This week I'm dipping a toe into the river of original music with a vocalise I wrote on a jazz standard by Frank Rosalino called "Blue Daniel".
What the hell is a vocalise? Is what you may be asking if you are not a jazz musician... Vocalise is when you take a tune that has already been written or an improvised solo and write lyrics to it. This technique was used extensively by Jon Hendrix, who did some really great stuff on Miles' "Freddie Freeloader" for example.
So I wrote the lyrics here as well as the guitar intro (basically just the melody over a reharmonization of the chord changes) and did some improvising in the middle. The intro is really pushing the limits of my abilities so that was fun.
I also brought in a friend of mine on upright bass (it's me) starting after the intro. I hope to have a full fledged original tune finished for next week, I've been putting a lot of work into it so I'm pretty excited about that.
Anyways. Here she blows.
