The JRB Weblog

ASK JRB: ENOUGH WITH THE BILLY JOEL ALREADY

2012-02-03T21:02:39Z

I got a weird and huffy comment this morning on yesterday's blog about "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." Perhaps this guy was annoyed by my incessant Twittering about the Billy Joel project, perhaps he doesn't like the sound of my voice, perhaps my guitar playing justifiably drives him to distraction. Who knows? But this is what he wrote:

I'm trying to remember how I subscribed to this blog. If I recall correctly, this used to be a blog about a composer and the music he wrote. Also, I love Billy Joel, who doesn't, but NO ONE decides they want to listen to Billy, and then listens to a cover instead. I hate to say it too, but this is affecting my enjoyment of your music (LFY in particular). Now all I can picture is Jamie writing Hardy Boys fan fiction in his 40's.

I was baffled by this line of thought, but then I realized that perhaps other people were feeling a similar frustration with this particular detour on my always-amusing career path, so I responded thusly:

When I was 11 years old, Simon & Garfunkel reunited for a concert in Central Park which was broadcast on television. I didn't know the songs all that well, but I clearly remember being moved by the two of them singing the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie," a song which had obviously inspired them as kids and through which they communicated a genuine if complicated affection both for each other and the music they grew up with.

Likewise when Joni Mitchell released Both Sides Now, we got to hear a singular artist bringing her own soul to the music she loved in her youth. I could also mention Todd Rundgren's Faithful album, or Shawn Colvin's Cover Girl, or, oh let's get crazy, Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" or Brahms's variations on themes of Haydn and Paganini. As a composer, my own act of creation mystifies me – why do I pick that chord? why do I want the melody to go in that direction? – and interpreting the work of other artists at best helps me to understand my own creative impulses, and at least comforts me that such mystification is part and parcel of the process.

But hey, if none of that is interesting to you, there are only five more songs left on The Stranger, so this probably won't drag out for too much longer. In the meantime, there are more than thirty other songs on my SoundCloud page available for you to listen, free of charge. And if you feel inspired to reinvent one of them for yourself, perhaps you'll find that some people are encouraged not just by your finished products but by the sounds of your explorations and inspirations.

VISITING THE ITALIAN RESTAURANT

2012-02-02T19:10:35Z

When I said I was going to cover The Stranger in its entirety, I knew (as did you all) that what I really meant is that I was going to have to deal with "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." This song is a singular, magnificent creation; it does not want to be reckoned with. I would not set about doing an arrangement of "Bohemian Rhapsody." I would not put "my stamp" on side two of Abbey Road. But here I am, staring at seven and a half minutes of beautifully written, arranged and performed music and forcing myself to follow through on my threat to Jerbify it.

When they did this song in Movin' Out on Broadway, they changed the lyric from "summer of '75" to "summer of '65." The song makes a lot more sense that way, honestly – the references to both engineer boots and "greasers" place the action comfortably in the mid-sixties. "Seventy-five" sings a lot better, though, and I couldn't make my mouth say it the other way, so I guess Brenda and Eddie are just weird anachronisms buying paintings from Sears. (That quirky detail about their home décor is my favorite line in the lyric.)

I've always been moved by the story of Brenda and Eddie, but I've never been entirely sure who the narrator was; I decided that it was the Piano Man himself, sitting at the bar on a break, telling the story to an old girlfriend from the old neighborhood who happened to stop in. In order to make my intentions clearer, I skipped one of the sections of the song; it happens to be the most iconic section, but part of the gestalt of this project has been about hearing things in different ways. And look, the good news is my version's only five minutes long.

I chose not to mimic Billy's legendary Long Island diction here, but it was hard not to sing "Brenda Renetti" and "boddla weitz" after hearing it that way for thirty-five years.

When I was in Portland last weekend, I met some of the teenage band members of a local production of 13, and all of the guitarists yelled at me for writing such hard chords. I hope that now they will listen to my execrable guitar playing on this track and enjoy the smug satisfaction of knowing that while I can write it, I most certainly can't play it.

On to side two!

Scenes From An Italian Restaurant (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion, guitar, harmonica & vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 2/1/12

And here are tracks 1-3, for your kind and forgiving ears:

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown

The Stranger (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown

Just The Way You Are (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown

SET LIST, 1/28/12, PORTLAND OR

2012-01-30T07:51:00Z

As good as you think Shoshana Bean is, you haven't heard anything until you hear her in her hometown. Every time we get to sing together is a privilege, and we'll be doing it again at the end of February in Fort Worth (click here for details!). Thanks to Chanda Hall and all the folks at Staged! PDX for bringing us to Portland and getting a fantastic audience to the First Congregational Church. Can't wait to go back again!

