Andy Mac - guitar / harmonies / arrangement
Alex Pangman - voice
Drew Jurecka - violin
Dave Kosmyna - cornet
Tom Richards - trombone
Brad Brose - bass
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youtu.be/M5jptEejvF0
The inspiration for this project was sparked by my appreciation of the music of Eddie Lang (guitar) and Joe Venuti (violin). They were joined by the Ponce Sisters in a 1933 recording of the tune 'A Million Dreams', a composition by Gus Kahn and J.C. Lewis.
I wanted to see what the composers had in mind so I went to great lengths to get an original copy of the score. I was able to track it down with help from Lynette Woods, a librarian at Bagaduce Music. I was surprised that the recordings I have heard don't interpret the melody the way the composers had written it.
I created an arrangement of the piece that was both true to the original and workable with the musicians I wanted to collaborate with. I recorded audio and video of myself playing guitar and singing and sent the audio to the other musicians so they could send me back their tracks. I also sent them a PDF of my lead sheet arrangement.
The process of arranging did not end with creating the score. Since I asked each musician to improvise through the entire piece, I was selective in the audio editing stage (remember that the musicians were initially recording their part along with guitar and voice only - they would have no way of anticipating whether they were over or under playing according to what the other players were doing). If I left the audio from each musician at full volume for the entire piece, it would have sounded chaotic. I selectively muted and brought forward each player's part to make an arrangement that sounded good to me.
I then had to make sure that the video edit I was creating didn't show a player at a time that I had muted them. I used Adobe Premiere Pro to create the video edit. It took a lot of time.
Recorded, edited and mixed in May, 2020.
released June 19, 2020
Composition by Gus Kahn and J.C. Lewis.