Hi. My lessons these past weeks have been about learning basic chord shell voicings and learning the standard Nature Boy. First I had to learn how to play the chords on the chart, then I learned to play the melody in one position on the guitar. Today I finished my arrangement of the piece in ableton. Nature Boy is a jazz standard which wiki defines as
musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners
David Bowie did a version that everyone in the comments says sounds like a Bond movie score. I think the descending line in the piece Dm, DmMaj7, Dm, Dm6, Gm6 is where that comes from.
The piece was written by Eden Ahbez, and first recorded by Nat King Cole
This is a really great recording, and there are some really groovy guitar lines.
My favorite version of the piece is by Kurt Elling because I like the way that he augments the melody, and his virtuosic skat singing in the second half of the piece.
For my version, I played an arpeggiated line following the shell voicing in the guitar, added a simple drum line, and then took that .wav and stretched it out so you hear a lot of artifacts in the base accompaniment. Some really beautiful things happened that were not intentional, and I wonder about how that affects the song. Something my teacher seems to be pushing is that it’s important to have an intention behind everything you play and do. One of my main inspirations is John Cage, and he is well known for his aleatory compositions and overall philosophy of zen music. Can you be intentionally unintentional?
I also added a bass line, and the “classic roads” keyboard for some additional color. I don’t know how happy I am with the performance of the melody, it seems like too much at points. Overexaggerated/too loud to no good effect. I had a lot of fun playing it though, and maybe the dynamics were different in the moment of playing it. I also added the sound of unplugging the bass because in the middle of arranging this I unplugged my guitar and plugged my bass in while the song was playing and I liked the sound of it. I don’t know if I want to include this song in my staple repertoire, it’s definitely a vocalist’s song, maybe I will do a vocal version too.
Anyway, here is my current version of Nature Boy!