April 21, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Call OSHA
Heard in the corporate cafeteria: lite jazz/muzak version of 'Take Five'...in 6/8!
In between anguished howls I paused to reflect on rehearsals of my high school production of Jesus Christ Superstar:
Everything's all right yes - [beat], everything's fine
There ought to be a law...
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at April 21, 2004 6:15 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksJust creating a 6/8 version of Brubeck's "Take Five" is a crime against humanity. I am in shock. I shudder to even think about it ...
... almost as much of a crime as making it 4/4; I've heard versions on jazz radio in that time signature. Grrr ...
Yes, I heard that the other month and said (to myself) "what the f..."? Sacrilege.
What next, Blue Rondo a la Turk as a waltz?
There's a 7/8 measure in ALW's "Memory" (you know, the one from Cats) that was pretty much never played outside the Winter Garden Theatre. Usually the word "time" was doubled in length to cheat it to a 4/4 in the sapp(y/ier) versions.
And that's all I'm-a gonna say 'bout that.
Anyone who's played a lot of Christmas church gigs knows that the second line of "Joy to the World" — "Let earth receive her King!" — is printed in all the standard hymnals with a beat and a half for "King," but invariably sung with three and a half beats for the same word. (I mean counting the rest before the next line.) There's a sort of instinct to standardize and regularize. I'm reminded of the old joke (old if you hang out with musicians, anyway) about the conductor who was asked if he could conduct in 7/8 and said, "Oh, conducting in 7 is very easy; you just count off "one-two-three-four-five-six-sev-en."
(To anyone who didn't get that, I assure you that there exist circles in which it's screamingly funny.)
But "Take Five" in 6/8? Gaaaah, someone is going to spend eternity having his bowels slowly and painfully excavated. Jeez.
You know, I'm having trouble getting a 6/8 "Take Five" even going in my brain.
Did they sort of beer-garden the piano/drum rhythm in the background into an "oom-pah-pah-oom-pah-pah", or what? Yikes.
Derek
Derek Lowe wrote:
"You know, I'm having trouble getting a 6/8 "Take Five" even going in my brain."
Unfortunately, I'm not, and it's not a pleasant experience.
That said, one has to wonder why a music vendor would think 5/4 so unmarketable and change it to 6/8. 5/4 is not a terribly new time sig for popular American music. Between 1850 and 1880 a spate of parlor waltzes were published in 5/4, typically called "five step waltzes". It wasn't a huge phenomenon as popular music goes, but it was real.
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