The Real Book Project: God Bless The Child

For those of you who don't know I studied Jazz Vocal Performance in college as a part of my music minor. There was this list of songs that all Vocal Performance majors had to know but since I was a minor I never had to learn all of them. I have decided to go through the list and just sit down at the piano and bang out a few of the ones that I somehow avoided. To motivate myself to actually do it I am going to post the videos and promise myself that I will learn one a week.

The main reason I am doing this is because since graduating I have had very few chances to perform and this gives me a good excuse to exercise my vocal chords.

Project Notes:

1- I can read a lead sheet but I am not a piano player and I am not fluent in voicing anything other than basic three note chords so...my piano playing accompanying these songs will basically be a train wreck. I don't really have time to practice enough to resolve this issue so just try to ignore it if you listen.

2- I will only chose songs that are close to being in my key in Real Book. I also don't have time to transcribe things...even if I did It's kind of a chore and I don't want to deal with it. Some things will be too high. Others will be too low. Some will be juuuust right.

3- Most of these songs are songs to which I BASICALLY know the melody so any other jazz people out there will probably notice some...inaccuracies.

4- I don't know to turn on the light in the corner where our piano is right now.


5- For each song I will do two takes. I am not going to belabor this or else I will never get it done.Take 2 will get posted. Take 1 I will have on my youtube channel in case you're interested.

Here is The video. Took too long to upload directly

This week is God Bless The Child. Thing is a song that I aaaaalmost like, but I just don't. I can't really explain why. That's why I never bothered to sit down and do it before now. The RealBook key is perhaps a bit high for me. In my performance I ignore almost every instance of minor 6 chords and b57s not because I don't understand why they are important but because my hands just didn't want to go there. Oh well. There are a few ick notes.


 My poor, abused Real Book Cover