Samurai Seven

Written on 02/08/02

In the waning days of VHS, there was a video rental store down the street from my apartment in Los Feliz called (I believe) Captain Video. It was curated by genre and you could spend an hour just figuring what to rent. I went through a Kurosawa phase and of course loved his film, Seven Samurai. The title of this tune is meant as a tribute. Most of the odd time signature playing I’d done at the time had been over standard progressions so I intentionally set out to write an original in 7/4. I believe I came up with the chord progression first but the melody presented itself pretty easily soon after. The intro developed naturally through playing it on gigs and sessions and I only recently notated it in the chart.