Welcome back to Get Your Sax Together I'm pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson.
one of my mates who's down with the kids told me that there's a game called
Cuphead which has got some great jazz music on it. I checked it out and he's
quite right, there's some awesome thirties big band stuff all through the
game. So I'm gonna teach you how to play the piece of music called Botanic
Panic which is in one of the earlier levels of the game. Let's get straight on
with it!
Botanic Panic is a very fast piece of music. It's a concert F minor blues which
is a G minor blues for tenor players, D minor blues for alto, but because it's
so fast I've written it in double speed so in other words it's a 24 bar blues
now. So here's the first phrase, which you're going to play twice. Here it is
played nice and slowly for you...
So you play phrase one twice and now we're moving on to phrase two. Now if you
go down into the description and click the link there's a free PDF with all the
music written out.. look, this is my labor of love, and you can get all the sheet
music for alto and tenor sax there so make sure you go and get that resource
down there in the description. Now here is the second phrase, which is chord
four of the blues, played very slowly for you...
So when you come to perform this you're gonna play the first phrase twice, you're
gonna play the second phrase once and then you're going to play the first
phrase again once, and then we move on to phrase three. Now I've broken up phrase
three into two parts because there's a lot of notes to learn. You're going to
have to practice this slowly and gradually get as fast as you can because
it's quite notey. So here is phrase three played slowly...
Now here's phrase four, which is really the second half of phrase three, but
I've called it phrase 4, here it is played super slow...
Great! And then you finish the whole thing off by playing phrase one again.
So the structure of the whole song is: phrase one twice, phrase two, phrase one
again, phrase three, phrase four, and then finish off with a final phrase one. That
gives you the twenty four bars of the blues structure. So you've got all the
individual pieces, I've played it extremely slowly for you - here is the
whole thing played a bit faster just to give you the flow of the whole song.
Again, don't forget go down into the description, get your PDF, print it out
whether you're an alto or tenor, and then follow along. All the phrases are marked
in underneath, one through to four. So here it is played a bit faster...
As I was transcribing the video it occurred to me that people might not know the
origins of where the music comes from, so I dug out three different examples of
this exact style of music so you can see the origins of this kind of jazz. The first
one is Cab Calloway from 1934, hidey-ho. This is from an old paramount movie,
check it out and you can tell me if you think it is quite Cuphead...
Second big influence on this track is Benny Goodman's famous "Sing
Sing Sing". Now here's a live version of it from 1937 from the Holiday Hotel
movie, with Gene Krupa on drums check it out...
And finally, it really reminded me of some Charles Mingus stuff. He is a double
bass player who's a famous jazz composer as well, so have a listen to Boogie Stop
Shuffle and see if you think it's quite Cuphead-ish...
So there you go, there's the influences of where this Cuphead music comes
from. That's all we've got time for this week. Please do subscribe to the channel,
click the bell if you're a first time watcher, go and check out my Instagram
feed, and remember go down into the description click the link to get your
free pdf with all the music. It's a beautiful transcription, very accurate,
all written out nicely for you. You can print it off and follow along as you
learn the song. So I'll see you next week for more sax-tastic magic on Get Your
Sax Together. Keep practicing, see you later, bye!