Tag Archives: Mashups

An update on Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past, my new jazz fusion covers project

A while back I posted about Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past, the third album in my series of jazz fusion covers.

This album is going to consist of a set of covers of songs written by Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. With at least one original and a bonus mashup thrown in for fun. And, of course, a YouTube video of the recording of each track.

At the time of that original post, I had recorded 3 of the songs. Now I’ve recorded three more! That’s one each by Herbie and Keith, plus the bonus mashup.

First, there’s Keith Jarret’s “Grow Your Own”:

That was followed by a goofy mashup idea I came up with when I was doing a bass subbing gig with a local big band that was playing “The Chicken,” a James Brown tune popularized in jazz circles by Jaco Pastorius in the early ’80s. The goofy part is that I mashed it up with Pearl Jam’s “Alive”:

And, most recently, I did a somewhat-mashup of Herbie Hancock tunes. Which is to say, I did a cover of his 19/8 space jam “Hidden Shadows,” released in 1973, but I threw in ’80s-style Linn Drum samples, along with shoehorning the melody of his 1983 synth pop hit “Rockit” into that unusual time signature:

What’s next? Well, I’m still working on it… but whatever it turns out to be, it will be a Keith Jarrett composition. Or, compositions? Hmm… we shall see.

Rest assured, however, that the following will not be a part of the album…

The Shining: happy version

Apparently this brilliant mock trailer for the “happy version” of The Shining has been on YouTube for 3 years, but I just discovered it in a post on Brand New, cited as an effective metaphor for the horrible decision of the merged United and Continental airlines to simply merge their logos as well.

Anyway… wow. This trailer really messed with my brain. Watch:

The most disturbing part for me was that for most of it, I believed it was a real trailer. I was too young when The Shining came out to be able to remember the marketing campaign for it, but I’ve seen enough late-’70s and early-’80s movie trailers as bonus features on DVDs to recognize the dippy narration as de rigeur for the era.

It wasn’t until I heard a brief snippet of my favorite piano motif from the soundtrack of The Shawshank Redemption that I realized it was fake… and then moments later, when “Solsbury Hill” (a song that at least existed when the movie was made) came in, the conceit went over the top — funny, but obvious.

Regardless, this is a brilliant piece of work. In addition to being hilarious, it shows how you can twist an assortment of brief clips from a movie to tell just about any story you want. (It also helps explain why trailers can be effective in selling tickets for a crap movie… which The Shining, of course, is not.)

The coup de grâce is the way the voiceover says “Shining” at the end.

The Mother of All Funk Chords

I just had to pile on to the mountain of people sharing this because it’s so cool:

Merlin Mann pretty much sums it up:

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.