Greetings, friends! It’s been a while since our last blog post, but in the year+ since, we’ve continued to thrive here in our hometown of Charlottesville.
What’s new
The highlight of this year so far has been having the opportunity to play twice live in the studio of our local independent radio station, WTJU 91.1 FM. When groups play at WTJU, they do so for three audiences: those that attend live in the studio; those that are listening to the radio station locally; and those that stream the radio station’s broadcast worldwide at www.wtju.net.
This year’s performances weren’t the first times we’ve played for WTJU. In fact, we’ve done so a handful of times, both as The Hard Modes and as our “traditional” jazz ensemble, the Cville Jazz Congregation. The first time they invited us to played was back in 2018 for their “Lambeth Live” production, which transformed into their current “Offbeat Roadhouse” Friday night concert series after a move to their current home in early 2019.
OFFBEAT ROADHOUSE | JULY
The day after my birthday, on July 28, we played a double-header—first from 8–9pm at WTJU for Offbeat Roadhouse, then at local jazz mecca Miller’s from 10pm–1am. That kind of marathon isn’t typical for us. We may play jazz, but we go against the grain in that we tend to go to bed by 10:30, haha.
Due to an increasingly toxic environment, I had left my full-time job back in April and decided to take some time for myself. During the first couple of months of non-retirement, I dug hard into arranging new tunes for the band—ones that had been on a backlog for a considerable amount of time. Our Offbeat Roadhouse show was the perfect place to debut them.
Pat pensive prior to playing
Roundabout 12:30am at Miller’s
The new tunes were:
Hyrule Castle (Koji Kondo, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past): Our tune quiver was distinctly lacking content from The Legend of Zelda (save for our attempt at “Sword Search” from Link’s Awakening, which we’ve only attempted to pull off once). Having grown up loving A Link to the Past, I was inspired to pull some content from its iconic soundtrack. The result was an arrangement that, upon first practice, the band declared a banger and determined that it would be a new audience favorite (hearing that was a big win for the arranger, let me tell you). The distinct sections of this tune inspired me to infuse different rhythmic feels into the arrangement, even when the harmonic language doesn’t move much.
A Chapel (Hitoshi Sakimoto, Final Fantasy Tactics): FFT is my favorite game of all time, due in no small part to its soundtrack. Because of my reverence for it, I had been unable to bring myself to arrange a piece from it. But, our friend, the brilliant pianist and arranger PurpleSchala, had been prodding me for years to do one. Inspired by her own version of this tune, I kept my promise to do it, and the results have me hopeful that I can work out more in the future. The hard part about this tune is in the last section of the form, there is a series of hits (and corresponding chord changes) that make it feel like the time signature is changing when it’s not. Soloing over those hits while keeping your place and playing something that meshes with the rhythmic sequence is a fun challenge.
Frozen Flame (Yasunori Mitsuda, Chrono Cross): This tune’s beauty has always has been a standout on what is my absolutely favorite game soundtrack. My arrangement is rather straightforward, though I added some flavour with new harmonies and countermelodies.
The other two tunes we played were Corridors of Time (Yasunori Mitsuda, Chrono Trigger) and Ideal and the Real (Toshiki Konishi, Persona 5 Royal). While we didn’t do anything new for “Ideal”, I did re-arrange “Corridors” in 12/8 to give it a little more spice compared to the way that we’ve been playing it for the last 6 years. I think you’ll dig it.
Check out the show in its entirety here (if you click through you’ll find timestamps for the tunes in the comments):
We were really happy with the show. We played for an audience that was standing-room only, and though there are flubs here and there with our new tunes (which is to be expected!) our playing gets better and better during the set. The show culminates with what is, I think, one of our best performances of “Ideal” ever.
WTJU JAZZ MARATHON | OCTOBER
WTJU has a number of week-long fundraising marathons ever year that correspond with their different departments: jazz, folk, classical, and rock. All volunteer DJs are asked to submit show ideas for the marathon, and then the time devises a schedule, allotting two hours for each show. The marathon also includes hour-long live performance slots each weeknight. We first played the Jazz Marathon in 2019, and were psyched to be asked to do it again this year.
Now, I have no doubt that we would have been asked to play at WTJU again in due time, but I think one of the reasons we were pegged to come back so soon for this year’s Jazz Marathon is because I started volunteering as a DJ for the station, haha.
