That Was One Bold F# Diminished 7th

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by Paul Bass | Jul 28, 2010 10:25 am

(3) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Arts, Politics, Campaign 2010

The reviews are in: Ned Lamont is willing to go out on a limb. At least when he’s tickling the ivories.

That’s the verdict from two of New Haven’s top jazz musicians and music professors.

The pair, David Chevan and Jeff Fuller, agreed to review a clip of gubernatorial candidate Lamont’s rendition of “Summertime.” The candidate put his spin on the Gershwin classic during a visit earlier this month with seniors at New Haven’s Tower One/Tower East complex.

Chevan and Fuller ended up with dramatically different takes on the success of Lamont’s approach to the number. Here’s what they wrote:

Cliched Phrases

Paul Bass Photo I hope Ned Lamont’s performance of Summertime is not indicative of what he will be like as a governor. It seems clear that he is a bit frustrated that no one is listening to him as he gives up on singing after the first line of the song and pounds out the melody on the piano in the hopes of being heard. That in turn causes him to rush and make several small but key harmonic and rhythmic mistakes in his execution. He tries to save everything with a bunch of standard blues licks at the end of his performance, but those come off like the typical tired hackneyed clichéd phrases we have heard over and over again from politicians far too often. If Ned Lamont is offering a fresh approach to government he really needs to do a bit more practicing before he brings his act out in public.

Chevan is a professor at Southern Connecticut State University and leader of the Afro-Semitic Experience.

The sad thing is, I am a BIG Ned Lamont supporter.

Jeff Fuller

Ned Lamont is not a polished pianist, of course. He probably had a lot of fun playing and singing with college rock bands and such, but I admire his gumption for performing for the residents of Tower One. Anyone - especially an amateur - who is called upon to play in front of a live, discerning audience (as most senior groups are) and in front of video cameras, and as a candidate for public office, has a lot of courage.

That being said, here are my comments on his rendition of “Summertime”. He started to sing it and found out it was in an uncomfortable key to sing, either too low or too high if up an octave. A polished musician would know his most comfortable key, and transpose the song to that key. Lamont played the song in A minor - the standard key… for the soprano role in “Porgy And Bess”! Most male vocalists sing the song in D minor. Nevertheless, he provided an interesting substitute chord change in measure 6: an F# diminished 7th harmony—I haven’t heard that before and it worked.

Although he played the first 4 bars in the correct mode of A natural minor (Aeolian mode), he played measures 7-8 in an awkward sounding mode, kind of E Aeolian. It normally remains in A harmonic minor over E at that point. Due to the amount of background noise—a situation with which I am all too painfully familiar—it is hard to discern exactly what is going on, but I did detect a few tempo and metric “variations” (putting it kindly) in measures 4-5 and 13-14. But the sound quality was not too good—maybe I’m being a little picky.

Jeff Fuller is a bass player who has performed around the world and teaches at the Educational Center for the Arts.

Comments

posted by: abg on July 28, 2010 11:59am

No self-respecting pianist would ever perform on a grand or baby grand without opening the lid. This is consigning oneself to failure from the outset, like signing a no-taxes pledge or trying to win votes by appearing on the Colbert Report.

posted by: robn on July 28, 2010 10:06pm

Awesome.

This is the kind of reporting I like…getting under the skin, through the ganglia into the neural cortex, and then way past into the deep, deep psyche of a candidate…

Speaking of which Mr Lamont…how about a rendition of “I’ve got You Under My Skin” by Cole Porter??? or are you too nervous? Or are you ...gasp…a Harvard man?

posted by: Leslie Kuo on July 29, 2010 5:57am

abg, I disagree. My piano teacher always said that the lid on a grand or baby grand piano should only be opened in a sufficiently large room. If this was a small meeting room at the apartment complex, it would have been appropriate to leave the lid down and not overwhelm the room’s acoustics.

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