All Things In Time (Shoshana Bean)
I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
Long Long Road
And I Will Follow (Shoshana)
King of the World
Another Life from The Bridges of Madison County (Shoshana)
Wondering from The Bridges of Madison County
I'd Give It All For You (Shoshana & JRB)
Being A Geek

INTERMISSION

Nothing In Common
When You Say Vegas from Honeymoon In Vegas
Anywhere But Here from Honeymoon In Vegas (Shoshana)
Still Hurting (Shoshana)
The Old Red Hills of Home
Caravan of Angels
Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Shoshana)
Moving Too Fast
Stars and the Moon (Shoshana)
Someone To Fall Back On

I LIKE YOU ALMOST THE WAY YOU ARE

2012-01-13T19:17:37Z

There's a fun tradition in gospel music of taking secular love songs and, with the smallest changes in the lyric – a pronoun here, a reversal of direction there – turning them into love songs to God. It was in that spirit that I decided to revisit the 1978 Grammy Award winner for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. The only bumpy lyric was "Don't change the color of your hair."

In my opinion, the original recording is Phil Ramone's finest five minutes as a record producer. The groove, the choice of instruments (including Richard Tee's gorgeous - and uncredited – electric piano playing [*see Sam Lupowitz's comment below]), those wordless backup vocals (or is that a Mellotron?), the beautiful minimal string arrangement, and especially Phil Woods's sax solo, easily the hippest sax solo on any pop record in the last half-century. Ramone has a great song to work with, of course, but it could have easily turned schmaltzy or goopy, and I think it's to his credit that that recording is as fresh-sounding and honest as it is.

My wife thought that perhaps this version was a little too over-arranged, too self-conscious. That's of course one of the greatest dangers an arranger has to face – how to infuse your personality into the song without overwhelming it. It's a balancing act. I think, in this case, since the song is so well-known, so iconic, it could probably bear the weight of all the ideas I threw at it. But it's definitely tricky. For example, it occurred to me that the best way to make sure you really understood the importance of the title was to avoid saying it – because you know the song, your ear will finish the phrase, but you'll think about it differently because I didn't sing it. Or maybe that pulls you out of the song and the experience too much. It's hard to know, and I didn't want to let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" as far as this project was concerned, so I just decided to try it.

The hardest thing about this (other than the harmonica, which I'd never played before yesterday) was finding the right style for the vocal. If I played it too low-key, the song got boring; if I pushed it too hard, I sounded like I was auditioning my club act for a cruise ship. This isn't something I usually have to worry about with my own songs, since I feel like my job is just to bring the music and the lyrics into the light where people can hear them for the first time; since nobody's hearing "Just The Way You Are" for the first time, it's harder to find the tone.

In "Movin' Out," I thumped on the guitar for percussion; in "The Stranger," I hit the guitar case; finally, I've moved on to playing the guitar itself, BUT... only a two-note figure. Perhaps by the time we get to "Everybody Has A Dream," I'll even play a chord.

Just The Way You Are (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown
Just The Way You Are
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion, guitar, harmonica & vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 1/12/12

Some of you have been asking about the technical process by which I'm recording these things here at Casa JRB, so here's a very wonky paragraph about this song:

For this track, I started by beatboxing to a click – my vocal mic (which I use for pretty much everything except the piano) is this gorgeous thing, a K2 from Røde – they don't make them in this style anymore, they've changed from a tube to a condenser, but I love this mic. Once I had gone on making silly mouth noises for about five minutes, I isolated the four-bar segment where I thought I sounded most on the beat, and I looped that – GarageBand makes that super easy. I needed a bass drum sound, so I thumped on my guitar and then used a GarageBand default EQ called "Isolate Sub Bass Drum," which worked perfectly. Once I had the loop set (and to be honest, the loop doesn't change at all for the whole six minutes of the track), I laid down a piano track. My piano is a Yamaha C5 that I bought from Bondy Piano Service in 2001 when I was writing The Last Five Years. The piano mic is a Røde NT4 stereo condenser mic. (Those two mics are really the only ones I ever use, though I did use the built-in mic on my MacBook for the handclaps in "The Stranger.") My original version of the piano solo was actually three times as long, so then I set about tightening it up, and once I had done that, I recorded the first of many vocal takes. Then I added the snaps, but realized that I still needed something with a higher pitch for the rhythm track, so I got out a Grover tambourine that I stole many years ago from the Parade pit at Lincoln Center when the show closed. (Neither the tambourine nor the snaps are looped, for reasons I can't possibly explain except that perhaps I enjoy the meditative nature of playing one note every measure for six and a half minutes.) Then I added the guitar (I have one of these guys, which I bought so I could write The Bridges of Madison County on guitar) and the backing vocals. At the very end, still looking for one more thing to fill up some of the air, I grabbed my daughter's Little Lyon Easy Learning Harmonica, which happened to be in the right key, and I blew randomly into it until I hit pitches that fit the chords. GarageBand drove the entire thing, and the mics all ran through a MOTU Traveler (this one, in fact, but they make a better version now). I've got a MacBook Pro (17"), and I monitor using a set of Sony MDR-7506 headphones and these beauties, the Bowers & Wilkins MM-1 desktop speakers, which I got at the Apple Store and love unreasonably.

I'm fully aware that the next song is "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," and I'm suitably anxious.

[Oh, here are the two previous entries, to save you unnecessary clicking.]

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown

The Stranger (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown

UPDATE: The next track is now posted here!

