011 - The Thunderstorm Song

I’m kind of enjoying revisiting all these tunes I’ve excreted over the past 10+ years so bear with me as I’ll be posting more of them. I’ll intersperse them with new ones.

This somewhat cobblers patch of a tune has a different pedigree than most of the others I’ve posted. This was actually a post of an earlier tune at the time I put this in the 2012 collection.

I don’t remember the year, but somewhere between probably 2005 / 2010, likely during some spring month, later in the evening after the last remains of twilight had long passed, severe thunderstorms passed thru that knocked out the power, which is rare around here with most of our power lines buried.

My mandolin was handy so I picked it up and started noodling there in the dark with the storm crashing, thunder rumbling the foundation and lightening flashing bright white rectangles through the windows, and this of all things is what I improvised, hence the title.

Simple as it was, it struck me as a keeper so when the lights came back on I wrote it down and then promptly forgot all about it until later, while doing the tunes in 2012 I found it so in the collection it went and I got a break that day.

For all its simplicity, it’s a lot of fun to improvise over. Overarchingly (sic) it’s a blues, but it’s 24 bar length makes it a little bent. We play this in my trio and sometimes I improvise it for ballet classes. It gives me a chuckle watching the little kids do their exercises while I’m playing this.