Boxer's Blues – Gigi Gryce
A different type of altered blues: this Gigi Gryce composition has a riveting quintet arrangement that features alternating instrumental lines.
- Recording: Gigi Gryce - The Rat Race Blues
- Recorded on:
- Label: New Jazz (NJ 8262)
- Concert Key: G
- Style: Swing (medium)
- Trumpet - Richard Williams
- Alto Sax - Gigi Gryce
- Piano - Richard Wyands
- Bass - Julian Euell
- Drums - Mickey Roker
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Listening to our audio excerpt, which starts at the beginning of the arrangement, you'll hear that this is an intriguing quintet arrangement, where the trumpet and alto sax have specific assignments, as do piano, bass and drums. The arrangement alternates between double time feel and half time. This could also work in a quartet (or smaller) setting, but everyone should get to see everything that went on in the original recording, so they are free to choose what role their instrument should take. Therefore, each of our lead sheet editions are like single staff scores with the notes for the recorded instruments labeled. There's also a separate 24-measure solo section indicated in each edition which helps clarify that this is actually a long meter altered blues.
"The Rat Race Blues" was recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs.
The idea for the instrumental composition The Boxer's Blues originally came out of a collaboration with jazz journalist and lyricist Ira Gitler. As Ira recalled in Noal Cohen and Michael Fitzgerald's "Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life Of Gigi Gryce", "I've written a lot of lyrics to already existing songs...[T]hat's the way I've usually written, but I started writing these lyrics about a boxer and I finished them and showed them to Gigi, and he liked them so he wrote a tune to match the lyrics. Then he recorded the instrumental version for Prestige." The lyric version became the song You Left Me With The Boxer's Blues..
Learn more about Gigi Gryce at Noal Cohen's Jazz History website. Also see Gryce's discography.
More from this album.
The idea for the instrumental composition The Boxer's Blues originally came out of a collaboration with jazz journalist and lyricist Ira Gitler. As Ira recalled in Noal Cohen and Michael Fitzgerald's "Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life Of Gigi Gryce", "I've written a lot of lyrics to already existing songs...[T]hat's the way I've usually written, but I started writing these lyrics about a boxer and I finished them and showed them to Gigi, and he liked them so he wrote a tune to match the lyrics. Then he recorded the instrumental version for Prestige." The lyric version became the song You Left Me With The Boxer's Blues..
Learn more about Gigi Gryce at Noal Cohen's Jazz History website. Also see Gryce's discography.
More from this album.
Gigi Gryce
November 28, 1925 – March 17, 1983
Gigi Gryce was a fine altoist in the 1950s, but it was his writing skills, both composing and arranging (including composing the standard Minority) that were considered most notable. After growing up in Hartford, CT, and studying at the Boston Conservatory and in Paris, Gryce worked in New York with Max Roach, Tadd Dameron, and Clifford Brown. He toured Europe in 1953 with Lionel Hampton and led several sessions in France on that trip. Read more...