THE STRANGER, STRANGER

2012-01-08T00:28:21Z

The second track on The Stranger is the title track, a song that on the original album bounces in turn from smoky film noir jazz to Steely Dan-style rock to tropical disco and back again over the course of five minutes and fifty-one seconds (with the best drumming and bass playing on the whole album).

As soon as I finished "Movin' Out," I started worrying about how to pull this next song together. The biggest issue was the "Stranger Theme" that bookends the song. I didn't want to keep the two musical ideas separate as Billy had on the original, so I kept putting off recording the song until I had figured out how to integrate them. As you'll hear, I think I came up with a pretty elegant solution. (One problem that solved itself immediately: my whistling range is about four notes, so I knew I wasn't going to try to reproduce Billy's virtuoso whistling solo.)

The original tempo is about 92 bpm, which I bumped up to 107, with a sort of reggae feel. I dropped the key a major third, mainly to accommodate the falsetto stuff I wanted to do in the theme. In the verses, I changed some of the chords just to simplify the harmonic motion since the tempo was so much faster. I also reharmonized sections of the bridge, but that was kind of inadvertent; the way I'm playing it is just the way I've heard it all these years, and I was surprised to look at the sheet music and see that it wasn't really that at all!

The percussion on "Movin' Out" was provided by the body of my acoustic guitar; the percussion here was actually my guitar case. It's amazing when you're recording how everything in the studio starts to look like an instrument.

The Stranger (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown
The Stranger
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion and vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 1/7/12

Oh God, the next one is "Just The Way You Are." All right, follow me on Twitter and I'll let you know when it's ready (probably not until February). And Happy New Year!
UPDATE: The next track is now posted here!

SET LIST, 12/9/11, SEATTLE WA.

2011-12-09T21:34:13Z

A warm and wonderful crowd at the Falls Theatre at ACT last night – my first solo concert ever in Seattle, and it felt like home. Thank you all for being so welcoming and for laughing at my endless patter!

All Things In Time
I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
Long Long Road
She Cries
Being A Geek
King of the World
Wondering
When You Say Vegas
The Old Red Hills of Home
Caravan of Angels
Moving Too Fast
Someone To Fall Back On

It was great to be able to come out and support Broadway Bound and their fantastic production of 13. I'm looking forward to working with the kids this afternoon and then partying at opening night tonight!

You're fantastic, Seattle! I'll try to come back soon!

ODE TO BILLY JOEL

2011-11-27T05:32:40Z

Billy Joel's LP The Stranger was released at the end of September, 1977, and I'd guess it made its way to our house in Rockland County about two months later, presumably because my mom or dad was into "Just The Way You Are" or "She's Always A Woman." (They didn't buy many records when I was a kid; in fact, the only other one I can recall showing up around this time was Barbra Streisand's Greatest Hits Volume 2.) Which means that my life was changed some time around the beginning of 1978, although I don't remember any specific moment of discovery; at some point, I just started listening to The Stranger and never stopped.

I'm not sure it's my favorite Billy Joel album (that's probably 52nd Street) and I don't even know if it's the best collection of his songwriting (I might vote for The Nylon Curtain), but to me, it's the most elemental, definable, quintessential LP he ever released, sort of the ur-Billy. And in terms of me looking back to figure out how I turned into the songwriter I am now, I think that The Stranger – with its warring impulses of blue-collar rock versus Tin Pan Alley sophistication, art-rock ambition versus Baroque intimacy, slick and polished production versus rambunctious and ragged playing – comes closest to predicting the kind of work I ended up doing and loving.

For the last couple of months, I've been deep in writing three different shows, spitting out songs as quickly as I can. When I went down to my studio yesterday to write yet another piece for The Bridges of Madison County, I felt that I needed a break; I needed, if only for a minute, to engage with some music that wasn't my own. And so, having already reckoned with two of my musical heroes on this blog (Paul Simon and Stephen Sondheim), I thought that perhaps the time had come to reckon with Billy Joel, and maybe even to try and connect with not just one song but in fact an entire artistic statement.

Who knows whether I'm going to follow through and finish this, but my plan is to record every song on The Stranger, in order; me singing and playing everything. I don't want to spend much time on any given track, it's really more about following an initial impulse that springs up based on thirty-four years of living and breathing this material. I'm less interested in my own performance than in the musical give-and-take I feel when confronting these iconic creations. And since my GarageBand setup is fairly primitive, I'm not going to go nuts about the audio quality.

"Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" is actually a tricky one to start with. For a variety of reasons, it's not my favorite track on the album – it's the sloppiest lyric (in the first verse, "some day" is supposed to rhyme with "country" and wind up with "money"; for a writer as meticulous as Joel usually is, this is mystifying), it doesn't have a bridge, there's that whole "Cadillac-ac-ac-ac-ac" thing which I couldn't do without feeling like an idiot... But most significantly, there's the "attitude" thing. The fans know what I mean, and so do the detractors. What creeps into Billy Joel's work from time to time is a snarl, an assertion that he's "hard" or "street," an insistence that he is a real Rock guy. (The legendary rock critic Robert Christgau refers to it as the "spoiled brat" thing, and while I don't agree with Christgau much, that's a pretty accurate assessment.) His anger is genuine, and I recognize a kindred rage even without having met the guy, but the songs in which he expressed that anger by "rocking out" feel, to me at least, considerably less honest than when he writes more sophisticated or gentle music. It's not that "Movin' Out" or "You May Be Right" or "Pressure" aren't good songs; they're very well realized and smartly constructed pieces of craftsmanship. But they don't resonate for me the way so much of his other work does, and trying to find that resonance is part of what this project is about. It was a challenge to find my own way to that attitude, my own organically honest version of the "spoiled brat" thing, but I think I got there eventually, and in so doing, I gained a different perspective on the song. It's not just a wry lyric, it's also a real groove, and ultimately it was a lot of fun putting this together.

I don't sing as high as Billy does, so I took the song down a minor third; and I sped the tempo up considerably. Ultimately, it ended up having a kind of Latin feel, and I also think that the handclaps lend it a kind of "Slip Kid" vibe (we'll get to my Pete Townshend obsession another year).

So here's the first of my attempts to reckon with The Stranger and, by extension, to reckon with the work of possibly my most direct and obvious influence. I'm hoping that this "conversation" with Billy Joel's work ends up reverberating in unexpected ways through my own writing.

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion and vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 11/25/11

Follow me on Twitter, if you have nothing better to do with your valuable time. I'll alert you there as to when the next track is ready (probably in a couple of weeks).
UPDATE: The next track is now posted here!

SET LIST 10/15/11, INDIANAPOLIS, IN.

2011-10-16T07:01:39Z

Mostly the same songs as last night, but with one significant difference. Before the show, Sho and I were told that some members of the previous night's audience were disappointed not to hear "Stars and the Moon." Now, I like to make the audience happy, but we did a two-hour show with eighteen songs, we can't do everything, for God's sakes, we're not machines, what do they want from me, I'm giving my blood and sweat up there... Blah blah blah, I was getting all sensitive and defensive, and Sho said, "Dude, I know it, let's do it." (She actually said, "Jason never lets me do that song," and I was like, "What does that mean? You can do the song whenever you want!" I don't understand women. Whatever.) So I said, "Well, if you really know it, maybe we'll do it." So for the encore, I called Sho back up and she sang the living hell out of it. No rehearsal. Just pulled it out of her back pocket. She's amazing.

Thanks to the Columbia Club Cabaret and everyone here in Indianapolis for two wonderful shows. Hope I'll be seeing you again soon!

All Things In Time (Shoshana Bean)
I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
Long Long Road
And I Will Follow (Shoshana)
King of the World
Another Life from The Bridges of Madison County (Shoshana)
Wondering from The Bridges of Madison County
I'd Give It All For You (Shoshana & JRB)
Being A Geek

INTERMISSION

Nothing In Common
When You Say Vegas from Honeymoon In Vegas
Anywhere But Here from Honeymoon In Vegas (Shoshana)
Still Hurting (Shoshana)
The Old Red Hills of Home
Caravan of Angels
Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Shoshana)
Moving Too Fast
Stars and the Moon (Shoshana)
Someone To Fall Back On

SET LIST 10/14/11, INDIANAPOLIS, IN.

2011-10-15T06:21:28Z

My first concert in about six months, and what a pleasure to do it in front of a sold-out house here at the Columbia Club, and with Shoshana Bean singing so gorgeously all night. Thanks to Lee Lessack for setting us up with this swell gig, and thanks to Shannon Forsell and Anne Miller for taking such great care of us!

All Things In Time (Shoshana)
I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
Long Long Road
And I Will Follow (Shoshana)
King of the World
Still Hurting (Shoshana)
Another Life from The Bridges of Madison County (Shoshana)
Wondering from The Bridges of Madison County
I'd Give It All For You (Shoshana & JRB)
Being A Geek

INTERMISSION

Nothing In Common
When You Say Vegas from Honeymoon In Vegas
Anywhere But Here from Honeymoon In Vegas (Shoshana)
The Old Red Hills of Home
Caravan of Angels
Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Shoshana)
Moving Too Fast
Someone To Fall Back On

One more show tomorrow night, and then back to NY for more rewrites and rehearsals for the workshop of a new show!

IN CELEBRATION OF 13 (THOUSAND FOLLOWERS!)

2011-10-06T00:35:42Z

At some point last night, I reached 13,000 followers on Twitter. What makes that particular number extra cool is that the day I hit 13,000 is three years to the day from 13's opening night on Broadway, October 5, 2008! 13 and 13,000? Right? ADMIT IT, IT'S COOL. I have to admit that 13,000 feels like an awful lot of people, especially since I still don't know exactly what I'm supposed to do with Twitter in the first place. But I am grateful that those thirteen thousand people apparently have some interest in whatever inanities I tweet, and therefore today I shall celebrate by posting two very rare 13 artifacts!

(I know, compared to Ariana Grande's 817,000 followers, my number seems pretty paltry. Stop raining on my parade, haterz.)

