Jazz Band Generation Y Covers Nirvana On The Spot
Jazz artists are fascinating because they can adapt almost any genre of music to jazz. For example, many of the jazz tunes that we know today as “jazz standards” began life as pop songs from the 1930s - 50s, and many of those were originally from musicals.
Musora is an online music education resource. In this Musora video, drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr. and his jazz band Generation Y “jazzified” the Nirvana grunge pop song, Heart Shaped Box, in real time, by making the rhythm swing, adding syncopation, modifying the simple pop chord progressions to make them more harmonically interesting, and, of course, improvising over the chord progressions.
An interesting aspect of the jam session is that most of the musicians in the band had apparently never heard this early 90s song. But that didn’t prevent this experienced group of musicians from quickly internalizing the melody and chord changes, and then jazzifying it and making it swing.
A 3:55, the band begins discussing which direction to take the tune.
The bassist provides an idea at 4:05, on which the pianist builds at 4:12.
The horn players propose how to play the verse at 4:26, and at 4:50 they propose how to play the chorus.
Jazz Band Generation Y Covers Nirvana On The Spot (ft. Ulysses Owens Jr.)
At 5:10, the players toss around ideas about what kind of vibe they want to make, the tempo, and how many times around they want to play the tune.
They play the entire tune at 7:41, and the horns come in with the verse at 8:45.
The chorus begins at 9:10.
At 9:45, the horns play the verse again, but this time they take turns playing 4 measures, which is known as “trading 4s” in jazz, but they modify the original melody to make it more interesting to the listener the second time around.
The horns trade 4s again at 10:40, but this time, they improvise a new melody, before returning to the recognizable chorus. At 12:00, the drummer solos until about 12:40, when he nods to the pianist to begin his improvisational solo.
At 13:20, the horns come in and play yet another improvised melody with the pianist, but this time it is more remeniscent of original pop tune melody, which not only sounds nice, but it signals that the band is about to end the tune, and want to bring the listener home to original melody.
The jam session likely took longer than this likely edited 12 minute long video, but I think it’s safe to say that the band worked out their interpretation song in relatively little time in the studio.
I found Generation Y’s interpretation of Heart Shaped Box to be beautiful, inspired and lots of fun. An I imagine if you asked them to do it again a month from now, they might even do it differently, after they’ve had more time to percolate on it. I’m sure it wold be just as interesting as this version!
Find Ulysses Owens’ books and streaming music here.
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