Andrew Lardner
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"Medley: Crow River Waltz / Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring / Jack Fig" by Leo Kottke
🕑 Added 2024-04-01 14:02:07 +0000 UTCFriends:
It's a pleasure to be back this month with a huge post. If any of you have been following the narrative of this Patreon, Leo Kottke's My Feet are Smiling record will always stand alone as the most important for my development on the guitar. Even though I tagged along with my parents to Kottke's concerts as a young kid, I didn't start listening to his records on my own until around 2001-2002. It was around this time that I was starting to play some acoustic guitar and my dad told me I should listen to this particular album. The rest is history as they say.
Creating transcriptions for the medley would be difficult because there is only one video I'm aware of from the same period where he plays all three in roughly the same manner as presented on My Feet are Smiling. If you haven't yet seen it, here is the concert recorded for WCCO's This Must Be the Place on April 22, 1973. That places this footage within 5 months of My Feet are Smiling. I was finally able to have so many questions answered about "Crow River Waltz," as this was now the only footage from the early 70s of Kottke playing the piece. There is also great footage of Kottke playing the latter two pieces from Rockpalast in the later 70s, but by this time the pieces were evolving beyond their earlier forms.
I'm confident the presentations of "Crow River Waltz" and "Jesu" are pretty much exact as Kottke played them. Only a few questions remain on "Jack Fig." The biggest question in my mind is whether he is playing the main theme (the part starting in measure 5) using middle and ring fingers on the top two strings or whether he is using only his middle finger to play both strings. Unfortunately, the footage is too dark to see what he was doing clearly. As we know, he stopped using fingerpicks in the late 70s or early 80s and was playing "Jack Fig" using different techniques at that time, with much more frequent use of the ring finger. After reviewing the Rockpalast video I can see him only using the middle to brush up on the top strings in several instances, so I believe him to be doing the same several years earlier. For this reason, I decided to write out every instance of the double stop on the top strings being brushed with the middle. I still believe he may have occasionally used the ring finger in brief moments of "Jack Fig" as played in 72 and 73 (this would not be unusual, especially because by this time he re-fingered one passage in "Crow River Waltz" to use the ring finger when compared to the 6&12 record), but unfortunately I do not yet have any way to verify.
The second issue with "Jack Fig" is trying to determine just what exactly he intended to do with the bass in this same passage. He starts off with a very regular bass pattern (5 6 5 6 5 5 5 5) but it becomes increasingly more random as the piece progresses. I, personally, would normalize this to always be the same. It's interesting to contrast the bass pattern with the 6&12 record, in which he only plays the 5th in the bass, and a slight change in the 1973 footage as he plays it similar to 1972 but with a small change, 5 6 5 6 5 6 5 5 for the first melodic phrase and 5 6 5 6 5 5 5 5 for the second. I suppose we can just consider this an early point in the research and I might be able to develop a firmer stance after looking at this for another 10 years!
Finally, I'm playing this on my newest acquisition, a Bozo from 1988. I long said I would celebrate finally having my own Bozo 12 by recording this medley, here we are.
The lesson video this month is incredibly long at just under 2 hours. You can access it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdo6A2H6h4Q
In case you skip the lesson video, please take note that Kottke is tuned two steps below concert pitch (Bb Eb Bb Eb G Bb) on the My Feet Are Smiling recording. I'm using a fairly heavy set of 80/20 bronze strings (13-58) for my recording and find two steps down to be comfortable for the time being.
The scores for the three pieces are attached below. As of 5:00pm on April 1st I have re-uploaded all the scores, I believe all of the bugs caused on export are now corrected. If you downloaded earlier in the day you may wish to grab a fresh copy.
Thank you everyone for your support! This wouldn't exist without you!!
Comments
Peter Neski
Leo really missed the best part of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, which he never gets to
Bill Knoedel
Thanks for the clarification.