Before going into rehearsal for the production at Goodspeed in the summer of 2008, our producer asked me to make some high-quality demos of the new songs I was writing for the show so that he could lure investors with them. So I got a great band of LA's finest session musicians and called in some very fancy talents to help me sing the songs.

The brilliantly funny Jesse Tyler Ferguson (176,000 followers) came in to play Archie to my Evan for this number, which, as you can see, remained essentially unchanged when the show opened seven months later.

All Hail The Brain (JRB, Jesse Tyler Ferguson) by MrJasonRBrown
All Hail The Brain/Terminal Illness from 13 (demo recording, 2008)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
c 2008 Semolina Farfalle Music Co. (ASCAP)
JRB & Jesse Tyler Ferguson: vocals
JRB: piano
James Harrah: guitars
Jon Baker: electric bass
Tom Walsh: drums
Recorded March 1, 2008 at Umbrella Media, Chatsworth CA by Andy Waterman; vocals recorded and mixed by Jon Baker
Produced by Jason Robert Brown

The other track is considerably different than anything currently in the score of 13. "Anything You Want" was written for the top of Act Two (back when the show was going to have two acts). The story: It's the big football game – the Quayle Quails (led by Brett) against the dreaded Thunderhawks. But Brett can't concentrate, because his mind is fixated on the events that transpired at the movie theatre two nights before, when Kendra broke up with him. Since then, Kendra's been calling to apologize and get him back, but the conniving Lucy has been using every available technique to press her advantage. It all comes to a head here at the game, where Lucy and Kendra – both cheerleaders for Brett's team – stand ready to act on Brett's command. Brett is torn – who should he choose? In his distraction, he keeps getting sacked. But finally, disoriented and punch-drunk after having been knocked over several times by the opposing team, Brett finally succumbs to Lucy's siren-call and engages in a massive tongue-lock with her. Thus fortified by lust, he leads his team to victory.

We actually performed this number at Goodspeed, but it got cut for a number of very good reasons, not least of which was that we really didn't have enough boys in the cast to make a credible football team. Another, perhaps larger, issue was that it was a long number about Brett, Kendra and Lucy, but the characters the audience really needed to spend time on were Evan, Archie and Patrice. So out it went. But now you can hear this exuberant if ridiculous rendition, featuring me in full meathead mode as Brett, the always lovely Kim Huber as Kendra, and the deliciously evil Susan Egan (only 2,000 followers - let's get on that, Tweeps!) as Lucy. (Note also James Harrah's triumphant Brian May impression in the last minute.)

Anything You Want (JRB, Kim Huber, Susan Egan) by MrJasonRBrown

Anything You Want written for 13 (demo recording, 2008)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
c 2008 Semolina Farfalle Music Co. (ASCAP)
JRB, Kim Huber & Susan Egan: vocals
JRB: piano
James Harrah: guitars
Jon Baker: electric bass
Tom Walsh: drums
Recorded March 1, 2008 at Umbrella Media, Chatsworth CA by Andy Waterman; vocals recorded and mixed by Jon Baker
Produced by Jason Robert Brown

Thanks to all my Twitter followers for following me, and more importantly, Happy Anniversary to all my 13iacs! When's the revival?

COMING TOGETHER (Live, 2002)

2011-09-10T23:43:01Z

There isn't much I can say about this song or the events that inspired it. I don't perform it very often anymore because it now feels like a promise that wasn't kept. But for several years after I wrote it, I had the great good fortune to have Adriane Lenox join me and share her heartbreaking empathy and understanding and extraordinary vocal power. The concert from which this recording is drawn was one of the most emotional and memorable nights of my life as a performer – me, Gary and Randy, and 60 singers (many of them my dearest friends) in the Great Hall at Cooper Union one year after 9/11. Outside of the 500 people who were there that night, I think I'm the only person who's ever heard this version, and I offer it here as a thank you to Adriane, and as a perhaps naively hopeful blessing and memorial.

Coming Together (JRB & Adriane Lenox, Cooper Union 10/25/02) by MrJasonRBrown

Recorded live at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, 25 October 2002 (Recording engineer: John Guth)
Lead vocals: Adriane Lenox, JRB
Piano: JRB
Acoustic guitar: Gary Sieger
Fretless bass: Randy Landau
Concert produced by Howard Stokar
Choir conducted by Joel Fram
Choir: Sopranos: Suzanne Adams, Diana Brownstone, Lisa Capps, Alissa Dean, Elizabeth Faulkner, Jill Geddes, Laura Griffith, Leslie Henstock, Emily Klein, Tracy Michailidis, Aysa Morehead, Jessica Paschke, Emi Ridenour, Kari Swenson Riely, Robin Sneider, Jen Vaden, Jessica Wright
Altos: Mimi Bessette, Julie Dingman, Julie Foldesi, Angela Howell, Shira Kirsner, Katie Kozlowski, Cindy Marchionda, Jen Piech, Janina Reiner, Sonya Robinson, Caroline Sorokoff, Jade Stice, Georgia Stitt, Landon Westbrook
Tenors: Roy Chicas, Tim Edwards, Dan Everett, Daniel Frank Kelley, Charles King, Keith Byron Kirk, Ian Knauer, Adam Korn, Robert Krahen, James Marino, Scottie McLaughlin, Randy Redd, Kwame M. Remy, Lawrence Street
Baritones: D.B. Bonds, William Holab, Mark Kressel, Gregory Marlow, Andrew Meidenbauer, Ron Morehead, Tracy Paul Muchesko, Brian Nash, Tim Salamandyk, Caesar Samayoa, Tally Sessions, Tom Story, Patrick Taylor, Grant Wenaus, Correy West

