Into the Score - November 18, 2008
Episode 24 - Earthbound

INTRO

(ONETT THEME)

I'm Kenley Kristofferson... and this is Into the Score.

Good morning, afternoon or evening, depending on what time you are catching Episode 24 of Into the Score, which of course, is the only podcast solely devoted to the academic study of video game music.  My name is Kenley Kristofferson and this episode, we jump into the 1995 cult classic for the SNES, Earthbound, developed by HAL Labs and APE and published by Nintendo.  In this episode, we will look at the mould of mid-90s role-playing games and why Earthbound defied that, we'll look at the myriad of styles that came out of the 20th-century and found there way into the game with particular focus on the jazz combo, then we'll cap it off with an interview with VGM jazz ensemble, "The Runaway Five." Right now you're listening to "Onett", which plays while we're adventuring in the first town of the game (and the home town of our protagonist)! It's composed by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka.

Can't wait for the show, but I also can't wait to tell you how to reach us!

(CONTACT INFO)

CONTACT INFO

The address for Into the Score is www.intothescore.com, and reach me, you can reach me at Kenley@intothtescore.com, so k-e-n-l-e-y@intothescore.com! You can subscribe on the website through the RSS feed or you find us on iTunes! Also on every post, there is a comment section and I love to hear what you've got to say about the episode.   

After 5 episodes of hovering near our top mark, we've finally broken it in the 1st week of November, excellent job everyone! Keep spreading word about the show, I love what you're doing!

In the past few episodes, we've studied big orchestral scores like Shadow of the Colossus or Final Fantasy Tactics, or really organized and thematic scores like Super Mario RPG, but this one is not like that.  Like the game, a lot of the music is very quirky and really quite strange...definitely not your typical RPG.  To highlight this, let's begin the formal part of our show with a piece that highlights that very notion.  It plays in, perhaps, the strangest place of the game called Saturn Valley, which is inhabited by these little creatures called Mr. Saturns.  They have no arms, just stubby legs, a big nose, whiskers and a little bow on their heads.  They're one of the many mascots of the game and they are as weird as they are awesome.  You'll notice the weirdness in the instruments, especially the tuba, agogo bells, accordion... weird mix, love it.  This is Saturn Valley.

(SATURN VALLEY)

1995 IN THE WORLD AND GAMING

1995 in the world brought the World Trade Organization into existence, the unfortunate paralyzing of "Superman" star Christopher Reeve in a riding accident and a devastating bombing in Oklahoma City.  On the more positive side of things, Microsoft releases Windows 95, eBay is founded and the "Million Man March" takes place in Washington, DC on October 16th of that year!

With regards to gaming, The "Electronic Entertainment Expo" or E3 is held for the first and it takes place in Los Angeles, California, USA.  It was a huge year with regards to consoles, with the Virtual Boy being released everywhere, the Sony PlayStation, the Sega Saturn and the Sega 32X add-on for European Sega MegaDrives.  However, this would be the last year the NES is made in the USA, good run, team...

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995)

With regards to gaming, note the similarities in some of this year's big titles: Chrono Trigger by Squaresoft, Heroes of Might and Magic by New World Computing, and WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness by Blizzard.  There were other big games this year as well, like Phantasmogoria by Sierra, the first Command and Conquer from Westwood Studios and the SNES sequel to Donkey Kong Country, but what do we have in common from our games listed earlier?

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_in_video_games)

They are all set in a medieval world, be them RPGs or Real-Time Strategies or otherwise.  Most have magic, mythical beasts, swords, archers, et cetera.  Now, for a game like EarthBound, also released 1995, this could be a tough market to break into, especially as an RPG.  But this wasn't always so, and before we jump into why EarthBound was so cutting edge, I think that it's necessary that we look at how things got to be this way, because they sure didn't start like that.  This next section is heavy and quite involved, so let's relax our brains with some trippy 1950s, island-influenced, reverse-trance craziness.  This track plays where we're in the inverted town of Fourside, called Moonside.  Random... it's by Keiichi Suzuki and Hip Tanaka.

