No. 1 Groovy song for Mia and Odile

OK, so I somehow missed the month of September. Just because I didn't blog, doesn't mean I wasn't busy musically...I wrote this cool little instrumental, and I did some more soundtrack work for my favorite non-profit organization. Both videos are posted on my You Tube channel. Here I'll talk about my Groovy song...

What's up with this song and where did the title come from?

This takes some explaining...I've got a music project brewing with some friends from work that has me checking out various famous guitar instrumental pieces. Like Green Onions, by Booker T and the MG's. Or Walk don't run, by the Ventures. Or the amazingly cool Cissy Strut, by the Meters. And I've also been grooving on my James Brown greatest hits CD, and have been trying to play Sex Machine, Popcorn, etc. I also learned Watcha See is Watcha Get, by the Dramatics. I LOVE STAX VOLT. Anyway, this soup gets stirred together with listening to the Dirty Soul Party on WTMD when we drive back from Baltimore late at night from visiting the daughters and it just has me in that zone from the 60's and 70's where cool jazz, blues, and pop overlap. Call it R&B, soul, jazzy funk, whatever, I totally love it.

So...I started cruising the internet looking for guitar lessons on jazzy blues and while checking out Telecasters (OH YEAH, did I mention that all this had me seriously Jonesing for a Tele?) I stumbled on the amazing guitarist Tim Lerch. I can't carry this guys guitar case, but he had a video where he was going through some other freaking amazing but totally unkown to me guitar god's blues song (Tim Green, Lazy Blues I think) and though I sure as hell couldn't play the beautiful stretch chords, I immediately latched on to some of the structure and novel changes, and out popped this Groovy little song. Any guitar geeks, songwriter types that both read this and watch the video should notice how the Ab13 becomes Am7. I like to play with major minor voicings and when I saw that in the Lerch video I felt the voice from the mountain top speak to me...

And now why do I associate this with MIa and Odile? Again this takes some explaining, but I'll try to be brief. Years ago, my daughter Musetta did a report where she looked at dance crazes over the years and she stumbled on The Madison because it shows up in Hairspray, and we have always had a thing for John Waters, Baltimore, etc. Well, if you pull on the Madison thread, which we did, you end up in French new wave cinema watching the coolest dance scene ever where Odile and her Band Apart spontaneously do the Madison in a Paris bistro (video at the top of page). And because Quentin Tarentino is fixated on the French new wave, he riffed on this scence in Pulp Fiction, having Uma Thurman (Mia) pretty much steal the show twisting with John Travolta. So every time I play dance music I think of these dance scenes, and as I first started playing my No. 1 Groovy song I thought I'd stumbled on a Madison style groove...but alas, I don't swing it enough, so it's a little off the mark groove wise, but that's where the inspiration came from. It just got distorted and rendered a little square because I haven't steeped enough in the soup I was waxing poetic about at the beginning.

Yeah, but what about the guitar?

It's my Vega again. Which I'm growing very fond of. This time you are hearing it purely acoustic. No amplifier. Pretty nice, huh? It's not loud, but I like to play it in the quiet of the morning. It sounds wonderful bouncing of the wood surfaces in Naomi's violin studio. I could simply strum 9th chords and maj7s forever and be a contented man...