"THE TRUMPET OF THE SWAN" COMES TO LIFE

2011-06-23T19:37:07Z

As you can read in the news feature I posted yesterday, the CD of The Trumpet of the Swan: A Novel Symphony is now available for purchase and download. I'm so thrilled that people are getting to hear and fall in love with this story.

One of my favorite movements to write was the section when Louis the Swan checks into the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia. During the course of the scene, he walks around the room switching the lights on and off, then he calls room service and orders a watercress sandwich, then he reads a newspaper article about himself and what a big success he's becoming, and that makes him nostalgic for home and his old life on the lake in Canada, and so he gets in the shower bath and takes out his trumpet and plays a song for his inamorata, Serena, until the front desk calls up to let him know that the Ritz-Carlton does not allow guests to play brass instruments in the bathrooms.

On the actual CD, all of this is narrated by the magnificent John Lithgow, speaking Marsha Norman's delightful adaptation of E.B. White's classic novel. But I thought it would be fun for you to hear a version without narration as well – this is a rough mix from the orchestra recording sessions in February.

Louis at the Ritz (Trumpet of the Swan rough mix) by MrJasonRBrown

"Louis at the Ritz (rough mix)" from The Trumpet of the Swan (2011)
Music by Jason Robert Brown
Text adapted by Marsha Norman from the novel by E. B. White
Orchestration by Sam Davis
Conducted by Jason Robert Brown
Christopher Michael Venditti: solo trumpet
Jeff Driskill: solo bass clarinet
Sid Page: solo violin
David O: piano
Randy Landau: fretless electric bass
Georgia Stitt: associate conductor
Flute/Piccolo: Gary Woodward; Flute: Sara Andon; Oboe/English Horn: John Yoakum, Jonathan Davis; Clarinet: Phil O'Connor; Clarinet/Bass Clarinet: Michael Grego; Bassoon: Rose Corrigan, Ken Munday; French Horn: Joe Meyer (principal), Brian O'Connor, Justin Hageman, John Reynolds; Trumpet: Malcolm McNab (principal), Jeff Bunnell, Larry Hall; Trombone: Andy Martin (principal), Alan Kaplan, Charlie Morillas; Drums: Bernie Dresel; Timpani/Percussion: Wade Culbreath; Percussion: Brian Kilgore, Mike Englander; Harp: Amy Wilkins; Violins: Sid Page (concertmaster), Amy Hershberger, Michele Richards, Tiffany Hu, Katherine Livolsi-Landau, Christian Hebel, Joel Derouin, Peter Kent, Barbra Porter, Charlie Bisharat, John Wittenberg, Becky Bunnell, Norm Hughes, Ana Landaurer, Julie Rogers, Darius Campo; Violas: Jennie Hansen (principal), Bob Becker (principal), Laura Pearson, Denyse Buffum, Luke Maurer, Cheryl Gates; Celli: Armen Ksajikian (principal), Dane Little, Steve Richards, Giovanna Clayton, Dennis Karmazyn; Contrabasses: Trey Henry (principal), Nico Abondolo, Dave Stone Dan Savant: music coordinator
Recorded by Andy Waterman at EastWest Recording Studios (Ethan Walter & Jeremy Miller, associate engineers), Hollywood CA, February 2, 2011

Order your copy from PSClassics.com or download it right now from the Amazon.com MP3 store for only $5.99!

Happy Trumpeting!

SING AN AMERICAN TUNE

2011-05-19T00:18:47Z

I have been so inspired by Paul Simon for my entire creative life, and never more so than now, when he's got a spectacular new album, So Beautiful or So What, for which he's been touring around the country with the most incredible band I've ever seen onstage in my life.

So today, when I was trying out some new things in my studio (I finally upgraded GarageBand after five years), I decided to take a crack at one of Paul's many masterpieces. It's an honor to sing a song this beautiful. (This is one take with no fixes.)

American Tune (Paul Simon) by jason-robert-brown

American Tune
Music and lyric by Paul Simon (1973)
JRB: piano and vocals
Recorded live at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 5/18/11

A LOVE LETTER TO A TERRIBLE SONG

2011-05-11T06:34:17Z

Among the many problems particular to musical theatre writers is the occasional need to write a song that the audience thinks is bad. Some moment in the script will call for a delusional hack or an over-the-hill ingenue to burst forth with what they think is a fantastic number, and we are immediately supposed to realize that it's terrible. The problem is that the moment is not just about the song, it's also about illuminating the character, and so the writers of the show must be very careful. It can't just be a bad song; it also has to be good.

