There once was a sodium ferret,
And I foolishly tried to repair it.
But it fell in the water --
Oh, what a slaughter!
Should've stayed with the styrofoam parrot.
The title of this post and the accompanying music came before the limerick. It was initially going to be called Black Cat, due to the 13/4 time signature, but I decided that there are already far too many pieces with that title, and "Walking Under a Ladder" didn't occur to me until much later, so I decided to keep the animal reference but change it to a ferret, and for some reason it sounded reasonable to describe it as a sodium one, but "Sodium Ferret" was too short, so I expanded the title, which in turn suggested a limerick that I then had to write. I'm no Bill Shakespeare, but I think it works, although I'm pretty sure the music works better.
As with Aftermath and Restoration, this started with a bass line that actually predates A&R, going back to 2015. I got the idea down back then and temporarily (I thought) set it up for a quartet of piano, bass, drums and alto sax, fully intending to replace the sax with guitars, more keyboards, etc. Before setting it aside, I added the first three piano chords (but not the three answering ones that are now impossible to imagine not being there), and a "temporary" sax fill that I thought was goofy at the time. About a week ago, I came back to this, added the second three piano chords, extended the initial sax phrase, and realized that I had boxed myself into committing jazz -- perhaps not traditional jazz, but while A&R was toward the rock end of fusion, this is even more heavily tilted toward the jazz end of it. Now, the drumming still needs to be cleaned up, but as this is just a diversion from my more "serious" music... as they say, "close enough for jazz":
