ReMix: Super Mario Bros. 2 'Gypsy Jazz'

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MASON!!!!!!!!!!! 2006 marks the first year I've really given a damn about college basketball, almost entirely due to my own school's making it into the Sweet Sixteen, then the Elite Eight, and now... the Final Four. This is the first time a lot of people are hearing about GMU, located in my home town of Fairfax, Virginia, so it's just fun to see the school gain more national recognition. It doesn't change our status as a commuter school located deep in the heart of traffic-plagued suburban sprawl, but it does give us a newfound sense of pride about that sprawl. Thus mad props go to Larranaga, Lewis, Butler, and company. Final Four, baby.

Adrian Holovaty gives us a nice gypsy jazz arrangement/performance of Super Mario Bros. 2 (or Doki Doki Panic, take your pick), channeling Django Reinhardt. As a side note, for some great gypsy jazz guitar tunes and brilliant performances by Sean Penn and Samantha Morton, check out Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown; critically acclaimed and criminally underwatched, it even has a Django Reinhardt (as played by Michael Sprague) cameo in it, and does a superb job of building a mythos around his character. It'll make you appreciate Mr. Holovaty's piece all the more by adding some context. Speaking of the ReMixer, Adrian is actually a net celebrity of sorts, as the main force behind a python framework similar to Ruby on Rails, appropriately named Django, and the founder and developer of www.chicagocrime.org. For those of you who don't speak code, in other words, he's got some serious programming skillz to match his fretwork. This is a brief mix that sticks fairly close to the source, especially in the first half, and centers most arrangement decisions around adaptation to a single instrument. Quoth Jesse:

"the melody and structure are more or less the same as the original, but the rhythm guitar does a wonderful job voicing chords that could not be expressed on NES."

JJT adds:

"the original's chord progression is indicated with a bassline, but the remixer outlines and expands upon that progression with just the rhythm guitar. no bassline is needed. not the most daring arrangement we've ever seen, but there's plenty of interpretation and musicality."

For my money, it's exactly what I would expect an accomplished arrangement of this tune, in the genre of solo gypsy/jazz guitar, to sound like. The recording quality ain't perfect, but if it were clinically pristine it would sound a bit weird. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay to Mr. Holovaty's piece is that, were I not familiar with the source material, I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow had it been part of the Sweet and Lowdown soundtrack, i.e. it would have fit right in. This is a straightforward ReMix which illustrates that pure musicianship and some thoughtful arrangement can result in pieces just as satisfying as more elaborately instrumented or involved compositions. The ReMixer/Developer clearly has a respect for Reinhardt, and that respect comes through in this short-but-sweet piece.

― djpretzel