Of the Golden Age songwriters, Comden & Green especially seem to have warmed to this peculiar task. "I Wish I Was Dead" from On The Town, "Thanks a Lot But No Thanks" from It's Always Fair Weather, "The Wrong Note Rag" from Wonderful Town, and virtually the entire score of Say Darling are all masterful showcases of deliberate mediocrity. Sondheim and Jule Styne had to face up to the issue with Dainty June's material in Gypsy, and Sondheim on his own battled it with his sort-of-loving pastiches of "Rain on the Roof" and "Ah Paree!" in Follies. My personal favorite creator of good bad songs would be Frank Loesser; both "Bushel and a Peck" and "Take Back Your Mink" manage simultaneously to be utterly stupid and totally fabulous.

But then there's the issue of Cole Porter.

Those of us who love the work of Cole Porter know that, for all his genius and technical facility, the man was perfectly capable of signing his name to some of the laziest, most reprehensibly inane dogshit in the history of the musical theatre.

Even his two indisputably great theatrical scores, Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate, have some serious turds floating in the champagne. Sure, you can have "I Get A Kick Out Of You" and "So In Love," but you must endure "Bon Voyage" or "We Sing of Love." And before you argue that Porter's generation didn't take the art of character writing as seriously as Loesser or Sondheim, let me note that there is nothing in the entire catalogues of Rodgers & Hart or Irving Berlin or Jerome Kern that's as brazenly dreadful as "Bianca."

I fell in love with Cole Porter's songs in high school. I was hired as a second pianist at a local community theatre's production of Cole (a British revue of his songs) and was thunderstruck by the invention and daring of the writing. It's safe to say that not many other 15-year-olds in 1985 were spending their afternoons marveling at the chords for "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" or howling with laughter at "You've Got That Thing," but those songs were a thousand times more interesting to me than football or the Nanuet Mall. I was simply amazed. The pop music I had been happily listening to up to that point did not concern itself with craft; Porter's stuff was craft to the nth degree, with deep pockets of emotion hidden in the lining. It was captivating and inspiring. I went to the Finkelstein Memorial Library and, with the cheerful lack of discernment that is the hallmark of teenage infatuation, I checked out every LP that had a Cole Porter song on it, one after the other.

And that is how I discovered "The Red Blues."

I'm not a big fan of the Broadway cast album of Silk Stockings – something about Don Ameche just strikes me as oleaginous. But the movie is something else entirely, a sumptuous lark with a divine Cyd Charisse at the center, courted by a somewhat musty but still enormously charming Fred Astaire. It's not the best MGM musical ever made, by a long shot, but it's very funny and has some sensational dancing, and I've watched it hundreds of times.

Towards the end of the story, Boroff, a great Russian composer, declares that he has given up writing longhair music and fallen in love with American jazz. To prove it, he shows us the new song he has written. Here are the lyrics:

We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red Blues.
We got the Red, Red, Red -
That's what we said -
Red Blues.

In the movie, these are the only lyrics. The Broadway version actually continues with "Why not the white blues?/Why not the black blues?/Why not the" Oh my God I can't go on.

And the music? I guess I'll concede that some of the chord changes are surprising, but the melody is unimaginably pedestrian. I guess it fits the lyrics perfectly.

Can you imagine the balls it must have taken to write that crap and then bring it in to the producers of your expensive new Broadway musical and say, "Here's the big 11 o'clock number?" I am in AWE.

Now mind you, by the time you get to "The Red Blues" in Silk Stockings, you've already suffered through the stultifying "Josephine" (mercifully truncated in the final print of the film) and "Fated to Be Mated" (horrifying!), and still to come is the unspeakable "Ritz Roll and Rock." But even in that august company, "The Red Blues" stands out with shocking impudence.

So why do I love it? It's not about Cyd Charisse, though her dancing is retina-searingly sexy. It's entirely about the music.

If you have any aspirations to be an arranger or an orchestrator for the musical theatre, "The Red Blues" shows you just how high the bar is set. The arrangement in the film is credited to Albert Woodbury and Skip Martin, who were MGM's go-to guys for "hot jazz"; and the music supervisor was André Previn, who knew plenty about how to make things swing (listen to the recording of "My Fair Lady" that he made with his trio – the more staid the song is, the harder they cook).

So here were three arrangers who had invented virtually every trick in the book for making a big number build and land, and they had at their disposal the MGM Studio Orchestra, which I'll argue was the best collection of studio musicians on the planet at that time. So let's look at what they do with this lox of a song to make it fly.

The Broadway version of the song is depressingly straightforward, a perfunctory Dixieland arrangement that's several metronome markings slower than the movie. Woodbury and Martin have something very different in mind.

They start with just the instruments you see on the screen, an upright piano, drums, balalaika (no, really!), accordion and trumpet, plus an upright bass that must be hiding behind the curtain. (The trumpet doesn't play until the second chorus, but there's the actor idiotically miming away from the beginning anyway.)

