Arrangements for a duo

[jannejava]

I am currently playing on duo with a singer, just double bass and vocals. We have a couple of song arranged, but I curious to hear if some TBLers have any recommendations on tracks or albums with only bass and vocals-arrangements.

Regards, Jan

[Ed Fuqua]

Check in with Ray Parker, he plays this format a lot. As a general rule of thumb, you want to stick with tunes that have a lot of harmonic movement...

[Marc Decho]

I always liked "Honeysuckle Rose" as a duo, that chick singer (ya know the one i'm talking about ??) w/McBride have an intro w/vox/bass which sounds great, "Fly Me to the Moon" sounds equally as nice, ....just take any tune, like Ed says with lotsa harmonic movement and fly with it

[Jeff Schwartz]

Sheila Jordan has recorded a lot in this format with Harvie Swartz (no relation) and Cameron Brown. I don't know the albums well enough to make recommendations, but there are probably excellent arrangement ideas to be stolen from all of them.

[anonymous0726]

My best rec is to pour through tunes and find what works for you. It'll depend a lot on your and your singer's strengths.

In short, tunes with strong melody/harmony contrasts work well. A great example of this would be the tune 'Just in Time'. An example of a tune that really doesn't work for this format would be 'Maiden Voyage'.

Another thing to consider is feels. Eight-note-y feels allow you more freedom to lay down the bass, counter melodies and the like, and still maintain a groove. Really slow ballads (which singers LOVE) are really difficult to pull off. For swing things you can take a lot of advantage of 2/4 feels.

You can also take advantage of open-string keys (E through C/F around the cycle) allow you a lot of open strings to help keep everything from ending up a half-step down as well as giving you a lot of double stop stuff.

[pierre]

The only cd I have with this duo

Michel Donato -Karen Young some good cds very amazing and interesting

Ferruccio Spinetti- Petra Magoni ("musica nuda") not only jazz more pop but lot of good doublebass lines

Rob Wasserman duets with Rickie lee jones bobby mcferrin,and others musicians (not in my taste but ...)