I encourage students to listen to a variety of styles of music so they develop a feel for what makes a song “work”. When students become proficient at reading music, it’s fun and tempting to buy the sheet music for a song, sit down, and play the notes. But in my experience, students find it more rewarding to say “I heard a version that’s good, but I think I can do better,” then work out that better version.
That’s what I suspect happened with this version of Bruce Springsteen’s Jungleland.
Normally we would expect an unaccompanied piano piece to incorporate the song’s melody in some respect. This version doesn’t do that.
Instead, with a minor exception at the beginning (where the piano plays the opening violin part) this seems to be the piano accompaniment lifted right out of the original Jungleland recording from Springsteen’s 1974 album Born To Run. This was almost certainly orchestrated by Springsteen’s long-time piano player, Roy Bittan, and it turns out to be a beautiful piece in its own right. (No, this isn’t me playing. I don’t have the audio or video recording equipment to make good videos.)
Something I think students and non-musicians will find interesting about this video is that, with the close-up shot of the piano keyboard, we can actually see in detail how the music is “assembled”, if you will.
As the left hand plays the bass parts, we can see the pianist periodically switch back and forth between several chords (this is easier to see in the reflection off the face of the piano, visible in the upper right hand corner of the video).
In the original version those chords match or complement or “double” the guitar parts, especially the bass guitar part. This coordination of the bass guitar and the piano bass line give the original song a fuller, more complex sound that is consistent with the rest of the songs on Born To Run.
Perhaps more interesting is the reason this rendition works so well as a solo piece: it has an unusual musical form. While it would be classified as popular music, it’s definitely not written in the form of the vast majority of popular pieces.
Most popular music has three or four verses, each perhaps 30 seconds long, followed by a chorus of perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s well-known Sweet Home Alabama is an example. (One relatively well-known song that doesn’t use the structured Sweet Home Alabama approach is Roy Orbison’s Oh Pretty Woman.)
Almost all popular music is of this Sweet Home Alabama form. Jungleland is not.
Instead Jungleland runs straight through its nine minutes or so with little repetition, telling the story of survival in a sort of idealized life in a ghetto through a series of vignettes.
One way to think about it is as a sort of combination or three or four short, related melodies, all building on a single story. As you might imagine, this is a much more difficult way to write music, as it is both more complex and requires a lot more creative development.
Oddly, though Born To Run is widely regarded as one of the great popular rock and roll albums of all time, three of the songs on the album (Jungleland, Thunder Road, and Meeting Across The River) have this unconventional form.
In addition, the title track has four verses, but one has a completely different melody, and there is no chorus. What’s more, through the first three verses, the lyrics “Born To Run” only occur once. The familiar punch line of the song, “tramps like us, baby we were Born to Run,” is concentrated at the end of the song.
In any case, there is a lot happening musically on the Born to Run album. I’m always intrigued to find a such a beautiful piece as Jungleland that can stand alone when the lyrics and the rest of the accompaniment is stripped away.
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