Description
Midnight Manners Jazz Lead Sheet
Midnight Manners is a jazz ballad that I composed as a gift to my longest standing student, John Nelson. The melody is extremely rich in tritones, but you don’t necessarily hear that.
About the tritones…
When I compose, I don’t do it in music theory assignment fashion. I don’t sit down and say to myself, “let’s write a piece with a bunch of tritones in the melody.” No!
When I write, I go where the spirit leads me. In many ways it’s like what Stravinsky writes in his book, Poetics of Music. I am like an animal grubbing for food. What drives me is not music theory. What drives me is my own satisfaction. And for me personally, I am not satisfied until I feel God’s peace.
So yes, Midnight Manners has a lot of tritones in the melody. No, that was not contrived. It’s actually a very beautiful melody, smack dab in the middle of the jazz idiom.
Here’s a video of me and David Craig playing Midnight Manners. I hope you enjoy it:
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