Pokémon GSC: Lavender Town Jazz Cover by Charles Ritz

I've always loved this optimistic spin on this creepy #Pokemon classic, figured I'd give it a lush jazz treatment!

🎶 This jazz cover of Lavender Town is featured on GameLark's tribute album to the music of Pokémon Generation II, "Golden Feathers, Silver Gales"! Check it out here:
https://album.link/us/i/1574532902
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🎸🐟 Dov Beck-Levine (Guitar / Upright Bass) -   / dovbecklevine  
🐟🥁 Noah Benson (Electric Bass / Drums) -   / noahbensonmusic  

Gen 2 Pokémon rocks. There are so many beautiful tunes across the region of Johto, with pieces like National Park being some of my favorites of all time. I also greatly appreciate the care taken with the new arrangements of familiar Gen 1 tracks to tell new stories using the same melodic material. My friend Ben of 8-Bit Music Theory has a fantastic video on this topic, where he also talks about Go Ichinose’s arrangement of Lavender Town:    • What? THE SOUNDTRACK is evolving! | Revisi...  

My original intention was to upload this video as a bait-and-switch April Fool's joke, a la SiIvaGunner, starting with a spooky and heavy intro more reminiscent of the original Lavender Town, before going into this more tranquil rendition. But by missing that date, I had the chance to contribute the arrangement to GameLark’s album, which is always a great honor! I wanted to write a very lush, soaring arrangement of this theme, with orchestral strings and flute solis galore, and I’m really happy with how that aspect of it came out. It was also fun to evolve the material slightly over the course of the arrangement, with a solo section and ending key change into D major - overall, I certainly could have done more to separate it from the original, but I’m very pleased with how this turned out and I don’t think I’d have done it much differently.

This arrangement is also a debut of several new instruments into my collection, which I have been learning over the past year! I took a flute doubling class at Berklee in fall 2020, and while it was a struggle to start learning, I’m proud of all the progress I’ve made and it was such a joy to use it on this cover. I could write flute solis forever, they’re one of my favorite textures. Secondly, I have an EWI now!! One of my dream instrument purchases for quite some time, I bought a friend’s EWI 4000s earlier this year, and I honestly haven’t had so much fun with an instrument in AGES - I’ve been using it a lot to perform on Twitch, but this is its YouTube debut! I also had the idea to write a small clarinet feature at the beginning, and while I’m still new to the instrument, I’m excited to continue learning it.

Much love as always to my roommates Noah and Dov for always being so down to hop on my nonsense and being so darn good, and to all of you for being patient when I go away for prolonged periods of time. If you’ve read this far, thank you for

♫ “Lavender Town" from “Pokémon Red / Blue / Yellow" composed by Junichi Masuda (arranged for "Pokémon Gold / Silver / Crystal" by Go Ichinose)

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