play it just that well
PDF | Midi Mp3

“Just That Good” is about as simple as it gets: a basic 12-bar blues in D with a few boppish note choices and phrasings, and it functions mostly as an excuse for the musicians to trash-talk one another (and Cole Porter) on stage and to toss out some bits from the great old-time call-and-response tunes like “What’s the Matter with the Mill,” “Tight Like That,” and “Tear It Down (Bed Slats and All).”

Add your own!

Add nauseum!

This first reference track is an early Viper & His Famous Orchestra rehearsal take, which is something we make with a hand-held recorder or a phone when we first put a band arrangement together, just to be able to remember what we figured out when we come back to it later — mistakes, forgotten lyrics, dropped parts, etc., are all okay so long as we have a basic reference skeleton.

And, because I originally wrote this song as the Composer In Residence for the Lake Zurich Middle School Orchestras conducted by Mr. Riley Broach, I’ll also link to a snippet of the 7th-Grade low strings rehearsing their parts while I resided.

For video, here’s a Famous Orchestra performance from the annual Washington Heights (Milwaukee) “Boulevard Bash,” featuring my dad as Statler-and-Waldorf-ing letting us know that we’re just “terrible.”