(MOONSIDE)

HISTORY OF RPGS

Much of this section is sourced from the article "A History of Role Playing" by Steve Darlington, who cites a lot of his material from a book called "Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds," by Gary Alan Fine.  If you would like to read Darlington's article, I've put the link in the shownotes.

(http://ptgptb.org/0001/history1.html)

Prior to role-playing games, we have games based on war on conflict, with the oldest games tracing back to the Sumerians about 4000 years ago.  In a little more recent history, we have a game like Chess; again, based on conflict.  According to the research of Darlington, one of the more contemporary style of war games originated in Prussia, called Kriegspiel (or directly translated, "War Game") involving a sand table, the placement of markers and then, the rolling of dice to randomize actions and outcomes of games.  While these are interesting, they still don't really build into any sort of modern game that we have here - the pivot between then and now is a book written by science-fiction guru, H. G. Wells called Little Wars.

Quoting directly from the article: "It was Wells, [however], who first opened up the games for the amateur. In 1915, he published a set of amateur wargaming rules in a book entitled Little Wars, now seen as the "wargamers' bible". Wells was also the first to suggest that miniature figures be collected to represent respective forces, to add flavour, and a sense of involvement, to the game. Though the book was popular, wargames did not really take off until, in 1953, Charles Roberts released the first commercially available "board" war game. Though it was a slow starter, Roberts eventually went on to form the Avalon-Hill Game Company, now one of the world's biggest game companies."

In the 60s and 70s, war games were beginning to really take off with players recreating military battles like the Battle of Gettysburg or any set of battles from the Napoleonic Wars.  That frame of battle would change drastically in 1966 when a landmark set of novels was published for the first time - J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.  So now, instead of recreating military wars, the world of fantasy was starting to shape this type of gameplay.  David Arneson and Gary Gygax would take this one step forward and create a specific game set in a medieval-fantasy world called "Chainmail," widely considered as the first true "role-playing game" and the parent to the most popular RPG of all-time, Arneson and Gygax's "Dungeon's and Dragons."

By the late 70s, D&D was thriving, as were other games that sought the same goal, "Chivalry & Sorcery" or "Tunnels & Trolls."  More games continued this trend, some in different areas too like space or Asia.  Rules changed and varied, but also became incredibly codified in the next installment of "Dungeons & Dragons," called "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", necessitating the need for three expansive and expensive books: The Player's Manual, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monstrous Manual.  

(http://ptgptb.org/0001/history1.html)

Because this could go on for an entire episode (and it's wonderfully interesting too!), let's just look at those different elements listed before and apply them to all our popular RPGs pre-1995.  One of the first influential RPGs for computer or console, Ultima, Wizardry or the Temple of Apshai, and then the game that combined all of those elements and really brought commercial light onto the console RPG scene, Dragon Quest.  Jay Barnson of the indie-gaming blog "Tales of the Rampant Coyote" says, about Dragon Quest,  "this game inspired an entire genre, and became an entire evolutionary offshoot from Ultima and Wizardry." 

(http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/2006/08/evolution-of-computer-rpgs.html)

Now what do we have, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, World of WarCraft, RuneScape, Diablo (sort of) and tons of online games that tote the same notion.  It's everywhere, it's the standard, the status quo, you know how it is.  And I am, by no stretch of the imagination, saying that it's a bad thing, but it sure is nice to see someone break out of the mold... and that someone is EarthBound.  Even just listen to this tune and tell me if you reeeeeeally thought that this came from a knights and orcs-style RPG... it's by Keiishi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, it's called "Tenda Village" and it plays in the cave village of the miniature people, called "Tendas." They're shy, so be nice to them, "Tenda Village."

