Seiji: Hey everyone, this is Seiji.
Umu: My name is Umu and I'm Reacttothek's channel creator.
Owen: Hello. My name is Owen McCready.
U: Welcome to our Lee Jin Ah "Dangerous Dream" reaction.
When I was at music conservatory, I didn't have room in my schedule to take any
Jazz-related theory classes or improv classes. So I'm relying on the two other guys in this video to make all the analysis
related comments, while I just freak out about Lee Jin Ah.
Because I am so so so excited to see that she's back.
Her last release "Run" grew on me a ton,
and I loved all of her releases before, and I checked out a tiny bit of this,
and it seemed very calming and relaxing.
Let's get it!!
wooOOOOOOOO!!!
LEE JIN AH!!!!!
O: Three, two, one, boom.
Starting with a solo piano
I'm assuming that's her, because it is.
She's writing her own music.
U: I love the effect on the piano...
That's going to clear out soon, unless this repeats throughout the entire track.
It's like the ultimate lo-fi hip-hop sound to have the record scratch or... fuzz.
And vinyl sounds really warm, so it creates this effect,
you already see that there's a lot of orange in the video, too which kind of matches that.
So synthetic bass good.
Uh, they add another portion to this track to make it um... to change the harmony.
A minor two five going to six, instead of just a two five to one which was before.
O: Hey, duke! (?)
Nice.
Oh, so that's- she's looking at herself as a kid, maybe when she gets inspired to
start playing piano and
get into music. That's great.
Maybe. Who knows?
That's a very Tom Misch-y sort of synth.
I like the strings in the background- stringy sounds.
U: Oh, wow that cord gave me, ohhh, so many goosebumps.
S: The reason why it sounds so, kind of disruptive is because they did it on the
diminished two five,
or minor two five which you expect to resolve to a major chord- or to a minor chord, I'm sorry.
So that's a regular two five one, this is a minor two five one.
U: Okay.
This texture is so interesting.
It's both calming but also a little...
Improv section? Mm~
Cool, so that was like a pseudo-improvised section.
Um
Sounds good, because there's a lot of alterations that
kind of weave through the chord progression.
Which is what you listens for in jazz, by the way, that's the variation part of jazz.
It ain't a Lee Jin Ah song without her calming background vocals...
oh they're gone now.
Okay, so that chord right there, um part of the reason why this sounds soooo, um...
Ambitious and it sounds really crunchy, is because on these dominant chords, they're altering a lot of the chords.
So by altering we mean like, instead of playing the fifth, you make it a flat fifth, flat five or a sharp five
It creates more tension, it makes it more colorful.
O: Is she like building herself as an artist and finding different parts of her life
when she is younger that sort of add up to become who she is today?
OH, that was cool!
Yes, of course you'd give us a song with the solo in it.
S: Yeah the dissonance. It's really good.
O: Probably I'm moving too much
That wasn't it
You kidding me?!
S: Man, hopefully we don't run into the zoom problems up...
Okay, I did not update my zoom, so I wonder if that has anything to do with-
O: Boom. (or possibly cool??)
Sorry- U: Hello
S: There we go. What's up Owen? O: Hey guys
U: We're all here! Okay, (O: Yo, what's up) now you can be front and center.
O: Oh nice.
U: Yaay. How about you guys go first? Because I have zero jaalj- jazz knowledge
So everything i'm gonna say is just going to be like 'this moment was nice'.
O: Um, I don't know.
I should have listened probably more for the the actual like chord progression and piano and things like that.
I was mostly just talking about like, wow, this is great!
I don't know.
So- U: The texture!
O: Right! Yeah, yeah the texture, and she did like put in a bunch of really interesting
uh scales when she was improvising.
I thought that was pretty cool. Seiji you probably have more to say about that sort of
you know
U: It's up to you Seiji.
(O: Oh, no)
Are you- you're frozen.
SEIJIIIII
S?: Yeah. Yeah?
U: Okay, maybe yeah, just turn your video off-
or okay, there you are again.
Hi, we said you're our only hope I don't know how much of what
we said you heard.
S: Uh, hardly any of it. I caught the first part of Owen's thing. That's about it.
O: Oh no.
U: [dying] Seiji!
O: I hope he's not-
I-I hope we're frozen and he caught it, and is not saying anything
U: Me too.
O: And he doesn't have to repeat everything
U: Hi Seiji. Yeah, you broke up. Maybe should we turn all turn off our cameras.
What about that moment where like her vocal line ascended like crazy. Was that the two five one to major?
Like her vocal line just kept going up and up and up. Ah!
