Around ten years ago I sat down to transcribe the first track off Bill Holman's first major self-led big band album "In a Jazz Orbit," and before I knew it I had written out all 9 tracks. I had been listening to that record over and over for years and ...
Notated sheet music out in the world, in my experience, tends to be about 2% fully professional, 8% good enough, and 90% on a scale of annoyingly flawed to catastrophically broken. Which category do your parts fit into? Here are 10 easy changes you can make to your parts to ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3pt4p1ZjrI Despite the four-deep horn section, Skunk Hollow Blues has a three-part counterpoint on the head, some solo space with simple riff backgrounds, and one of the gnarliest shout sections of the swing era, all at a tempo perfect for beginner dancers and written with utmost efficiency. Written by ...
As someone who is a working instrumentalist and a working arranger, one of the biggest problems I see with nearly every band today is a book full of ill-fitting orchestrations. A band playing a chart that doesn't fit them is like a person wearing a suit that isn't their size. ...
Flying Lotus’s latest album, “You’re Dead!” is stunning. One of the best albums of music to be released this year. If you haven’t listened to it yet, get on it. Most of the tracks stuck with me in some way, but one that hit me hardest on the first pass ...
For two weeks in September 1948, the Miles Davis Nonet, a semi-informal group of young jazz musicians coming of age in the early days of bebop, played a live set, about an hour or so long, of newly-composed music that would ultimately be a significant contribution to the evolution of ...
"Good artists borrow, great artists steal." This quote is often attributed to Igor Stravinsky, a composer who was heavily inspired by Duke Ellington's music and who's music Ellington himself was an admirer of. It's appropriate here not just because of the connection between the two composers, but because of the ...
