Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #164

Guest Post by Cornell Sanner (Surfboard C) + "Blue Skies" by Art Tatum - 06/15/21

Today we have another fun guest post! This time from Surfboard C aka Cornell Sanner.

I became aware of C when a mutual friend almost booked him for our Yada Yada Haggadah Passover Seder back in 2019. But he couldn’t make it. He has this amazing song: “Black Jerry” that references “stacking big salads”, “ragged Newman energy”, how “Jerry got a different shorty every night”, and much more.

“Black Jerry” by Surfboard C

We followed each other on the gram and liked some of each other’s posts, and I greatly enjoyed some of his Saturday mixes during the pandemic.

Here’s a bio!

Cornell Sanner (aka Surfboard C) is a Songwriter and Graphic Designer working out of Los Angeles and Chicago. Inspired by vibrant artists like Pharrell, Toro y Moi, and Missy Elliot, he's still managed to carve out his own sonic niche. Beneath the colorful veneer, Surfboard C’s songs are layered with themes of mental health, heartbreak, spirituality, and the politics of living in today’s world. In recent years he has done work with Bravo-NBC, MOCA (Los Angeles), the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, as well as others.

Surfboard C’s latest album is She’s My Rushmore.

Merch and Apparel is available here.

Without further adieu take it away C!

---

I was pleasantly surprised when Dave reached out to me about writing a guest post. I spend so much time immersed in my thoughts on music, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to share a few with the world.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect, as I'd recently been working on a definitive playlist of uptempo jams called “Cornell’s Vibe” (mostly to impress a girl, but that's another conversation).

After spending so much time inside during quarantine, I grew accustomed to having solo dance parties and I wanted to start by compiling the songs that got me through.

Today my shuffle brings us to one of my favorite bops of all time, “Outta Sight” by Chromeo.

I’ve been a fan of theirs from the very beginning and this song really exemplifies all of the things that make them great. I’ve always loved how they manage to create a clever juxtaposition between the music and lyrics.

Sonically it comes off very “cool” but the lyrics aren’t overly confident, displaying a level of nerdy self-awareness that you wouldn’t expect to hear over a track like this.

“Ahem, your whole demeanor is outta sight.

You've got me wondering,
"would you come home with me tonight?"
That type of body
pictured it with no clothes.
But when it went down, down, down, down, down, I guess I got scared and I froze”

Let's just say the Chromeo universe and I truly exist on the same wavelength.

The cocktail of excitement and nerves that makes dating and hooking-up so exhilarating is relatable to many of us, and this song does such a great job of capturing it in a succinct and funky way.

This song (and album for that matter) takes me back to one of the greatest musical adventures of my life. I flew to New York City to see Justice and Chromeo play Madison Square Garden, at what was essentially the height of the bloghouse era.

It was an absolutely incredible show, but what really stood out was the crowd. That was the first time I'd ever experienced a concert with such a diverse audience, in particular when it comes to age.

I saw everything from young children to senior citizens and everyone was actively engaged.

It was truly a formative experience that changed the way I perceived music and art consumption altogether.

---

Yes! Thanks so much, C!

This Chromeo song is such a hot vax summer jam!

Some of the lyrics haven’t aged that well from the 2000s:

See we could go out
And I could foot the bill
But when we get home, girl
You know how you gotta make me feel

But it’s almost or might even be ironic as the song sounds like it’s from the 1980s, which was perhaps an even more chauvinistic decade.

On my end, I took out a woman for dinner on Sunday night.

She’s a cook/chef, so it was fun to go for the kind of Sichuan food in San Gabriel Valley that she doesn’t make.

We sat outside on the corner as the blue skies turned pink.

It reminded me of the song I got today:

"Blue Skies" by Art Tatum

Which is a riff on the standard from the 1920s by Irving Berlin.

According to Wikipedia, the song was composed as a last-minute addition to the musical Betsy. Audiences on opening night demanding 24 encores of the piece from star Belle Baker. During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.

Here are some of those famous lyrics:

Blue days, all of them gone
Nothing but blue skies from now on

Blue skies smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies do I see

Bluebirds singing a song
Nothing but blue skies from now on

It was a nice date, not just because she’s a nice person, but because it does feel like my blue days are (mostly) gone (for now) haha.

Tatum picked up the song it seems in at the latest the 1940s, and his version is just him playing the piano without a singer or other band accompaniment.

But ‘just Tatum’ is like two or three piano players at once.

Or as Oscar Peterson said, “Art Tatum was the greatest two pianists I ever heard.”

It’s been said that Tatum could maintain qualities of touch and tone even at the quickest of tempos when almost all other pianists would be incapable of playing the notes at all.

This seems to be what Tatum preferred.

Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco said that playing with Tatum was "like chasing a train", and the pianist himself said that a band got in his way.

In 1993, Jeff Bilmes, an MIT student in the field of computational musicology coined the term "tatum", which was named in recognition of the pianist's speed. It has been defined as "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase", and "the fastest pulse present in a piece of music".

Take a listen, that bluebird(s) is really chirping!

And then compare it to Willie Nelson’s smooth, easy-going, slower, later cover:

The crazy thing about Tatum is that he played even more wildly after hours.

Wikipedia notes, “Whereas in a professional setting he would often give audiences what they wanted – performances of songs that were similar to his recorded versions – but decline to play encores, in after-hours sessions with friends he would play the blues, improvise for long periods on the same sequence of chords, and move even more away from the melody of a composition.”

Composer and historian Gunther Schuller describes "a night-weary, sleepy, slurry voice, of lost love and sexual innuendos which would have shocked (and repelled) those 'fans' who admired Tatum for his musical discipline and 'classical' [piano] propriety".

I found a clip of Art after hours on YouTube.

And it sounds a bit like:

Suferboard C himself ;)

Right?

Okay, that’s the one hundred and sixty-fourth Shuffle Synchronicities.