Hi people!

First of all I wanted to totally agree with Sherry that jazz and blues are very much alike. I mean, they both employ dominant 7th and major 7th chords, and have accidentals flying everywhere. I wonder why they call accidentals "accidentals" if they're such an important part of music.

About how I composed this song: When I improvise, and I particularly like something that I play, I play it over and over again until it's molded into something that is musically solid. Unfortunately, for me writing down two-handed music on paper with a pencil is not something I'm that good at or enjoy. So to compose Crystal Blues, I composed the main theme on my keyboard (measures 7-14), and wrote that down with Composer (which was very easy.) I used the mouse. The rest of it I composed mostly out of my head with a general idea of what I wanted.

I spent most of my time composing and stopping to listen to what I made -- something I could have never done with pencil and paper. And that's how most of my song fell into place.

Measures 51-70 were a different story, though. I composed that a little less than a year ago with a strong influence from the blues scale. In G minor the blues scale would look like G-Bb-B-C-D-F-G. If you already know this, well...just a reminder! But the 51-70 section seemed to sort of fit with the theme of the song, so I put it in.

And finally, about encoding my name into the piece -- this is what I did. I created a code system that was rooted in the Bb major scale and looked like this:
<font face="Courier">
Bb|A|H|O|V
C |B|I|P|W
D |C|J|Q|X
Eb|D|K|R|Y
F |E|L|S|Z
G |F|M|T|
A |G|N|U|

And my name is Matthew Gruen. So, if I didn't make any mistakes, that turns into

G Bb G G Bb F C / A Eb A F A

</font>
And that's the sequence between measure 71 and measure 74, beat 2.

Sorry if I've gone on for too long, but I guess I had a lot to say!

Thanks for reading
Matt