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This is not another challenge, I just want to know what the tune is! Pasquale Grasso plays this at the beginning of one of his instruction videos, it sounds vaguely familiar but I can't put a name to it. Any ideas?
Here is the audio, he only plays one chorus:
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It’s the name that tune challenge...
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well I've failed cos I can't name it!
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He certainly has the freedom of a keyboard player. That's probably the title.
Amazing. It would do my head in listening to a whole hour of it, though.
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Originally Posted by
bleakanddivine
What Am I Here For?
hmm, not sure. There’s a very distinctive phrase PG plays at about 9 seconds, I don’t hear it in that tune. The initial phrase is quite similar admittedly but I think it’s played twice not once as in PG’s tune.
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It's "What Am I Here For?". Grasso adds a few (!) embellishments. Here's a more representative rendition:
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Possibly, although I have now played the Ellington tune through (I already had a chart for it) and also a simplified version of PG's tune transposed to the same key, and there are still a lot of differences. Hard to say really.
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Grasso adds a few hundred notes to the actual melody, but I would bet the rent money that's where he started. He's deeply into Bud Powell, which means that many, many notes are required. Some would call it excess, some would say it's expressive chops. I have to admit I'm impressed by his chops, but I can't listen to him for a long time.
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It has some melodic resemblance to "Somewhere Along the Way", but the bridge PG plays is quite a bit shorter than the bridge to "Somewhere Along the Way". It reminds me a bit of someone trying to write one of those 1930s-1940s "jazz etudes" that sound vaguely like popular standards, tunes in the style of Carl Kress or George M. Smith, etc. The fancy voice leading at the end of the A sections especially.
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Thanks for that, I think you may be right. The melody is a much closer fit to ‘Somewhere Along the Way’. Especially that bit at 9 seconds, that’s what clinches it for me. (PG plays it with a rising major 3rd interval rather than minor 3rd, but I don’t think that matters much).
He does take some liberties with the bridge by the sound of it!
On the video he then segues straight into a breakneck version of the bebop tune ‘Reets and I’, so he probably couldn’t wait to get into it!
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