Skip to main content

March Ragtime Goal: Bare Necessities

 Oh, man. So, I have always loved the Disney tune "The Bare Necessities."

Baloo the Bear is one of my favorite characters in all of Disney, and his song is one of the best. I also love, love, love just about anything Jonny May (of Piano with Jonny) does, so I got onto Spotify to see if he has a rendition of "Bare Necessities." I thought he might, since he was once-upon-a-time a Disneyland pianist.

Well, what do you know? He does have one! And it's amazing! And even better, he has videos on how to play it! Along with the sheet music!

So, friends, my goal for March, once I'm finished with the "Misty" challenge, is to learn this magnificent arrangement of "Bare Necessities."

Looking at the music and watching Jonny's teaching videos, it doesn't look too terribly hard, but when I watch this video of him playing it, I'm convinced that it's positively virtuosic and that there's a chance I won't be able to play it, no matter how hard I try.

But I'm going to try. As soon as I've posted my final "Misty" video (which will probably be Saturday, or maybe Sunday), I'll print out the "Bare Necessities" music and start working on it in earnest.

Comments

Sherry said…
I wonder if he started with a metronome . . . :)

Popular posts from this blog

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...