(TENDA VILLAGE)

DEVELOPMENT

While EarthBound may seem like a stand-alone game once you play it, it's actually the second in a series from Japan called Mother.  The plots of Mother and Mother 2 (or EarthBound) are very similar - the protagonist of the world has to gather 8 melodies to defeat a horrible villain called Giygas.  While the game was translated by fans and released as EarthBound Zero via emulator, I haven't played it, so I really can't say more with any sense of certainty.  

One of the parts of the series that caught my eye was the change in name.  Usually we have subtle changes between Japanese and their Western localizations, like Dragon Quest and Dragon Warrior, for example... but Mother and EarthBound seem to almost have a different philosophy or ideology attached to the titles.  In an interview on the Mother 1+2 release for the GameBoy Advance, the designer of the series, Shigesato Itoi discusses his rationale for the name "Mother": "Generally speaking, there are a lot of situations where the word 'mother' is used.  One idea was 'mother computer', and the game being so large that it could be a 'mother' for all other games.  Another one is where I cried after John Lennon said 'mother!'... His voice made tears gush out.  Being called 'mother' in that way felt horrible to me, so I decided to make others feel that way." It's on YouTube and the link is in the shownotes and when he's talking about John Lennon, he's referring to Lennon's song "Mother," which is also on YouTube, check it out.

(http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=lKpaKlatg5M)

Alright, but now on to EarthBound.  The game was released on August 27th, 1994 in Japan and June 1st in North America (and perhaps the rest of the world?).  It was designed by Shigesato Itoi and developed by two production houses - HAL Laboratories taking care of the programming side of things and Ape Inc. with all of the data... not good for people who have to go back and forth.  The game took five years to make and met several roadblocks along the way, including programming problems and a continual need for memory expansion - much of this space being taken up by music.  It was worth it, we'll talk about that in a minute.

Even though the Western version of the game came with a strategy guide AND scratch-and-sniff stickers, the game was received relatively poorly, selling 140,000 copies in North America.  Granted, the RPG wasn't really that big of a deal in North America until Square Enix's 1997 of Final Fantasy VII, but EarthBound's sales were still lower than expected.  While I don't know the exact numbers for Japan's release, it did eventually reach #1 of Famitsu's Top 30 chart and in the June 2008 issue of Nintendo Power, it was the number 1 "Reader's Most Wanted" virtual console title for the Wii with it's predecessor (Mother) at #2.  

Why would one crave this game so badly? To be honest, I think it's the story - after this tune, we're going to learn about it.  This is "Twoson" and it plays in the bigger town of Twoson, home to Burglin Park, the Polar Star Nursery School and the game's two star inventors, Apple Kid and Orange Kid.  This is "Twoson."

(TWOSON)

STORY

Our story begins in the year 199X with a falling meteor in the small town of Onett and it wakes our young, silent protagonist named Ness (a clever anagram of SNES, for the system on which it was released).  A small bee rises from the meteor named "Buzz Buzz" and he comes from the future, a future that is dominated by a terrible villain named "Giygas."  In order for the future to be safe, Ness must defeat Giygas in the present because of the strength that he's accumulated in the future.  However, Ness is not strong enough quite yet, so he has to travel to eight different locations and gather eight melodies - one at each location, and record them on his Sound Stone.  His power will unite with the Earth's and he will be strong enough to defeat Giygas... with the help of four friends.  

Because you name each character at the beginning of the game, you know that you'll get four characters, originally named Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo... yes, Poo, he's from Dalaam, be a grown up.  These characters all come and help Ness throughout the story as they journey through exciting and comic terrains like the "Doko Doko Desert" (or the "Dry Dry Desert," the zombie village of Threed, a village run by a cult obsessed with the colour, blue, or the ridiculous village of Saturn Valley, mentioned earlier in the show.  In the cosmopolitan city of Fourside, we hear this theme, it's called "Fourside"... you don't say.

