I’ve been quite-rightly bugged by some of my friends to play more piano. So yesterday, I stayed at work late (actually ’til nearly 2am!) and banged out some stuff on the now slightly-out-of-tune-but-still-serviceable grand piano in one of the lobbies, filmed with my slightly-old-and-suboptimal-video-recording camera, and documented in this run-on-but-still-comprehensible sentence.
The first bit is from a mini-medley I improv’d based upon songs from the musical “In The Heights,” which I had the great pleasure of seeing in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
Note that — as with all my medleys — this doesn’t contain an exact replica of the melodies, which I could make… but it’s more fun to stretch them a bit :). And you’ll probably catch that I was particularly taken with the song Alabanza from the musical, so — unlike in one of my typical medleys — my riffing on this one tune takes up about 80% of the medley.
I also recorded last night another one-take quick improv, which I’ve entitled “Western Clouds“; and this one’s without even really a central melody line. One of these days, I’ll actually discipline myself to compose another real, honest-to-goodness non-improv’d piece. But that takes a lot more than the 5 minutes it takes to flip on my video recorder and play whatever comes to mind! Perhaps I’ll build upon one of my improvs.
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Lastly, I thought this might be a nice opportunity for me to highlight a few of my older playings (they’re not really performances, so what should I actually call them?). I’ll try to make this list a reasonably interesting/diverse cross-section of my work.
- A medley I composed and performed last summer at the Beantown 2009 Dance Camp. I have made dozens of these medleys, ranging from somewhat distinct to massively different. It’s a source of fun and pride for me to be working on these at camp, often incorporating songs I hear just minutes earlier in the camp talent show 🙂
- NOTE: You can turn on annotations for this medley when viewing it by clicking on the bottom left icon and selecting the “turn on annotations” link. Then you can see the names of the songs I’ve drawn from.
- A longer improv, entitled “Nine out of Line.” [An AdamOriginal, not based on specific songs]
And the ones below were written/recorded over a decade ago (eeep!)
- “After Dinner,” one of the more popular ballads I’ve composed. This, along with other songs below, was recorded on my very aged Ensoniq TS-12 keyboard or formerly-owned (and even more aged) Roland W30 music workstation.
- Two very short and more upbeat / silly songs: “Coffee for Silke” and “Heike in the Park,” both recorded for friends who were visiting me (actually over a few minutes while they were visiting :-).
- Saxy Me! Short and catchy.
- Move it! I used to have this as my answering machine message back when people used answering machines and had fun messages.
- 5-4-J. A piece in 5/4. Written for someone whose first initial is “J.” What a sappy sap! :p
Interested in hearing more? Visit one or more of these pages on my excitingly-named adamlasnik site:
- Recent music
- Older music
- Older music – choral (with me accompanying or singing)
- My YouTube channel (songs already included in the pages above, but listed here in case you’d like to subscribe).
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Sadly, the vast, vast majority of my hundreds of performances are seemingly lost forever (classical piano recitals, choral performances, jazz band concerts in high school and college, etc.). Bummer.
But… I recently bought a dual cassette deck (linked for you kids who may not have seen one in the wild!) because I have the (perhaps overly optimistic) feeling that there may be some ancient AdamMusic on old tapes sitting in my closet. We’ll see!
In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this bit of Adam-music’ing!
What do you think?