Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Eric Baumgartner’s name will be new to many here in the UK. I only came across his work when his excellent Jazz It Up! Christmas collection appeared for review in 2022. Though glancing at his resume, I remained unfamiliar with his other work, but hugely impressed with his seasonal offering.
Writing in my review here I concluded:
“Baumgartner’s writing is wonderfully pianistic, stylistically spot on, and whether played for background entertainment or performed as concert pieces, listeners will be as delighted to hear these arrangements as piano players are to practise and play them.”
It has been a pleasure playing though many of his other publications in the intervening years, in particular while researching and compiling my newly available Willis Student Recital Collection, and it was while exploring these that his latest Favourite Melodies for Jazz Piano Solo also appeared.
Eric Baumgartner
Eric Baumgartner is originally from Ohio, where he grew up in a musically rich family environment. He began piano lessons when he was seven, and quickly developed a fondness for music. He went on to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and subsequently gained his master’s degree in jazz studies from Chicago’s DePaul University.
Baumgartner has enjoyed a fruitful association with Willis Music and Hal Leonard as a composer and arranger, and produced backing tracks for dozens of their most popular titles. His expertise in jazz and popular music is readily apparent in his original piano pieces, arrangements, and method books. He performs widely as a keyboard player, conductor and music director.
Baumgartner gained a national reputation with his Jazzabilities series of jazz exercises some two decades ago. These core materials were subsequently revised and vastly expanded as the Jazz Piano Basics series, which includes two superb jazz textbooks and Jazz Piano Basics: Encore, a collection of additional original compositions.
I am looking forward to giving that series the separate review it deserves, but in the meantime, Favourite Melodies for Jazz Piano Solo is billed as a second repertoire collection to join that series, and features 17 standards, folksongs, and classical themes arranged for pianists at late intermediate to early advanced level, around UK Grade 5-7.
For those familiar with Baumgartner’s previous publications, it must be pointed out that thirteen of these pieces previously appeared in his earlier Jazz It Up! series, joined here by four fresh pieces inspired by the enduring melodies of America’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’ songsmiths…
Favourite Melodies
Whereas Jazz Piano Basics: Encore delivered 17 original compositions, for this collection Baumgartner has delivered mainstream jazz and swing takes on the following familiar tunes:
- All Through The Night
- Blue Skies
- Bye Bye Blackbird
- Danny Boy (Londonderry Air)
- The Erie Canal
- Funeral March Of A Marionette
- Greensleeves
- Habanera
- La Cucaracha
- ‘S Wonderful
- Scarborough Fair
- Song For The New World
- Spinning Song 2.0
- Sugar Plum Funk
- Symphonic Swing (Theme From Symphony No. 40)
- What’ll I Do?
- When The Saints Go Marching In
Introducing the collection, Baumgartner tells us,
“These pieces have been uprooted from their traditional settings and summarily reinterpreted (or dare I say reinvented) through playful melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variation. In other words, they’ve been jazzed up! I hope you find the results surprising, whimsical, and (most importantly) fun to play.”
I certainly enjoyed playing through them. As with his previous collections, these arrangements are as stylistically alert as they are pianistically comfortable to play. And while not all the tunes will be existing “favourites” for all players, most are likely to become so in these terrific, and very agreeable, arrangements.
Most of the pieces use swing rhythms, so some prior jazz playing and theory would be an advantage, but as the author writes,
“It is not essential for you to have had previous jazz experience in order to learn and perform these pieces successfully; they are fully arranged. There are no chord symbols or sections requiring improvisation. However, if you are new to jazz, you may find some of the ‘vocabulary’ to be a challenge: syncopated and swing rhythms, bluesy and chromatic melodic passages, sophisticated and complex chordal harmonies. At first glance, these elements might appear rather alien to those with a more traditional classical background.”
Te organisation of the collection is alphabetical, rather than progressive, so players can dip in and jump around at will. I really think that most will find plenty to enjoy here!
As for the book itself, it appears in the standard Hal Leonard house style, with a gloss card cover and 64 white pages within. Following on from the author’s Preface and the contents page, the scores are well spaced and easy to play from. Minimal fingering suggestions are offered, and happily these include support with the passages based on jazz scales, where patterns will likely be less familiar to players at this level.
Closing Thoughts
Favourite Melodies for Jazz Piano Solo is one of those happy publications which proves as easy to review as it is to highly recommend. These are great tunes, masterfully reimagined in an accessible and very cool way: what a joy!
Such a collection might not seem, at face value, to be one to jump to the top of the late intermediate players or teachers’ shopping lists, but it could well prove to be one of those “sleeper successes” that delivers an improbably amount of pleasure to a very large number of players.
Certainly, I really love it!
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