Category: music

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Congratulations, Ms. Spalding!

Found this article today about Esperanza Spalding winning her 4th grammy, this time in the vocal category, for this album release of last October:

And I’ll have to say that this one was well deserved. If you make it through the list of her 19 videos I’m sure you will agree – pieces of art, all of them.

So this one’s for the singers. Needless to say that Ms Spalding is also a killer bass player both on upright as well as on electric bass. In fact she’s teaching both vocals and bass at Berklee…

As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

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Dalek, still in training

Today I tried something new. Played around with a ring modulator on my voice a bit to join ‘bluvation’ (Gerry) on his awesome ‘Dancing with Daleks’ track:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-181478.php

Musicians, until now: just him (all music) and me (words/vocals):

As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. And thanks to Gerry for all the fun 🙂

Update, Monday during my office hours:

Got a first remix from & with Brian on bass, very cool:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-181518.php

That makes three of us by now:

As always, thanks for listening. And now come and join the fun 🙂 If not, and in a Dalek voice: “EXPLAIN!” 😀

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Three random takes on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’

The conductor of the orchestra in which I’m helping out sent me another piece via email – and this time it’s a real fun one as it seems. And with about 100 years of age I guess you might call it ‘oldie but goldie’. If you look up the title on Youtube and select three, it can be as interesting as this:

  1. Jazz Manouche example:

2. Older, more to the original ‘Foxtrot’ or ‘Charleston’ style:

3. Much slower, but swinging real hard on this Jazz Standard:

As you see, the possibilities on songs like this one are endless – although with my electric bass I can’t of course get anywhere near to what Ray Brown did here…

Really lookin’ forward to playin’ on that one 😀 What a nice idea! 😀

See also: English or German Wikipedia pages about this song.

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Tales of Yore, 2 adds

I played on that awesome track from Rick aka ‘acousticeg’ and also included it into my latest album (see the blog post before/below this one). And since then I received two more adds already, since the piece was still left wide open by us. So here they are, in case you’re interested:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-180627.php
https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-180766.php

Thank, or rather merci to our friends, these are so nice 🙂 And thanks to you for your interest, and for reading and listening.

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Rise and Shine

A really wonderful & jazzy funky theme from Marc, jhonrobert, and Alex – so I added a few low notes and tried to support that groove:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-180444.php

Still some space for soli in there, and the list of musicians until now is:

Thanks to my friends for the fun I had, and thanks to you for listening.

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He’s Left The Clan

Short but irresistibly sweet piece by YuuLi, a relatively new member in Wikiloops whose first upload was a 9/8, and whose singing reminded me of other great artists like Joni Mitchell – so I wanted to play with that incredibly talented young woman since she joined us. And today I could finally try a few low notes on one of her tracks (originally an a capella of hers, no less!):

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-179975.php

And that nice nylon guitar is also played by a relatively new member, also from France, who calls himself ‘Al-Fadista’. So here’s the list of musicians so far:

Thanks to my friends for all the fun, and thanks to you for reading, and for listening.

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Tales of Yore

So after 3 internet outages during the last week, and one first rehearsal of the orchestra where I’m helping out for an injured bass player we now seem to have a stable connection again (knock on wood!), and I could log in to Wikiloops again, and download some songs to play on.

Haven’t done much with Rick aka ‘acousticeg’ since quite some time – if I remember correctly since my first album in the beginning of 2018¹. So I was glad to find an awesome new template of his, and couldn’t resist to adding some low end to it:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-179852.php

List of musicians so far – just him and melike here:

I’ve tried to keep his nice triplet feel in this one, and to also support his flagiolet tones with some from my fretless bass. Hope you like it as much as I did while playing on it.

As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. And thanks also to Rick for the fun I had.

¹Wrong – I did “Beneath the Waves” as another collaboration with him in November, even as a video collab. So this is our third one together after the intial “The way that she moves” with Shi from March 2018 🙂