SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW, This isnt an arrangement its a bunch of reharmonizations duct taped together and played consecutively I just have to point that out up front its hip to pull off maybe one or two of these in a tune but its not hip to reharmonize every single section of a tune and do it differently every time Unless youre trying to mess up the singer Having got that out of the way these are a dozen variations on the A section of SOTR plus three different bridges Theres not really an intro or ending because this is not an arrangement Four choruses in all I just play the melody no improvisation I spent about 2 3 hours on writing all this mess down about two hours recording it and way too long on editing and annotating the video I avoided all the pedestrian reharms that you run into all over the place these are all intended to be a little more obtuse Some are a lot more obtuse You may not dig them all I only bent the melody twice in doing this I have some doubled thirds here and there that may offend the classically trained among you deal with it This is in the usual key of Eb and interestingly I start an A section with a chord rooted on each note of the chromatic scale except for F#/Gb Im pretty sure I use every chord quality available at some point or other along the way The final A section is the one Im happiest with and I did it first actually The chromaticaly ascending bass line satisfies some compositional urge in me that I cant explain I intended to fill out the other two A sections and one bridge and call it done but I got started and filled up four choruses with different reharmonizations They mostly are fairly different from one another not a lot of recycling The first A section of the fourth chorus is my second favorite I am fond of upper structure ahrmony and pedaling the Eb gives me a chance to break out some of my favorite upper structure tricks I give you a four bar phrase worth of chords at once That helps reflect the structure of the tune and keeps the changes from flying by too fast to read And you can look ahead or behind Most of the time intersting things are happening within a phrase rather than across phrase boundaries one or two exceptions I dont consider any of these solutions to be excessively adventurous Almost all of them cadence somehow or other at the end of a phrase Just not always how you expect Its hard to run so many versions without recycling some devices though Youll see a vanilla ii V all over the place Second A of the fourth chorus is a shot at an urban contemporary feel the iv V i is typical at least since I set up C minor so strongly I made the fourth bridge belong to C minor as well