Impressions of Ipanema

**JazzPadd** · Today, 07:13 PM

Sometimes, a song is so well-known that you don't really need to play it in the usual way. Maybe even that's part of the jazz ethos, to appropriate a song (like the pop songs, show tunes, and movie themes that inspired the early jazzers to do their own things with them). Among us on this forum, we have some wonderfully creative examples of this stretching and kneading the raw materials of a known song into something new, something else all together, a more personalized take sometimes even deconstructing what we see as jazz.

Jobim's "Girl From Ipanema" is certainly a well-known song. It's probably one of the most recorded songs in the history of recording, even ascending it with the help of elevators to provide some distraction from the discomfort of being in a closed space with strangers. It seems a good candidate to just hint at the melody, or put it into an experimental context. In other words, rather than just "playing" a song as in "covering" it as ordinarily done, we can also "play around" with the song. The degree of play seems to be somehow related to the degree with which a listener might be familiar with a song. That was my inspiration.

This is part of a half hour live suite, which began with "Look to the Sky" and ended with "Dindi." I performed it at a local venue as part of a community event commemorating the composer's birthday. I'm not a singer, nor do I have anything like the solo guitar chops to do elaborately varied chord melody arrangements. I conceived it as something more akin to a continuous stream of consciousness from one song to the next. Rather than starting with the venerable and deceptively simple main melody, this short excerpt proceeds with a rubato, improvised version of the bridge melody and moving from one to the next of the three key centers of the original but with a more loose feel. After that, I set down a quasi-bossa groove vamp on Fmaj7 to Gbmaj7 with a looper and improvise a little, eventually quoting the main melody ever so briefly, and moving on to an ambient take on the last part of the main melody. The recording cuts off there, as there wasn't a smooth spot to pause before moving on to the next song; at some point, I might post the entire suite.

For those interested in effector pedals, here is the board I used for this performance:

Impressions of Ipanema-jobim_board-jpg

Right to left, the chain starts with an Effectrode optical compressor, then into three from the GameChanger Audio line, a Plus (to hold notes), a Bigsby (to waver as needed), and a Light spring reverb. The pulsating echo upon which I rely quite a lot here is from the T-Rex recreation of the old Binson rotating drum type echo, which I love more so than other echo effects. Next, there is an ordinary EHX 720 looper, before running it directly into the venue's PA. The whole thing is powered by a One Spot and laid out on an Iranian hand woven wool carpet. It was a several month project putting this performance together, and it was a lot of fun playing it for a small but very appreciative audience. I hope you enjoy it.