(FOURSIDE)




COMPOSER

That was "Fourside" by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka.  Keiichi Suzuki was born on August 28th, 1951 in Tokyo, Japan, according to his bio at bioandlyrics.com.  The first band that was involved with was called Hachimitsu Pie and they only released one album, and that was in 1973.  Within Japan, he may be most widely known with his work with a cutting-edge Japanese rock band called "The Moon Riders," where he was the singer.   He has collaborated with other bands including the Yellow Magic Orchestra (who inspired the composers of our last episode, Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata) as well as composing for films like Tokyo Godfathers, Uzamaki and Hiroshi Shimizu's Chicken Heart.  

Around the west, he is most commonly known for his score to the Mother series... most notably: EarthBound.

(http://www.bioandlyrics.com/keiichisuzuki/biography)


Hirokazu Tanaka, also known as "Hip Tanaka" was born in December 13, 1957 currently resides in ____, Japan, where he is the president of Creatures, Inc., a company that deals with Pokemon games and trading cards.  He got into music at age 5, after his parents enrolled him in piano at the Yamaha Music School, a privately run music institution.  Although his mother rigorously played recordings of classical and film music, it would be the rock music that really sold him into the art.  When he was nine (and still attending the Yamaha School), The Monkees aired on TV and that encouraged Tanaka to start up a band with some friends, which prompted his performance in rock bands for the next 20 years.  The Monkees would continue to be one of his influences among others like the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Burt Bacharach.

Now, when does he start composing? He enrolled in college as an electronic engineer, but was the most interested in the engineering applications for music technology.  In 1980, Hirokazu came upon a newspaper advertisement for a sound engineering position at Nintendo, which he applied for and received!

His initial work for Nintendo began with installing sound equipment and programming sound effects for their arcade machines - this went on until 1983, when Nintendo began work on the Famicom, or NES.  With this, game music would receive its first critical attention, especially for Tanaka's work on Kid Icarus and the infamous sound effects for Duck Hunt.  According to Japan-101.com, he had been writing music for 1/3 of all famicom titles.  In an "as-yet-unreleased" interview with Jeriaska, co-founder of Nobuooo.com, he cites that Jamaican music has had a profound influence on his writing, stating: "Since my twenties, I have been in love with reggae music.  I remember hearing dub reggae for the first time while eating soba at a restaurant.  I was eating and my body was instinctively going along with the groove of the music.  I felt compelled to ask the restaurant owner all about it, and that is how I discovered Jamaican music.  I immersed myself in that music until I was in my thirties.  Most music you hear is made by people in their twenties and thirties.  The must you listen to and write during that period is truly essential to the development of a composer's skill."  Thanks to Jeriaska for that one.  One example of Jamaican influence in EarthBound is one of the house themes.  

(HOUSE  1 [SPC])

Japan-101.com also has a really interesting quote with regards to the atmosphere of Japanese VGM composers at the time, stating: This increase in sound technology [four channels of audio], coupled with the composing talents of Tanaka and his coworkers such as Koji Kondo helped raise the popularity of game music in Japan.  The increased attention spurred good-spirited rivalries between many game composers, a development that bothered Tanaka, since it forced composers to write in a way that he felt was contrary to the atmosphere of the games themselves.  It was this dislike that inspired him to compose the subdued themes of Metroid.  In his words, he tried 'to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects.'  He composed the music so as to deny the player a simply melody to hum along with; only after completing the game is any 'catchy music' played.  At the time, the Metroid soundtrack was criticized as being too "heavy, but today, the score is widely regarded as Tanaka's masterpiece."  End quote.  I can't say that I agree, as I think that Super Metroid was his masterpiece, but that's just me.  

(http://www.japan-101.com/art/art_hirokazu_tanaka.htm)

Keeping in mind Mr. Tanaka's engineering background, he was the one composer on the Nintendo staff that, rather than using the sound programs for NES, wrote all of his music in Assembly language... in other words, he coded every note and rhythm in his piece... man, that is craziness.

MUSIC

While playing through EarthBound then discovering this information about Tanaka... this really doesn't surprise me.  Some of the music in the game is just... out there... like when one is prancing through the Doko Doko Desert, we get the sound of a radio tuning and a morse-code-like built into the piece...

