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This one was a total whim and a rush job. I didn't yet know that this was going to be a weeks-long project for me. The Strong Bad Twitter account had tweeted about the first song in the Decemberweenvent 2022 calendar, and I was going through a Guaraldi phase (that I guess I'm still going through). So I took the synth melody from the original song and turned it into a jazz bass line. Sure, it's not a walking bass line, but a lot of Guaraldi's tunes had written out ostinato bass lines on the melody rather than a walking bass line, with an obvious example being "Linus and Lucy". Another well-known example is "Cast Your Fate To The Wind".

I played the melody and some straightforward jazz harmonies on piano on top of that bass line, improvised a solo, and played the melody differently again to end it, and that was that. The solo has the bass switching to a walking line and the drums moving to a swing feel. Switching between straight eighths with a bass ostinato on the melody to swung eighths with a walking bass line for a solo is a characteristically Vince Guaraldi thing to do. "Linus and Lucy" provide an example again with the second solo of that recording, but Guaraldi did it many other times such as once again on "Cast Your Fate To The Wind".

There are two Guaraldi-isms that I put in the solo to try to maximize the evocation of Vince. There's a down-to-the-third-and-leap-up-to-the-flat-nine-on-a-dominant-seven-chord at 0:47 and there's a repeated smushed third thing at 0:59 that I guess we'll call a Guaraldi Third.

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from Songs in the Key of Decemberween Volume 1, released December 14, 2022

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