AHAHAHAHAHA [victorius Umu noises]
I found it! I found it! (O: 'kay) 3:15! 3:15 and to... 3:20
O: Oh, I mean that sounds like a circle of fifths progression to me, going to the background
U: Mm. I just keep- I'm distracted by the strings
O: Maybe i'm crazy. (U: Oh wait) because it goes like
Buh ba buh ba buhh [demonstrating the notes]
Throughout that- that's (U: Right!)
Starting at like 3:10 or something.
U: This whole time, I was like never listening to the actual pitches of the bass.
O: I think that's probably what it is.
U: It definitely at least starts off that way.
There's just so- what I found myself doing while listening to this song
was...
It was an awful lot of listening to the textures.
O: Mhm.
U: And then allowing the harmonies to just flow lightly over my ears
So it was a bunch of like twinkling, ear candy, niceness...
And I wasn't actually paying attention to the base, which would answer a lot of my questions about the harmonic structure.
O: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it did feel like, I don't know, for some- something about this
this song didn't feel as...
Like clear to me as some other- her other songs (U: Mhm) from like the Lee Jin Ah restaurant.
It maybe has to do with the production,
maybe it has to do with having it a different feel for different sections
Because (U: Mhm) it felt like a lot of the song was pretty similar.
Yeah. And so I-I don't know
I definitely kind of felt that that sort of like flowing over me
sort of feel for the most of the song. I think that(U: Mhm) did very well there.
U: Yeah. I'm curious Seiji
What do you think of the piano mixing because it felt, at the very end,
perhaps the sound was more dry than when it was inserted...
in the middle, like specifically improv parts.
S: Yeah, I think well...
It sounds like a lot less reverb than when they were improvising, right?
They're trying to bring it up, raising the highs.
I mean the beginning they were trying to go for that lo-fi effect
with having (O: Yeah)
the um
the record player
crackling in the background and
It was- it was- it was just like one of those, um, it was just like a loop track pretty much.
Until they bring in the bass. (U: Mhm)
U: But did you- do you like the mixing overall? Like the sound of the piano?
Because I felt like we don't always get that hard
hitting, like they always try
to make- like mic-ing in the lid and under the piano itself.
While this actually felt like
it might have been in the lid but very, very close
to the, what is it called?
The hit things O: The hammers? U: Yes that.
O: Yeah, no, it did feel like that. Yeah, there's
there's definitely that kind of like bigger woosh-ier sound
to it
in some places.
U: Yeah, so-
S: It's never a sound you'd want as a classical pianist, right?
(O: No) or even a jazz musician like you would you definitely want the bigger more open sound with more of the room
U: Right S: Um, but it's definitely it's I mean it-
it's- to me it sounded like it just took a page out of lo-fi. And...
kind of like the
like in a movie where you have the old piano that's so nostalgic.
That's kind of what it reminded me of.
Yeah, and then to end our discussion, did you guys have a favorite specific moment?
S: Um, I thought the improvising was honestly pretty good.
'What was cool about this track is it has a minor 251 in it' and a lot of the improvisation
really took advantage of the alterations that you can specifically do in that progression.
U: Mm.
S: So since it's a diminished two, um, and I- when it goes to six, minor six, like there's a lot more
Like alternate- alterations that you can put onto the dominant chord to make it a lot more colorful,
and the thing is those are a lot more difficult to control right, because there is a-
like your ear knows where the tendency-
the sonority is pushing the sound to go to
I had this the same sort of feeling, I liked
definitely with like, they cheated an altar scale over like
the beginning...
Well, I think it was over the four or something like starting two five one two to six I think
And I thought that was cool. It was like dada du dada da dup [sings the notes]
but it was just a bunch of crazy notes falling down all jazz style like, that seemed unrelated
But were just kind of cool
Heck yeah, and as for me, I was just really mesmerized by
the synth sounds that kept having the the pitch wheel like played with so it was like
byooo byoooon bwaaaa [mimicking the synth sounds]
O: Huh, yeah. U: That's what also distorted my intake of the harmony because everything was so
constantly changing and there were just so many different textures that really stood out and didn't quite blend with each other,
all at once so the soundscape was, I felt like, really interesting in the song.
S: Yeah, you can tell that she's um, she does a good job of staying present with the times.
Um, because when you think about it, the other Lee Jin Ah recording is very
reminiscent of kind of what Esperanza Spalding was doing at that time, and now it's a little bit more
of like what a lot of jazz musicians are doing in Los Angeles.
It's a lot more similar to what's happening right now. So.
Good for her. It's-
changing all the times.
U: Thanks so much guys, um, i'm ready to wrap up if you guys are? O: Cool.
U: Okay, so! Thanks so much for tuning in everyone and I hope you guys had a nice uh time watching our reaction.
We will be reacting to this on the classical musicians react season five, whenever that happens
whenever COVID's over whenever i'm reunited with...
Whoever is comfortable to be on camera again.
Um, but until then
Bye-bye
O: Alright, bye.