(DOKO DOKO DESERT)

... Or the triumphant brass section doing call and response with a power drill and this weird, transporter sound in the Great Underworld...

(THE GREAT UNDERWORLD)

Or bizarre crazy tuba, or synthesized... talking in the "Dungeon Man."

(DUNGEON MAN)

Like... what?? The really crazy thing is that there is this bizarre pairing of really beautiful tunes with tunes that are really out there.  Some of the music is absolutely gorgeous, like the music in Snowwood (where we find Jeff).  It's got a very clear one-beat lilt over a 3/4 pattern, an ostinato in the sleigh bells and a soaring melody in, what I think is some sort of ocarina or soft woodwind... you know what, let's just listen to it.  This is the "Snow Wood" music from the "Winters" piece of music found on the Mother 2 OST and I believe that it's by Keiichi Suzuki.

(WINTERS - FIRST PART)

Like... beautiful.  According to the liner notes, Suzuki wrote most of the more melodic music, like Onett and Twoson, while Tanaka wrote the more sonically-involved music like Doko Doko Desert and Dungeon Man.  This probably comes as no surprise, but it's still worth noting.  

With regards to a lot of these more melodic pieces, this would be the first time that North American listeners would hear this music, but our friends out east had heard a lot of these tunes before from the game's prequel, Mother.  When I say "a lot", I mean "A LOT."

A lot of the music seems to be recycled from the game's predecessor, and if the music wasn't so good, I'm not sure how happy I'd be about that.  Just to demonstrate some of these similarities, we're going to do some comparison between the NES's 2A03 soundchip and the SNES's SPC700 - in other words, 8-bit and 16-bit console sounds.  The last tune that we heard during the "Snow Wood Boarding School," where our resident geek and fixer of things goes to school - his name is Jeff, and this is "Snow Wood," from EarthBound.

(SNOW WOOD - SNES)

Now, there's another snow place in Mother, except that it's at the top of a mountain and is just south of a town called Merrysville - not in EarthBound.  This town is called Snowman, and here's the music.

(SNOWMAN - NES [23])

Here's another and according to the OST, it's called "Humoresque of a Little Dog," it plays when you're inside the drug store.

(DRUG STORE)

And from Mother...

(HUMORESQUE OF A LITTLE DOG - NES[12])

Maybe just one more, because it's fun hearing 8-bit renditions of tunes that we know.  The cool thing about these examples is that the 8-bits are the originals and the ones that we know are arrangements... don't hear that too often.   The last one that we're going to hear on its own is one of the Cave melodies, most often called "Cave 2." Here's what it sounds like from EarthBound.

(CAVE 2)

And finally, from Mother.

(CAVE 2 - NES [33])

I find that that one retains a lot of the same haunting quality, even in its 8-bit form.

Granted, the games are still different and a gamer named Eddie Segoura has taken the time to point them out on his website, which is in the shownotes if anyone would like to check it out.  There's nothing wrong with borrowing - a lot of popular series in film, television and video games do it all the time... like the Mario theme, the Legend of Zelda, the prologue and chocobo themes from Final Fantasy, the "Ring Theme" from Lord of the Rings, the list goes on... 

The difference with EarthBound is that there really is quite a bit of muzak, I find.  I love the score to EarthBound, but I feel like some pieces are definitely better than others - that's not to say that some are more or less appropriate than some of the others, but you know, there's only so much hotel music that I can listen to.

(HOTEL)

Or Chaos Theatre...

(CHAOS THEATRE)

Those weren't borrowed... borrowed... we were going somewhere with that... ah yes. Where things start to get really clever is when Suzuki starts cutting up themes from Mother and putting them in different places or different tunes within EarthBound.  One of the more famous pieces from Mother is called "Pollyanna - I Believe in You," and it first plays when you leave your house at the beginning of the game...yes, Mother and EarthBound start the same way - here's "Pollyanna."

