All Blues Update/Dream Theater

All Blues met again tonight at Kresge, and we played Chih-yu's arrangement of Dream Theater's "Pull Me Under" for the first time.

Sarah joined us on piano for both pieces! I'm so happy she's branching out.

Dream Theater went very smoothly. Even though it was the first time we'd done the piece, Chih-yu had her vision all written out in nice printed scores and parts, and we basically learned the form she had in mind. We just need to practice our individual parts now, and I just have to improvise something stylistically appropriate in e minor.

So I'll be listening to this piece quite a bit in the next week:


We also tweaked All Blues after rehearsal, and it has a slightly updated form now:

* Start: (12/8 feel) Bass starts vamping the intro, drums joins in, then everyone except voice
* Chih-yu cues the head, which we play twice.
* We go into solos: piano, violin 1 (Paula), violin 1+2 (Jess/Paula duet), violin 2 (Jess), then drums. The drum solo transitions from 12/8 to 11/8. During solos, only bass and drums play along with the soloist, except everyone including bass drops out for the drum solo.
* Intro vamp starts again on bass, and all instruments vamp on it. Chih-yu cues the head and we play the head once only.
* Solos: voice, sax, and bass. During the bass solo, the violins and sax vamp in the background.
* We vamp briefly after the bass solo, then Chih-yu cues the head (2nd half).
* Ending: We repeat the last four bars two additional times, then vamp with everyone doing small improvisations on the vamp, and gradually fade out.

I'm feeling really good about All Blues. I've been practicing improvising on it in my private practice time, and I'm comfortable with it now. I actually had a lot of fun playing it tonight, especially in the final run-through. I felt so loose - it reminded me of something Donal said early on in the class, that he can tell when he is really getting into a piece when he's loose. I think I felt that "looseness" tonight, and that relaxation helped me improvise better.