Lonely Woman

Lately I've been feeling the blues. I've been a bit lonely... oh wait, that's not what this is about.

Late Monday night, Donal emailed a few of us from the improv class that we were going to be playing with him in the Festival Jazz Ensemble concert set for tomorrow night. So Wednesday and yesterday, Chih-yu, Paula, Dennis, Donal, and I had rehearsal putting together our piece. It's surprising to me that we've been able to do it on such short notice. I've never prepared an improv piece before, much less planned to perform in one in front of a large audience in Kresge.

The piece we're performing is an arrangement of "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman.

I'll recount how rehearsal went, since it's a model of how jazz/improv pieces can be put together.

Wednesday, Donal brought a lead sheet and we read through it first, just playing the notes straight. Then we experimented with different sets of instruments playing the "A" section. Donal liked the sound of two violins playing the melodies, except purposely not together, to create a "phasing" effect. We thought about how to incorporate the guitar and piano after that, and decided to have them back up a phrase within the "A" section to reinforce it in the second time through ("A" is repeated). We decided to have Chih-yu alone on voice to start off each section. For the "B" section, we had the same general format, and then we had to worry about transitions between the sections, but we didn't work out our final plan until Thursday.

The piece was in flux until the end of the Thursday rehearsal, which is when we really hammered out the transitions. For example, Donal had planned to do a kind of dark, moody solo after the "A" section, but we decided to change the style of it to be less depressing and faster, to contrast the rest of the piece - and to move it to after the "B" section to create a transition back to the recapitulation of the "A" section. After experimenting a bit, Donal made the solo transition into a free jazz section for piano and guitar, with the violins kind of in the background playing parts from "B" until Donal gave us a head nod to cue us to start playing material from "A" again. The piano and guitar would then fade out, leaving the violins to continue the "A" section again. Transition complete. Chih-yu also brought lyrics, which added a layer of meaning to the piece:

Lonely in the night she wonders,
Who can she tell of her heartache?
They that listen do not care.
They don't share heartache.
She is a lonely woman,
No one to cry to at all.

We considered whether the lyrics would give away the intent of the song, but we decided it would be fine, as the audience might not even listen that closely to the words, focusing instead on the emotion in Chih-yu's voice. I personally don't think the lyrics interfere, because it actually can help the audience to imagine the violins, which repeat the melodies sung by the voice, as anguished females, which is what I hear them as.

To sum up the rehearsal experience, I learned that putting together a jazz piece involves the input of everyone in the group - we could (actually, needed to) throw out ideas we jus thought about and wanted to try. Sometimes we liked the ideas, sometimes we scrapped them. But everyone was heard and sometimes the ideas we didn't like prompted new ideas we did. As the rehearsals went on, I could see the piece taking its final form slowly, and it was cool to know how each element in our arrangement came about.

The concert's tomorrow night.