(POLLYANNA - NES[4])

Now, let's pretend that we re-enact that scene, but in EarthBound.  We do all that stuff with the meteor that we have to do, now it's time to adventure during the day.

(ONETT)

Starts normal, alright - hey, hey! That's not how it's supposed to go! It starts with "Pollyanna" and then it goes right into Onett's music.  I feel cheated, back to Ness's House.

(HOME)

Ahhh... okay, now I'm relaxed.  Now that I'm relaxed, I can listen to the first section of the "Pollyanna" theme - we heard the intro when we walked outside, and we hear the rest of the tune inside Ness's house... much better.

But let's get back to this town theme idea - at a time when many (but not all) RPGs had a generic town theme, the developers of EarthBound decided to have each different town have its own music.  Onett (or "ONEtt"), Twoson, Threed, Fourside... we see the number pattern.  Anyways, because these cities are pretty modern (as the game is set in the 90s), all of the themes have a sort-of-metropolitan feel to them, which I think comes from their melody instruments. For Twoson, Threed and Fourside, their melodies are all played with this tenor-range brass instrument, it kind of sounds like a "generic synth brass for SNES:" It could be a French Horn, it could be a Trombone with really soft attacks, it could be a Euphonium (which is what I think it is) OR, it could just be a software patch that the composer liked, period.  Anyways, here's the big city of Fourside, have a listen to this one - it has some Latin percussion in the backgrounds and uses a Latin-style rhythm for the turnaround in bar 5.  A turnaround is something that takes us back to the tune, it usually happens at the end, but not always - as in this case, it happens at the end of the 5-bar intro... "Fourside."

(FOURSIDE)

So with "Fourside" especially, we get a juxtaposition of Latin percussion, smooth Latin backgrounds with the brass section underneath a very legato, more tonal and Western-style melody (that doesn't really sound Latin at all), listen for that more time.

(FOURSIDE)

Of the four towns named with numbers, this is the only one without a guitar and is noticeably different from the other three.  The other tree have lots of grass in their towns, the towns are generally smaller, there are no skyscrapers, etc.  As you progress through the towns, their music is less and less folk-like.  Onett is young and adventure-like, Twoson's music is more poppy, whereas Threed's music is a Spanish dance in 3/4, finally coming up to a Latin feel in Fourside.  With regards to music happening within the game, both Twoson and Fourside have theatres  - the Chaos Theatre and the Topolla, respectively.  In those theatres, we see the performing group "The Runaway Five," who are comprised of two singers and four instrumentalists... making six... not five... anyways!

They resemble a troupe from both Saturday Night Live and film lore called the "Blues Brothers."  Even their music is like them - this rock/jazz/blues kind of feel... very clichˇ...here's an example.   It's one of their songs... in the SPC archive, it's called "RunAway5Song2."

(RUNAWAY5SONG2)

Wow, like a junior high jazz band method book... It's not the best blues in the world, but it is very cool that a jazz combo has found its way into an RPG, especially as a part of the story! We've got one more Runaway Five tune to listen to and it plays when they're riding on their tour bus - it's "Runaway Five - Bus 3," here we go!

(RUNAWAY5BUS3)

So that was one of the bus themes, the third one, actually... Now, to complete this idea of combining tunes, we're going to listen to the ending song, and seeing as its over 9 minutes long, we can listen to a pretty substantial sample.  See how many songs you can spot! Big ears, listeners!

(ENDING)

So it starts with Fourside (SAMPLE) then goes into the Runaway Five's bus tour (SAMPLE), then overtop of that, we hear the A section of Onett's theme, then acting as the B section of the melody, we get the A section of the Threed town theme (THREED) but funky (FUNKY THREED).  Okay, I'll go through that one more time.  First, we have the Fourside music, then it goes into a sweet vamp (or repeating thing) of the Runaway Five's third bus music, then we hit the B section of Twoson's music, which sounds like this in the original (TWOSON - B) and this in the Ending, we'll hear it and keep on going, you'll hear Fourside one more time (ENDING - 1:20).