That said, I had considered deploying the Cville Jazz Congregation for it because of the July show. However, we had done a CJC thing for Offbeat Roadhouse last August, and while we wouldn’t have new, exciting tunes as CJC for listeners, there was still one new Modes arrangement that was too difficult to get together earlier this year. Additionally, I decided to use this as an opportunity to bring tunes that we don’t play very often “back from the dead” in a Halloween-y set for the season. Our set included:
Zombie Panic! (Joe McDermott, Zombies Ate My Neighbors): This arrangement was trumpeter Brandon Walsh’s first, and the only evidence of its existence is a live cut from when we played it at Miller’s in 2018 (oddly enough this Kramer-style bootleg is our 6th-most viewed video on YouTube!). Normally the arrangement splices together two tracks from the SNES cult classic—“Zombie Panic!” and “No Assembly Required”—but we ditched the second tune for this run.
Fire Eyes (Jeremy Soule, Secret of Evermore): Walsh’s second arrangement, and one that you may have heard during our Free Play performance. We usually don’t play this tune unless we’re lucky enough to be sharing the stage with original Hard Modes member and vibraphonist Trevor Williams. Like “Zombie Panic!”, we changed the arrangement to exclude the melody of a second tune (“Colour of the Summer Sky” from another classic SNES RPG, Secret of Mana) during the bridge, instead opting for it to be eight bars of joint soloing between trumpet and sax.
Phantom Train (Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy VI): Dirges don’t usually make the best material for background music at bars, so we don’t play this one very often, even if it’s one of our more recognizable tunes and even if it’s one of the tunes we’ve played since the beginning. Had to unleash the spirits again to keep with the theme!
Find Your Way (Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy VIII): Yet another arrangement from our debut, we can’t play this one when there’s too much time between performances due to the demands put on the pianist. In fact, when Gabe replaced Nick back in 2020, I shelved it. I’m very happy it’s back in rotation, though—it’s one of my favorite Uematsu tracks, and the style of the arrangement will add variety to any set we play.
Kainé (Keiichi Okabe, NieR: Replicant): This is the arrangement we couldn’t get together for the Offbeat Roadhouse show. It’s a combination of both the “Salvation” and “Escape” versions of Kainé’s theme, and for the faster “Escape” section, the time signature weaves from 6/8 to 5/4 to 5/8 and back again. It’s tough. I’m so pleased with how it came together for this show, and hope that fans of this beautiful work from Okabe enjoy our jazz translation.
The other fun fact about this show is that I decided to play bari sax for most of it. After years of dreaming and saving, I bought my bari last summer, only to herniate a disc in my lower back. I put it down for a year as I healed, and was eager to bust it out on air. Would love to hear from folks on any feelings that you have around the bari sound for these tunes.
Check out the entire set here (again, timestamps of each tune are in the comments):
VGM: THE NEW STANDARD
Aside from being invited to play that live set for the Jazz Marathon, I also curated and DJed a radio show called “VGM: The New Standard” for a Wednesday 11pm–1am slot.
Here’s the description of the show:
The standard Jazz canon derives from the Great American Songbook of early 20th Century showtunes. Over the last decade, a new vehicle for standards has emerged for young musicians: video games. Come explore the sounds of video game music, comparative jazz recordings, and sounds from modern bands who are integrating these sounds into the modern jazz lexicon.
You can listen to the archive of the broadcast here (and if it’s ever taken down, you can listen to the VGM x Jazz pairings on this Spotify playlist).
Every show for the marathon required both a DJ and a “pitch partner”, someone who the DJ selects to help talk about the importance of WTJU in our community to help fundraise. Thankfully, Brandon was enough of a sucker to join me for it. It was a battle to stay awake and coherent for sure, haha. We had a super fun time, though, and if you’re reading this, I have no doubt you’ll enjoy the set, so tune in!
YUGE THANKS
A number of folks deserve a huge shoutout before I close out this post:
Can’t thank WTJU enough for having us back time and time again to perform. I sincerely believe in the power of independent radio in our community—Charlottesville is so lucky to have this station and to have an amazing team of volunteer DJs that are eager to share their favorite music with you. By the way, you can still donate to the station! Every dollar helps keep the lights on.
Specifically want to thank Folk director and Offbeat Roadhouse series curator Peter Jones for extending the invitations, being excited for our performances, and for being a great friend to me and to the band.
More WTJU thanks goes to our good friend Gary Funston for believing in our playing since the beginning, hanging out with us, having us on air, and coming to a ton of our shows; and also to the live production staff (which is different for every show but is always killing it).
Of course, gotta thank the band! Brandon, Gabe, Pat, and Andre worked their tails off to get all of this new music together. We keep sounding better and better, and I’m excited for the future.
Last but not least, thanks to all of our friends who support us and our musical endeavours, especially our Jazz Wives (and soon-to-be Jazz Wives)—Jen, Eliza, Allison, Emily, and Tish—our Jazz Pets—Bertha, Pepper, Yucca, Mars, Venus, and Bella—, and superfans, including Tuong, Quinn, Ruby, and our parents.
We hope to have new releases to all digital platforms within the next few months, so stay tuned!
Solidarity,
Greg
