Riff City in Portland

Riff City (pdf from portlandcollection.com)
Badlands All Night / Riff City (pdf from Contratopia Tunebook)

When Erik Sessions and I started playing music together, first around Decorah and then joining up with Pat and Patrice in Contratopia, I was suitably impressed that Erik had a tune (the killer "It Ain't the Heat, It's the Humidity") published in the first Portland Collection book. Portland 1 and, later, Portland 2 are almost always in the bag of necessities that I carry to every contra dance gig.

So I was very pleased to receive an email from Susan Songer a while back reporting that the Portland Megaband had recently enjoyed playing my tune "Riff City" and asking my permission to include a copy of the tune on her New Contra Dance Tunes webpage. Of course I said yes. While not the same as being printed in a Portland Collection book this is a big honor for me and I'm happy to hear that the Megaband folks thought the tune was fun to play.

I'm also including a copy of "Riff City" as it appears in our Contratopia Tunebook. Since it's on the same page with my tune "Badlands All Night" (a combination of two of my favorite Springsteen song titles, "Badlands" and "Prove It All Night"), I'm including that also. One thing to note about "Badlands" is that Contratopia has been playing the A section up a fifth in the key of D for the last few years. It seems to work fine either way.

April, May, June, it's July already. You'd think I would have found a few minutes to write a blog post sometime during the last three months but I didn't. I'm not including a recording of "Riff City" this time as an experiment to see if I find it easier to add new tunes if I only include the printed music. We'll see how that works out.

Hope you enjoy the tunes!