I Love The Pan may be David ‘Happy’ Williams’ life mantra. It is a moving story of his passion growing up. Rudy ‘Twoleft’ Smith seized the heartbreak in it. For his Birdsong arrangement, Twoleft shares the bittersweet emotions love brings. With purposeful phrasing and acute tension he found moods that perhaps Happy never imagined.
He writes his own narrative with musical lines that fire your synapses. His introduction echoes love’s disquiet, but with an air of optimism. He holds a note in the first line of the verse that zings your heart if you are moved by such things. Then you hear confidence building. His chorus echoes Happy’s longing and tabanca for the instrument. Behind the melody, Twoleft layers strumming with warm feelings of expectancy.
The bridge gets almost abstract, and moves into the kind of improvisation you hear from him as a soloist. He explores the main melody line in different tempos before he leads us into a key change that brings more ways to render the tune.
He handles the orchestration here not unlike what Annise Hadeed did with In My House for Starlift. They both come at melody lines with creative intent and emotive purpose. They take a tune you know well and give it a makeover that changes your listening experience. As the two panists who stayed closest to the jazz idiom, Twoleft and Annise are similar in their approach to arranging Panorama music.
Twoleft is the original pan jazz musician, having spent most of his life in Copenhagen leading groups steeped in that genre, with his tenor pan as lead. But he still knows how to jam in ways we understand, and he does so expertly in I Love The Pan. His chorus is vibrant and vigorous. The pans talk to each other as chords massage the melody lines. He fits harmonies neatly behind the frontline pans with techniques of a master musician. He spins nuance into the tune with the same kind of dissonance you find in any real romance.
This arrangement may be an actual love affair between Smith and a band that is more cerebral than many. Raf Robertson and Andy Narell have also worked with Birdsong. The band seems to be a perfect fit for Twoleft’s fertile musical mind. And although this arrangement dates back to 2001, we can still hope the collaboration happens again.