DK Island Swing / Jungle Hijinx (from Donkey Kong Country) One-Man Jazz Big Band
26,585Benny Goodman and Donkey Kong are both the Kings of Swing!
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It feels incredible to be back here on YouTube posting a new arrangement after all this time! I've already said a lot in my comeback announcement video, so I'll keep this description section just about this particular arrangement, haha!
DK Island Swing is a song that I've wanted to arrange for so long, but always felt too intimidated to take on the challenge! I did reference it in my 3-part Jazz Video Game Medley series, but I've never arranged it as a standalone piece. With the title of the song and the iconic drumbeat intro, this song obviously references the famous jazz tune "Sing, Sing, Sing". Hearing this, I thought to myself "well, what if DK Island Swing was actually recorded by a big band?" I wanted to take on that challenge for a while, but there were a couple of problems: One, I didn't have the brass instruments in my arsenal that I would have wanted to use to perform this with the ensemble I wanted to and Two, the song is a bit short!
Since I'm originally a saxophone player, learning to play brass has certainly been a challenge for me. I started dabbling in trumpet in 2019 (I think?) and honestly it took me quite a while to start sounding halfway decent on the instrument. Fast forward a couple of years, and now I think my trumpet playing is sounding decent! I've also been working on trombone to round out the big band brass section, and ALSO a tiny bit of tuba (this video is my YouTube tuba debut!). Brass has been challenging - I'm very happy with my improvement but I'm definitely not fluent on those instruments. Kind of feels like learning a new language, haha!
Regarding the shortness of the original DK Island Swing track, that was always a unique feature of the original song that I found particularly interesting. The original track has a fairly long intro, a somewhat short swing section, and then a slower middle section before looping. I really wanted to emphasize that swing section in my arrangement, while also making sure to include the slower middle section (which sometimes gets left out in other arrangements of this song.) To help out with this, I decided to include some melodic material from "Jungle Japes", which is an arrangement of DK Island Swing by Grant Kirkhope that appears in DK64! It's really funny that you can tell _exactly_ which part of the song is Kirkhope's part because it's written in his signature style, but I think that helps round out the arrangement quite a bit, haha.
This video was a ton of fun (and effort!) to put together - feels good to be back, and I hope you enjoy!
β« "DK Island Swing" from "Donkey Kong Country" composed by David Wise
β« "Jungle Japes" from "Donkey Kong 64" composed by Grant Kirkhope
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