In the last half of the piece, we have a slow, smooth section and this melody is taken from Mother, its called "Smiles and Tears," Here is part of it.

(ENDING - 3:50 - 5:30)

Beautiful, I love it... So the first half comprised of many different town themes overtop of a Runaway Five vamp and the last based on a melody from Mother called "Smiles and Tears."  I want to get back to jazz combos here, because sometimes they get the shaft on things.  So, we're going to do two things in this episode of Into the Score: We're going to interview one, and we're going to have the jazz combo as our big idea of the episode!

(MARIO CLIP)

THE JAZZ COMBO

With its roots in African drumming, along with European orchestral and marching traditions, Jazz is truly America's musical folk tradition.  Its not only musical influences that characterized where jazz was going and where it began to go around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th one - it was a set of practices and a mindset about the music was.  Some of these aspects included call-and-response, improvisation and most importantly, the strong foundation on the blues.  There were many forms of American music leading up to quote-unquote "jazz", like ragtime and stride piano, but we're going to start with the year 1917.  

Allaboutjazz.com has this to say about the year 1917 in its "Jazz Timeline."

"New Orleans [Jazz] is a melting pot for the Blues, Ragtime, Marching Band music, etc. It can be thought of as an impressionistic view of these forms, just as Impressionistic painting gives a novel view of what we normally see." 

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/timeline_year.php?year=1917

There was this influx of different cultures into the United States over the past 100 years, especially with regard to the flocking of Europeans to North America and the slavery of Africans and many other cultures, by the Europeans.  With these different cultures, different music was brought into the country as well, and in every tradition - Western traditions, Latin music, French musical practices, African drum songs and rhythms and they came together everywhere, but never quite as dense and under such circumstances as were in New Orleans, Louisiana.  It was a bustling arts city, supporting more than one symphony and more than one opera house and again, it was the incubator for jazz... but it wasn't called this yet.

In 1917, "The Original Dixieland Jass Band" recorded the first ever LP of this music in history, a tune called "Livery Stable Blues."  It was a five-person ensemble comprised of piano, drums, trombone, clarinet and cornet (which is like an English trumpet).  This would be the first time that many people in both the US and in the world would hear this music, slowly catching the name "jazz."  It is also in this year that pianist, Duke Ellington, starts getting a reputation around his native, Washington, DC.  Two years before this, the trumpet player, Louis Armstrong, is playing bars at night for $1.25.  

Louis Armstrong has jazz bands, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Duke Ellington... all of these names are big in the next decade, which history has coined "The Roaring '20s."  Here is a smidge from Louis Armstrong, it's called "Ain't Misbehavin'."  The original was first recorded by Fats Waller and this tune is written by Fats Waller and Harry Brooks, with lyrics and Andy Razaf.  Most sources cite that it was recorded on July 19th, 1929, my recording is from the CD collection of Ken Burns' documentary, "Jazz." 

(AIN'T MISBEHAVIN')

Things are looking good for the world: Credit is good, the music is good, you could go to a bar and listen to jazz (which is something that I still yearn for) and we get the beginnings of the jazz orchestra or "jazz band," which is the standard of jazz education in most high schools throughout the world (which I have a few opinions on, but that's for another episode).  Vocalists like Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday come in to sing with these jazz orchestras too, and not always in this New Orleans-style that everyone's been playing, this style is more like dance music and they call it "swing," which begins near the end of the 20s and into the Great Depression.  In the 30s, we get groups like the Count Basie Band, the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Benny Moten Band, who dominate the scene... until something in the world changes.  Before you hear it, this is a Duke Ellington piece called "The Mooche," and it was recorded on October 1st, 1929 - I also got this one from the CD anthology of Ken Burns' documentary series ,"Jazz."

