I played piano at a wedding with my friend Julian N., a saxophonist and composer. Julian is a student at Humber College in Toronto. You can view his myspace page by clicking here.
Here is a track listing with links to the individual videos:
- Stella by Starlight (Victor Young)
- Blue Bossa (Kenny Dorham)
- Out of Nowhere (Johnny Green)
- Recordame by Joe Henderson
- Donna Lee (Charlie Parker)
- Blues in Bb
- Summertime (George Gershwin)
- It Could Happen To You (Jimmy Van Heusen)
- Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
If you’d like to download MP3’s of the concert (free) you can get them from here.
With Julian’s permission I used my minidisc unit to record the audio from our performance. There is quite a bit of background noise from the wedding guests’ conversation, but in the recordings you can hear both of us quite clearly.
I also set up my Sony Camcorder in the corner and video-taped our performance too. There was very low light, so you can barely make us out in the video, but it gives more context to the audio to be able to see us perform too.
At this wedding, we performed a selection of mainstream jazz standards in a duo style. Probably my biggest inspiration for the saxophone-piano duo format is the legendary combination of Stan Getz (saxophone) and Kenny Barron (piano). Another inspiration for rhythmic ideas has been the mighty pianist Chick Corea and his duets with the one and only voice artist Bobby Mcferrin (such as their killer performance of Autumn Leaves).
So without further ado, here’s our complete performance (except for the last song we played, Confirmation by Charlie Parker, where we got interrupted by some DJ music).
Hope you enjoy! I hope that these performances will give you some ideas or inspiration for your own journeys in jazz and music in general.
Further listening: I performed one of Julian’s original compositions with the college band at the Phil Dwyer Academy of Music and Culinary Arts (PDAMCA) last August.