it on sax for a Sunday night singing at my old church. While playing it, I realized I was unclear one some of the notes in the melody, so there was a chunk where I was kind of adlibbing my way through.
That being the case, I thought it would be worthwhile to have a version for alto sax as sheet music. This arrangement is really more of a transcription; that is, I attempted to put on paper what I play when I am noodling the hymn on sax. I tried to replicate the various ornamentations that I add on when I play.
Once I had the transcription I wanted, I didn’t grab my alto sax right away. Instead, I grabbed my bass! I played bass with our new church’s praise band for the first time this past Sunday, and I needed to practice some of the pieces for service. Since I had the bass out anyway, I decided to play the alto sax arrangement on the bass!
The result is the feature of today’s post. The typical key for “Softly and Tenderly” is concert Ab major. That puts it in the key of F major for an alto saxophone (for transposing reasons I won’t explain here, because while I think it’s cool, it’s also kind of tedious and boring). So, by playing on the bass (which I think of a concert-pitch instrument, but which technically transposes everything down one octave), I was shifting the key to concert F major (meaning if I played it with a pianist, the pianist would have to play in F major, not Ab major).
See? Kind of tedious. The bass rendition, however, is not:
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Yours portly hasn’t had a chance to noodle out any more new saxophone compositions or to tinker with new digital compositions, so I’m digging up a little something I put together last year and waited until Sunday—the first day of summer—to upload.
I recorded this little cover of the jazz standard “Summertime” from the opera Porgy and Bess last summer when I was driving up to see then-Dr. Fiancée. On those long, boring drives, I would usually entertain myself by sending her goofy voice messages. These usually hit in the third and final hour of the drive, when I’d be dying to get out of the car and see my girl.
Such is the provenance of this cover, my own little rendition with some altered lyrics.
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Fifteen years ago today, on 4 July 2010, my old brass band, Brass to the Future, played an outdoor concert in a park in my hometown of Aiken, South Carolina. It was a bit of a “guerrilla” concert, in that we did not ask permission, but just showed up in the park and started playing for our fans.
In the spirit of Independence Day, I’m featuring rare footage from that concert today.
This past Friday, 22 September 2023, I played a gig at a local coffee shop with my buddy John. I was recovering from a sinus infection, but through a combination of cough drops, water, and tea, I soldiered through and managed to hit quite a few high notes—woooooot! It also helped having John there to carry lead vocals on several tunes.
It was a sloppy performance on my end—I mixed up the lyrics to a song I have been singing for eleven years!—but I’m chalking that up to the sinus congestion and my slowly diminishing mental faculties. The result, regardless, was an absurd, self-indulgent, over-the-top, ridiculous, long closing number to a very fun show.
Tonight, for the first time in awhile, I’ll be playing a solo gig at a local coffee shop in Darlington, South Carolina. I’m looking forward to stretching out these stubby fingers and doing some soft rockin’.
Well, it won’t be entirely solo: my buddy John will be joining me on a number of songs. His gorgeous twelve-string guitar and his capable backing vocals add a great deal of depth and texture to my tunes, so I’m glad he’ll be joining me.
Back on Thursday, 20 July 2023 I made a pilgrimage back to Lula’s Coffee Company, which for several years before The Age of The Virus was the epicenter of a flourishing of musical and cultural activity in Florence, South Carolina. Then the management dragged its feet on resuming open mic post-pandemic, and I largely wrote it off as a venue.
Fortunately, I am overcame my stubborn resistance and occasionally make it out there for open mic night. It is a long way from my home now, so I don’t get out there much, but I found my most recent visit to be quite rewarding.
My buddy John Pickett and I played “Greek Fair“; I regard this song as the best I have ever written. Others have proven more popular, but I’m really proud of this one.
Two years ago I wrote “Supporting Friends Friday: The Cinematic Compositions of Mason Sandifer” about the composing work of one of my student, Robert Mason Sandifer. Mason (as I call him) started distributing his music to all the major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc.) earlier this month, and he is directly responsible for inspiring me to put my old instrumental music on the same platforms.
Mason is currently undertaking an ambitious project to compose instrumental music that tells the story of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelations (or, as my friend Steve O would say, “from Genesis through Maps”). It’s an amazing concept, and he has executed it beautifully so far.
It’s good to be back at open mic—finally!—and I’m getting some of previously unreleased tunes posted to YouTube. One original tune I played last Tuesday, 13 June 2023 is a piece I wrote in 2018 about the open mic scene called “Private Lessons (Goth Chick)“—the cattiest song I’ve ever written.
Thanks to the gentle prodding of Audre Myers, I’ve decided to upload videos actively to my YouTube channel. I’ve had this channel for almost fifteen years (apparently), but only used it to upload a short video from the video game Spore in 2008 and some footage of my old group Brass to the Future playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day 2010.
I’ll mostly upload original music. There are plenty of songs I love to cover, but uploading those covers to YouTube without obtaining permission from the original songwriters is technically a violation of copyright law. I’m a big believer in the protection of intellectual property, and I’d rather not run afoul of the YouTube police, at least not for something legitimate.
That said, readers are welcome to cover my tunes, just let me know about it.
So, I thought I’d periodically post a digest of some recent uploads for readers who want to dive deeper into my music—for free!