(THE MOOCHE)

In 1939, war breaks out in Europe, but there's more.  War and the economy of the world will eventually be the undoing of big band swing, and this is where our big concept of the episode comes into play.  Now, as times are tough, it is more economically feasible to still play jazz, but just with a smaller group - it's easier to pay three, four, five or even six musicians than it is to pay eighteen or twenty.  Concurrently, as always happens with new movements in history, a new school of jazz musician is approaching who have incredible speed and dexterity as well as a firm grasp on a very theoretical and hyper-chromatic approach to improvising - this style will emerge as "bebop."  Some of the earliest players in this tradition include alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker and trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie.  The jazz timeline at allaboutjazz.com has this to say about them in 1939:

"Charlie Parker is in New York City working at Clarke Monroe's Uptown. He'll be at Monroe's for about a year. One night during this year, Charlie realizes that by using the high notes of the chords of a song, he can "play what's inside of him". The rest is the history of Bop... It will be awhile before everyone realizes that he is a genius.  Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie is currently with Cab Calloway's band, which also included Coleman Hawkins-style tenor sax man Chu Berry. Dizzy was occasionally doing some things musically which others found strange. He would slip briefly into a chord containing notes 1/2 step away from normal. This practice will become standard Bop."

(http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/timeline_year.php?year=1939)

Guys like Parker and Gillespie would not be the only ones playing in this style.  Pianists Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk, Kenny Clarke and Max Roach on drums and the list continues.  These groups would get together and play, just a few of them, forming trios or quartets usually with very close musical conversation between all of them, feeding off of each other's energy.  

Here's an example of some bebop.  This is called "Anthropology" and it's by Charlie Parker.  I got this recording off of a Charlie Parker anthology back in like... 2001, I've had it forever and I still listen to it.  We can listen for how it still swings, but it's pretty quick and in the beginnings of Parker's solo, lots of chromatic movement, it's pretty heavy playing... heavy like "good", not like "weight."  Listen also for how many people are playing... sure not a jazz orchestra... Anthropology.

(ANTHROPOLOGY)

And this tradition continued... it even found its way into some of our friends of video game music, an ensemble called the "Runaway Five," named after our traveling group from EarthBound.  This is their rendition of a tune from EarthBound called "Fourside," we've heard it before, but not like this - "Fourside" by the "Runaway Five" and it will be the featured arrangement of the episode, as well as our segueway into the interview portion of the show!

(FOURSIDE - RUNAWAY FIVE)

RUNAWAY FIVE


The "Runaway Five" is made up of eight members spanning the two Canadian cities of Calgary, AB and Toronto, ON.  The core group consists of Matt MacLean on trumpet, Bent Mah on Saxes, Alex Goodman on guitar, Brendan Swanson (piano), Brendan McElroy (bass), Spencer Cheyne on drums, with Gordon Hyland, Tyson Kerr and Jon McCaslin on Saxes, Piano and Drums respectively, in Toronto.

Joining us for the interview is...... ______________, now let's get this show on the road.

(FIGARO CASTLE)

Excellent.  It is pertinent to mention that other large-scale arranging projects of EarthBound music have taken place too, most notably, the album "Bound Together," put together by scads of video game remixers from such communities as OverClocked ReMix and OverLooked ReMix, VGMix and OneUp Studios.  It was completed in October of 2006 and we're going to play one piece from it.  It's called "rake dat snake," and it's by "po!" It's kind of got a 70s funk feel to it and it remixes one of the battle themes.  Alright, let's have a listen!

(RAKE DAT SNAKE)

Thanks so much for listening to Episode 24 of "Into the Score," where we studied Nintendo's 1994 release of EarthBound for the SNES, scored by Hip Tanaka and Keiichi Suzuki.  We studied the jazz combo and the score to EarthBound! I hope that you enjoyed! Please feel free to leave me a comment at the post, which can be found at www.intothescore.com or you can send me a note at Kenley@intothescore.com! We're going to end off with my favourite tune from EarthBound, it plays when you're in the prehistoric-type Underworld and it's called "The Underworld."  Thanks so much for listening and see you in a month, where we study the history of chant and the epic score to 2005's God of War.  Enjoy!



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