Day 22
song: Sweet Memory 2016
artist: Jazz Mafia Symphony feat. Dublin & Joe Bagale
music and orchestration by Adam Theis
lyrics by Dublin, Joe Bagale and Karyn Paige
produced by Joe Bagale, Ben Yonas and Adam Theis
For the music in Brass, Bows & Beats (the suite this song is from), I worked hard to strike a balance between eclectic/ambitious instrumental music and the incredible vocalists within our greater Jazz Mafia crew around 2008 when it was composed. This song is one of the more straightforward of the 6, following something similar to a verse, chorus, verse, chorus format. Even so, it starts with a strange and exotic “Bolero Waltz” with samples about San Francisco going through changes and being sold-off to the highest bidder, taken from an old movie called “Barbary Coast” from 1935, although it pertains to recent times just as much or more. Dublin ran with the theme as you can hear in his vividly imagined verses.
The orchestra recorded this 2 weeks after we premiered the Brass, Bows & Beats” piece at The Palace of Fine Arts in SF. The band had been rehearsing a ton leading up to the premiere and still sounds very tight. Everything was recorded live in the studio (except for a a few overdubs of folks who were absent for this session). No “click track” was used. We were very excited about how this stuff sounded but right after finishing these 3 days of recording the whole sweet, Ben Yonas opened up the live recording files from the Palace of Fine Arts show and we both agreed it would be smarter to mix and release that recording first, since it was literally finished and sounded pretty damn good. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we got so busy with the many festival gigs, we just never got around to finishing this great recording from Fantasy Studios. It feels so satisfying to finally release this music in a much truer vision of its conceptual sound including some added twists (like Matt Wong on piano and Pat Korte’s “soloe’d” drums in the 2nd verse.
We’re working on one more song from Brass, Bows & Beats for release this month. We hope to get all of them done for a full album release sometime this year, but we’ll see how busy we get with other projects : )
- Adam Theis 2/22/16
Personnel
Dublin - vocals (rap)
Joe Bagale - lead vocals
Karyn Paige - vocals
Chris Mcgee - vocals
Rita Thies - Alto sax, flute
Sheldon Brown - bass clarinet, clarinet, tenor sax
Matt Nelson - tenor sax
Doug Rowan - bari sax, bass clarinet
Niel Levonious - lead trumpet
Mike Olmos - trumpet
Joel Ryan - trumpet
Erik Jekabson - trumpet
Rich Armstrong -trumpet
Joel Behrman - trombone
Jeanne Geiger - trombone
Adam Theis - trombone
Jamie Dubberly - bass trombone
Wayne Van Lieu - french horn
Shaina Evoniuk - violin
Rachel Noyes - violin
Sarah Dabby - viola
Crystal Pascucci - cello
Jon Monahan - guitar
Colin Hogan - keys
Matt Wong - acoustic piano
Matt Berkeley - synths
George Ban Weiss - upright bass
Tommy Folen - electric bass
Matt Lucas - percussion
Pat Korte - drums
Eric Garland - drums
recorded by Ben Yonas and Alberto Hernandez at Fantasy Studios 2009
mixed and mastered by Joe Bagale
©2016 Jazz Mafia Recordings
