PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Swing with Johann Sebastian Bach

Happy New Year !

If you're a fan of the Jacques Loussier Trio, Swingle Singers etc. you will understand why I was delighted to find a Hal Leonard Play along book (HL-120) with well known JS Bach pieces arranged for jazz.

https://soundcloud.com/dstong


I wish Band-in-a-Box would have more appropriate Real Tracks that approximates human musicians like this and this style. Of course I realize the serious limitations, however, PGMusic, has already exceeded my expectations, and maybe they will do it again in this direction.

I've got fond memories of my high school daze and being a member of a young singing ensemble that attempted to emulate some of the Swingle Singers' stuff. Much fun. Turtlenecks and sweaters...


--Mac

Hey Mac, we must be of the same generation !

I'm envious of you. I was never part of any band, but contended myself to playing recorder or flute of easy Mozart pieces or slower parts of Brandenburg Concertos, using a Wollensak tape recorder with playback set to 1/2 speed. The music dropped an octave and was half the tempo. Later on, when I had saved up money from cutting grass, snow shoveling, and a summer job working at Bond's Clothing (a men's clothing store) on Times Square, to graduate to a Tandberg tape recorder. It was dream-come-true technology for me.

More than 20 years later, I bought a used alto saxophone from a classified ad, repaired it, and learned to play it on my own. That's when I discovered Music-Minus-One, and Jamie Aebersold records. Sometime later, I came across Band-in-a-Box, at a NAMM (National Association of Music Manufacturers) show in Chicago (McCormick Place). It was one of the first DOS versions. I was in heaven, even though, these early versions sounded very mechanical and lo-fi compared to todays versions with Real Tracks. Nonetheless, I could now play songs at any tempo with a lot of instrumentation choices, including substituting harpsichord for the piano. I put chord progressions and melodies from hundreds of songs from various Fake Books, into BnB format. This was way before the internet.

Some years later I heard about the Yamaha WX7 windcontroller and bought one, but was very disappointed with the sounds produced with the TXZ1. It was not much better than a kazoo. Time went by and I discovered the EWI-3020 & 3030 interface box which had far better sounds, went on to various hardware synths (JV-1080, other Roland boxes), got Patchman JV-1080 sounds which were really good, then I discovered the Ketron SD2 (which is still the best-for-the-money hardware synth I think). Finally I found samplemodeling virtual instruments which were even better than anything I had dared to imagine. Fantastic sound authenticity, super low latency, and special features just for windcontroller users. I had arrived in heaven and I love it! I can't play anywhere as well as many of the musician on these forums, but when it comes to passion and enjoyment I'm up there with the best of them

Many parallels there, Dan, at least as far as the early recording equipment stuff. I was fortunate as to the music teaching and learning experience, my Dad was a Dental Surgeon who put aside a possible career as a Classical Pianist or Trumpet Player, to go to Dental School, he started me on Piano at somewhere around the age of three, moved to Trumpet at age 8 after the permanent teeth started coming in.

I was born in 1951, in the US there was the race situation in full bloom, when along came Nat King Cole on NBC with his own television show, the first and only person of my race to appear weekly on nationwide TV, though not one business was willing to actually become a sponsor of a show with a black man on it. That show ran from around 5 November 1956 and the last December 17, 1957. Cole had survived for over a year, and it was he, not NBC, who ultimately decided to pull the plug on the show. NBC and Nat had been operating at an extreme financial loss due to the lack of sponsorship his show received.
Cole said shortly after its demise, "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark."

I was a child, sure, but my family, including Gramma, NEVER missed a show, it was a big thing to many African Americans, I'm sure.

And, at about the age of five or so, we watched a show in which Nat used a sound-on-sound reel-to-reel recorder to sing along with himself.



Somehow, the magic of that tape recorder stuck in my head.

My first tape recorder was a small Silvertone reel-to-reel, longed for as a Christmas present, at around the age of 8 or so. (Actually, I had asked and begged earlier than that, but I think they thought I was too young...) It might have taken a couple of years, but I was persistent and one Christmas morning, there it was! That one was mono, but could run at 7-1/2 ips as well as the slower less fidelity 3-3/4, all tube driven, simple, and actually had fairly good fidelity. But no sound-on-sound or sound-with-sound capability.