When we get to the first instrumental break (at 0:47 in the video), Woodbury and Martin start playing a fun game. The orchestration here is supposed to evoke the 1930's – the clarinet on top of the woodwind choir, and the brass playing a "square," ricky-ticky figure.

The next chorus (at 1:24) jumps ahead a decade; it's all Glenn Miller/Benny Goodman-style Big Band playing.

Once Cyd Charisse takes over (at the two-minute mark), we are finally in the Here-And-Now of the 1950's, a wonderful choice given the evolution of Charisse's character. Even the orchestra mix changes to a much wider and fuller sound.

The first two notes of this section are taken from the melody of the song, but after that, it's straight-up blues. Dig how the seventh and eighth measure jump into double-time, then settle back in to the slow blues tempo for four bars before effortlessly rolling between both for the last eight measures of the section.

Note also how the arrangement flows without hitting every kick and turn of the dance routine. Most contemporary Broadway dance arrangers and choreographers collude in the idea that a movement onstage is somehow insufficient without a cymbal, triangle or choir of trumpets to accent it. It makes dance numbers sound like circus routines, and I find the practice unmusical, annoying and distracting. This clip shows how utterly unnecessary that is.

The choruses starting at 2:55 are classic MGM-style Big Band writing. I love how in the first chorus, the trombones trade the melody off to the trumpets (at 3:06), and in the second chorus, the process is reversed at the same place. The band is sizzling by the time we get to 3:38, and those trumpet hits are my favorite part of the whole song, simple but deeply satisfying.

Then we get to the choir entrance to build to the finale, a classic MGM effect (think of Ann Miller in "Shakin' The Blues Away" in Easter Parade). I'm nuts for this insane double-time feel, and the brass figures are a hoot. You can barely hear it on the YouTube clip, but the accordion player is absolutely blowing his brains out in this section (you can hear it much more clearly on the soundtrack album version, which I'll link below). It's a wonderful touch because it connects the number back to the "Russian band" feel that started it off. You don't need the accordion, but it's part of the character of the movie and the song. As ludicrous as the song is, the arrangers are trying to give the sequence a kind of musical integrity.

How did anyone get four and a half minutes of ass-kicking music out of that rotten tune? Well, that's what I love about it: These arrangers just threw one musical idea after another at it, believing that sheer inventiveness and dexterity could elevate a song of nap-inducing banality to something pretty close to Show Business Heaven.

And they were right.

(You can buy the soundtrack album version of "The Red Blues" – in a delightfully clear remix – on iTunes, by clicking here. Enjoy!)

--

POSTSCRIPT: Music director and scholar John Baxindine wrote to tell me that, while he did not disagree with my opinion of the song itself, he felt obliged to augment my somewhat incomplete understanding of the authorship of "The Red Blues." I am both a little relieved and a little disappointed to acknowledge the information John passed on. The following excerpt is from Steven Suskin's invaluable book "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" (Oxford University Press, 2009):

With [Silk Stockings] in trouble during an extended tryout and the ailing Porter back in New York, [Don] Walker [the principal orchestrator] was called upon to fill in for the composer, as described in a letter from Walker to general manager Monty Schaff: "As practically everyone connected with Silk Stockings knows, I had quite a bit to do with the tune of 'Red Blues.' In case this situation worries you, you may file this statement. I hereby, in consideration of this payment for $500, relinquish any claim upon the aforesaid production and or Cole Porter for any composing I may have done in connection with 'Red Blues.'"

GETTIN' READY FOR HENRY STREET

2011-04-25T14:34:04Z

Production meetings, band rehearsals, sound checks, publicity shots, camera runthroughs; I just hit the ground in New York and I'm already running.

Thursday night, I begin a three-night stand at the gorgeous Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, with the incredible Anika Noni Rose as my guest! April 28, 29 & 30 (Thursday through Saturday) at 8 pm.

Add in my ENORMOUS eight-piece Caucasian Brass Band and you might think it couldn't get better. But you're wrong! Because the whole show only costs $35 a ticket. That is correct, one-quarter of the price of an orchestra ticket for a Broadway musical, and you get two Tony Award winners and a big band and several extremely complicated chords, not to mention a generous helping of mixed meters and high belting.

But that's still not all! The really cool part? You might get to be on television! These concerts are being taped for PBS, and we need audiences packed full of raucous, joyful JRB freaks so that when the camera pans the house, it doesn't look like a Yizkor service in Wyoming.

This is what it looked like last year when Anika and I played a sold-out run at Birdland:

Also, this:

And this:

See what I mean?

Look, all of the above silliness notwithstanding, I'm very excited about these shows because they're going to be very special. I get to do a lot of new and old material with one of the best singing actresses on the planet Earth and a sensational bunch of musicians, including my best friends in the world. Will you come along and join the party? I'd love to have you there.

Click right here to buy tickets, and don't wait too long – Anika and I sold out our Birdland run last year, and sold out our run in London's West End in September.

Also while I'm town, I have several very exciting meetings about Honeymoon In Vegas. And then, once this is done, I run back to LA to finish mixing the CD of The Trumpet of the Swan, which we hope to have in stores in June.

Come out to the shows this week! See you there!