(Our Love’s) Too Big To Fail (2012)
Genre: Bebop, novelty
I was first introduced to Bebop in the mid-70s when I took a jazz appreciation class from saxophonist Trent Kynaston at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. By the time I moved to Boulder I was fully smitten. I named my dog in honor of Charlie Parker and asked an artist friend to paint a bigger-than life-size mural of the jazz great on my living room wall.
It was fun to relive my earlier infatuation during a Gift of Jazz Bebop composition class in 2012, taught by saxophonist Josh Quinlan. We had three writing assignments for the course: a blues, a contrafact and an original tune, all in the Bebop style.
For my original tune, “Too Big To Fail,” I was able to meld several interests: my love of Bebop, my long-standing attraction to novelty songs, and my obsession with current events (as a social studies educator, it was what I did for a living).
The conscious inspiration for this tune was the song “Romance Without Finance,” a 1944 collaboration between guitarist Tiny Grimes and Charlie Parker. While I borrowed bits and pieces from the harmonic structure of earlier songs (harmonic “borrowing” itself a Bebop tradition), the words were entirely my own.
The housing “bubble” had burst in the United States in 2008 and the resultant “great recession” was said to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The previously obscure names of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in the news as was the Occupy Wall Street movement. I telescoped earlier economic debacles like Enron and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme into the lyrics since all were in common currency (excuse the pun).
For the intro and outro of this piece, I decided to quote a short phrase from the most recognizable song to emerge from the Great Depression. The tradition of quoting musical material (known as quodlibet) is also a hallmark of the Bebop style. My U. S. History students would be able to identify this echo from that earlier economic panic as I used to play Rudy Vallee’s version of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” for my classes whenever we studied the 1930s.
For the debut performance of the piece at Dazzle Jazz Club in Denver, I decided to sing the lyrics myself, which gave me a chance to be the ham that I sometimes am. (See the video of my crooning in the “Live Performances” playlist on my YouTube channel.)
I was grateful to have the expertise of these local jazz musicians for the premiere performance at Dazzle on March 11, 2012:
Josh Quinlan (alto sax)
John Lake (trumpet)
Ben Markley (piano)
Patrick McDevitt (bass)
Alejandro Castaño (drums)
For the 2022 home studio “re-do” of this song, I pulled another rabbit out of the magic hat of jazz tricks, namely the practice of transcribing jazz solos.
Anyone who has worked with MIDI knows how hard it is to get realistic, nuanced, “humanized” instrument sounds. Sampled brass and woodwind instruments are especially difficult. They never sound as good as a skilled musician who has mastered his or her craft.
Without live musicians at my disposal during the pandemic, I took Josh Quinlan’s original, brilliant solo from that night, transcribed it (as best I could) and attempted to render it with my cheesy MIDI keyboard and the sampled instruments I had at hand in my modest home studio. I gave myself the assignment to try to make the “fake” horn parts sound as real as I could. To be sure, the results aren’t as natural as the original, but it taught me valuable lessons about how to try to get a more humanized effect from MIDI. In so doing, I hope I paid respectful homage to Josh’s original solo.