One of the other kids in the elementary school orchestra also had a mono reel to reel, it really belonged to his father, but the two of us would do anything we could to get those two decks together in the same room on a Saturday and would proceed to do the old Les Paul thing, dubbing from one recorder to the other while attempting to play a new part in along with the recorder playback. Generational loss be hanged, we tried all sorts of things. Those creations became rather a thing with family and friends, mostly due to our young ages more than our musical skills, I think.

Around the age of 12, a nice gentleman who was a Physics prof at the same university where my dad taught dentistry just handed me a Wollensak stereo reel-to-reel that featured the Sound on Sound thing. Wow. First thing I tried with it was playing both of the two Trumpet parts to the Vivaldi Concerto for two trumpets myself, adding my Dad's piano accompaniment, all on that Wollensak. That tape, unfortunately, is long lost, but it lit the fire, so to speak. Then came an attempt to cover Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass tune that was a big hit at the time, "The Lonely Bull". (and BULL it was, heh!)

The other Big Thing back then, at least to me, was the tape manipulations that could be done by bumping the two speeds such that you could make your voice one octave higher and "spaceman" or "alien" like, or, as became famous in and of itself around the same time, "The Chipmunks". Me and that same friend, now a bit older, did a Chipmunks cover of that famous Christmas tune, our twist was that Alvin was a distinct potty-mouthed and slightly racist little punk chipmunk. My mom never liked that one, but I gotta say that dad seemed to get a kick out of it until he caught mom's frown.

Two rather creative kids, rainy Saturday afternoon, a tape recorder or two, the soldering gun with bits from electronic surplus houses like 1/4" war surplus plugs that were selling 3 for a dollar back then, a Danelectro twinhorn bass and a Sears Silvertone Danelectro guitar with the amp in the case, the parent's Grand Piano, the little "schpinette" home organ, the Trumpets, big sister's nylon string classical geetar, the medieval recorders (the flutes, you see...), kazoos, -- even shaking little packets of sugar from the diner at the mic for percussion.

Man, those were good times.

There was once a time when a kid who knew how to set the drawbars on the Hammond Schpinette Organ, and knew what two notes to play, could bring up the Central Office at Bell Telephone. But that's a different story.


--Mac

Dan,

I enjoyed the music on your Sound Cloud page.

Mac,

I remember watching the Nat King Cole show. That was about the time that we two newlyweds got our 1st TV.

Who are the couple singing with Nat on the YouTube? The woman looks familiar, the man not so much.

Don S.

Don,

Thanks for the kind words.

The woman is the great Peggy Lee, and the fellow is Julius La Rosa.

My Dad was was not only a big Nat King Cole fan, but also told us, after having met and worked with him, that he was one of the nicest show people ever, unlike some of the stuck up guys like Bob Hope for example.

Although best known for his vocal artistry, Nat King Cole, was an amazing and innovative pianist, very much admired by other musicians.

Dan

Hey Mac,

It's wonderful to discover a kindred soul. I've been reading some many of your terrifically helpful posts over all these years but never knew anything about your background, but let's get one thing clear, I'm even older than you are got you beat by 5 years.

I watched your Nat King Cole youtube link and it's great. I'm pretty sure we watched those original broadcasts. That was a serious reel-to-reel tape recorder. We watched a documentary about Nat King Cole and some parts were quite infuriating and sad, but there is no limit to racist stupidity as far as I can tell. There was a lot of hostility when he bought a house too.

Both my Mom and Dad had some acquaintance with racism. When she was growing up in Hungary, kids threw rocks at her and called her a Dirty Jew. Dad told us about signs in some parks and fancy hotels in Hong Kong(?) that said No Dogs or Chinese.

Fortunately, although I experienced some racism, it was far less overt and of far less import. Certainly nothing compared to being Black in the US over those years. Things have improved but there is still way too much hatred based on factors such as race, gender, or religion.

Anyway, the Nat King Cole TV Show, was an important first step, even though it only ran a bit over a year. It was a milestone and almost certaily made other shows like I Spy with Bill Cosby, and the Cosby Show possible.

As far as sound-on-sound, my earliest accompaniment sessions did not include recording the resulting music, but we did have fun with reverb-like effects done with the delay produced by the distance between the record and playback heads. Neither of my parents played music, but my brother played piano and I had a year of piano lessons at around the age of 7 or 8, or 9? As a teen my brother would demo easy piano pieces for me to practice (Mikrokosmos and easy Bach pieces).

You're lucky to have an accomplished musician parent who got you started really early playing piano and then trumpet.

Thanks for the background stories Mac, they bring back old memories.