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ONE OF MY TRACKS |
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‘One of my tracks’ is actually a bit of a misnomer for the piece I want to talk about. It is my track insofar as it is my arrangement and it is on my new album. Yet, I didn’t write the original melody – French impressionist composer Claude Debussy did. The reasons I have chosen to discuss the recording of Variation on Clair de Lune are several. First, it is very close to my heart, since it functions as a kind of requiem for my late father. (It was one of his favourite musical pieces.) Secondly, it illustrates the liberties one may occasionally (have to) take when adapting and covering a composition. I arranged the piece, which was written for solo piano, for trio – guitar, bass and drums, with the bass taking the melody. I also transposed it up by a semitone, from Db to D: I figured it would sit better with the other tunes on my album, which are all within the realm of ‘white’ keys. Now that we have got the sacrileges almost out of the way, I need to mention one other sin I committed: I adapted a few chords, either because I felt it would sound better with the present instrumentation, or because I had difficulty deciphering the exact nature of the chord. I had already booked Jonathan Crossley and Rob Watson for the session, with whom I wanted to do two tunes I had decided on much earlier. To ask them to record this piece was very much an afterthought. I gave them no information about the piece, other than the actual chart and explaining the kind of feel I was looking for. I asked Willem Möller, the sound engineer, to set the click track at 60 (another sacrilege!), but mentioned to Jon and Rob that I’d prefer them (especially Rob) to imply the time rather than to actually play the 1 or 3 of every bar. I would overdub the actual melody later, after we’d recorded the rhythm track and Jon’s guitar solo. We did it in a single take. Jonathan decided to go straight into the solo, ie without laying down a harmonic cushion for himself (that function became mine, with the fretless bass). The result was, I admit, breathtaking: Jon’s chords and solo and Rob’s drum part shimmered and glistened, very much like the moonlight of the title, and for a while I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to deliver the goods in terms of playing the melody. I decided to use a fretted bass for this purpose, in order to attain a better contrast to the growly fretless anchoring the piece. The melody is played in a very legato fashion (I used pianist Tamas Vasary’s recording of Clair de Lune as a reference), so I asked Willem to take the click track out of the cans. The way I had arranged the tune was to have the bass play the first two distinct melodic sections, as well as the theme when it returns. The interlude (which in the original is all rumbly arpeggios, trimmed down to 22 bars here) was constituted by the guitar solo, and I chose to echo one of its central phrases near the end of the piece. When I recorded it, I just thought of the fragile beauty of the melody, as well as of my father, and of the many times we had listened to music together. With the very last bass note, a gently plucked top F#, I pictured him as a silhouette against a full moon, disappearing into the night. I played a rough, off-the-desk taped version to my mother later that same evening, warning her about the liberties I had taken. She listened and, after it had finished, said, ‘He would have liked it’. And that was all I needed to hear. |
