Videos #13/14: Bye Bye Blackbird

I think comparing these two videos is the best way to understand why I love working with this group so much. We’re able to play the song wildly differently depending on the setting, but I think both performances are effective and powerful.

For me, “Bye Bye Blackbird” is Nancy Harms’ signature tune. It captures her so well – it’s dark and exotic, it’s classic yet surprising, and it tells a story about leaving comfort to seek higher ground.

Nancy always introduces her arrangement by saying that this tune is usually done as a straight-ahead swinger, but she decided to go a different direction with it, because whenever she delivered the lyrics of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” she noticed a depth in them. The song is about leaving what’s familiar in order to take a chance, something that – for those who know Nancy – resonates with Nancy’s own story. Nancy was a small-town music educator before she decided to seek big cities, a singing career, Europe, and adventure through music. Nancy says – and I think rightly so – that leaving one’s comfort zone often seems obvious to other people (“of course he should get out of her bad relationship,” or “obviously, you should quit that job with bad hours”) but even small changes require great bravery for those willing to try something new.

Musically, this arrangement from Nancy and Robert Bell uses a bass ostinato to resituate the tune in a minor key. For our arrangement, we had Lucas play the bass part on the bass clarinet, whose dark, deep moodiness matches the mystery of the tune well, I think. Then, the bridge is an arrival point in major, a kind of “pay off” in the middle of the story. The whole arrangement is a giant swell and the ebb, starting with just the exposed texture of bass clarinet and voice and adding elements, volume, and complexity before receding back to the original duet.

In comparing the two performances, I took a very different approach on the piano. Whereas the Blue Whale performance is more percussive and groovy, with more “flashy” piano playing, the house concert performance is all about mood. My favorite moment in the Blue Whale performance is at 4:44 when Lucas and I organically switch places – he takes the lead and I play chords under him; I love that we can have the kind of unspoken musical relationship that we’re both able to step to the front or the back when the music calls for it. The house concert performance, in contrast, has a clear Debussy/Gil Evans influence and really sounds clearly modal in a way that the other doesn’t.

I’m posting a poll over on my Facebook page about which performance people like better. Feel free to click this link to visit my page and take the poll.

Download the free “at_Home/at_Play” EP here.

Bye Bye Blackbird
Pack up all my care and woes
Feeling low here I go
Bye, bye blackbird