A little dangerous knowledge...

Jazz ensemble class was interesting last night. We started narrowing down our selections for our concert and have decided to play four (maybe five) songs. We settled on definitely doing Wave. We do it pretty well. It's an interesting song, and, I've practiced it enough that I sound okay playing it, and since I'm the least capable musician in the group, that's as good a starting point as any in deciding a song to play. Then, before we could practice and decide on another, our singer suggested Michelle.

We'd never played that together as a group, and I hardly ever played it, maybe bashing it out once or twice when I first got The Real Book and looked for songs I knew and could play. While the instructor taught our guitarist the intro, I played through the changes once. So, 1, 2, 3, 4... and away we went!

We sounded good. Not great, but pretty good. Our instructor said we sounded like a small jazz group at a cafe in Paris, and we did. He noted that we hit all the diminished chords right on the money. Obviously, that's because we were familiar with the song. It is basically the first "new" song we've done that I knew, proving once again, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The Lennon/McCartney hit made it into a repertoire on the first try, after two full months of playing ten or twelve other songs, and never quite getting confident on them.

Amazing.