As of Monday, January 4, 2021, I had posted a song for 100 straight days! Time for a break I think.
80 jazz standards were posted to the Jaz Dumoz account:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-8G0QzZxDOB8cRk1-5n7lA
Currently 108 songs in my OnSong "Standards" book. Another 55 or so still in the list to be added. Still 2/3 of the final season of "Peter Gunn" to harvest. Wow, season 3/3, they got rid of "Mother's" and Edie Hart, Pete's girlfriend, has her own club "Edie's".
The Jim Dumas account currently has 20 songs:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs7QrCGIS2G_pgRvzKeqlSw
In late November I was running low on standards, so I added #BluesTuesday and posted a bluesy song to this channel on Tuesdays to pad things out.
From December 20 to Jan 2, I posted 14 holiday songs. Something that impressed me when I 1st met Ricky Howard, David Johnson, and some of the other professional musicians I get to play with in Naples FL was that when the holidays rolled around, they all had holiday songs. So I decided I'd be professional and add some too. No hymns. For #BluesTuesday, I did "Blue Christmas" and "Please Come Home For Christmas". For #SomethingNewerSaturday, I did "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" and "Jingle Bell Rock". These songs have both been covered by enough people to be considered standards, but I decided that any song with "rock" in the name was not a standard.
The 1st holiday song I worked up was "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". The 3rd verse starts:
Through the years we all will be together,Well, Fates allowed pretty much 0 this year. No family whatsoever for the holidays. My wife was unable to get off work & come to Florida for the 1st time in 11 years. I took me several tries before I could make it through that 3rd verse without tearing up.
If the Fates allow.
As usual, this is way too many songs to work with. For a 3 hour gig, the most of these I could imagine using is 60. If I use the looper more and put some solos in, that goes down to 40-50. So I'm going to start creating some set lists of the ones I think would work best. But, I'll keep adding songs in case of requests, and also because I always get tired of playing the same stuff.
Here's some of my favs so far.
I have to put this one as #1, because my wife was home when I was working it up, and whenever I sang "Go on and kiss her, go on and kiss her", she would come in and lay a big ol' kiss on me. I'm thinking "Finally! That's how music is supposed to work!".
These 2 songs were off of Julie London's 1955 debut album. "Julie Is Her Name", with Barney Kessel on guitar & an upright bass player. That is a great album, I think I've gifted it to 3-4 people. These were the hardest songs I did, as I tried to get all of Barney's licks.
Barney did a similar album with Sarah Vaughan, "Sarah + 2" in 1962. I worked up Barney's licks on this next song from that album, but wound up mostly doing the arrangement by my teacher, the most excellent jazz guitarist Ricky Howard. What a pretty song!
A few weeks ago I realized I needed to start doing more of the Fats Waller songs that I have loved for 50 years. In college, the 2nd band I played in "Blue Eyed Boy Mr. Death" was led by Delbert Lionel Hilgartner III ("Del") who sang most of the leads and played organ (Hammond B3 with a Lesley) and tambourine. He turned me on to Fats. I bought these 3 albums then.
I've started to seriously harvest these tunes, targetting 1/week. I have posted 5 Fats tunes so far, 2 more in process. Here's the Fats playlist. Here's 1 of his many happy, upbeat songs. My wife described them as playful, I agree.
Here's video #100. Nice, this is a fav!
On the other channel, this was the most popular song. I tweeted thanks to David Crosby for writing it, maybe that gave it a boost - all the way up to 40 views (LOL)!
Note, the intonation problems seem to come and go. If I pay more attention to it I do better. So that means I need to make sure I have the guitar parts down cold so I have the bandwidth to pay attention to the vocal intonation.
