Category: Composition/Theory

Fundamentals of Music Prep for Jazz Composers/Arrangers

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If you’re not familiar with Darcy James Argue and his big band, Secret Society, I encourage you to check out his music. Argue has a unique style of big band writing that has been described as big band jazz with an art rock sensibility. I like how he explores extended formal structures, different grooves, and otherwise bends the rules while still keeping at least one foot in the big band tradition. His band, Secret Society, is made up of some of the top jazz musicians around.

Argue has put up some materials for free on his web site that offer advice to jazz composers and arrangers for how to prepare their music so that the musicians are able to most easily read the charts and play your music better. He describes standard notation practices such as how large a font you should print your charts on, what size paper, how to properly beam rhythms, and more.

Darcy James Argue’s Music Preparation Materials

Looking through his materials there’s some stuff in there that I haven’t thought of before and will start adopting in my own charts. It’s very important to prepare your sheet music in the clearest manner and follow standard notation practice in order to get the best first reading of your music and then get the best possible performance. It can be very tedious to spend all that time getting your sheet music to follow all the conventions, but anything that you can do that will make it easier on the musicians who perform your music will only make your music sound better.

Lennie Tristano

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It’s not instant composing. It’s not following any kind of a formula. All you do is hear music in your head and reproduce it.

– Lennie Tristano

In 1983 the Norwegian Broadcasting Company produced a 1 hour television documentary on the life, music, and teaching of the pianist, composer, and jazz educator Lennie Tristano. I have to admit that I haven’t check out nearly as much of Tristano’s music that I should have, but after coming across this documentary I’m very interested in going back through his music.

One of the things I find so fascinating about Tristano is that his legacy was not just as a musician, but also a music educator. He was one of the earliest jazz educators I’m aware of, predating even the Stan Kenton clinics, I believe. His philosophy was to help students express their ideas through freeing themselves from the “tyranny” of their thinking brain. But that didn’t mean that Tristano relied exclusively the “think method,” he required his students to learn scales, jazz melodies in all keys, and practice with a metronome. He stressed ear training and learning to sing and play improvised solos by jazz greats.

At a time when most jazz musicians were following the lead of Charlie Parker, Tristano developed and encouraged a different approach that became influential in the cool jazz period to follow. In 1949 Tristano even recorded music with the form of the music improvised, predating the free jazz movement by about a decade. Some jazz critics today argue that one of the reasons Tristano isn’t better known today is because his music was so hard to quantify and pin down to a particular jazz style.

Learn more about Tristano and his music at The Lennie Tristano Experience.

The Wexford Carol for Sax Quartet

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The Wexford Carol is a traditional Irish Christmas song that was likely composed in the 15th or 16th century. It’s a beautiful melody and, at least in my part of the world, not nearly performed enough. An Irish organist named William Grattan Flood transcribed a singer performing this carol and then published it in 1928, which helped it to become more popular around the world.

It’s popular enough that Lenoir Sax asked me to write them an arrangement of this piece for their upcoming Christmas concert. I finished it a few days ago and they had their first read-through of it last night. Here’s the MIDI realization.

Arranging carols and hymns can be challenging because they are usually the same musical material over and over, just with different text on different verses. Arranging them as instrumentals requires doing something more or different in order to keep it interesting. With this arrangement I added some new musical material to use as an introduction, interlude, and coda (which is in a different meter than the carol, just to provide a little more variety). I also modulated the keys on repeats and orchestrated and harmonized things differently to help keep it from getting too repetitive.

I’ve written a bunch of arrangements for Lenoir Sax. I think this is the third Christmas carol arrangement I’ve done for them.

Big Band Arranging Resource

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I was not familiar with composer Roger Evans until recently.

Evan Rogers  is a British orchestrator and conductor based in Los Angeles, working across film, TV, and games.

Recent film and TV projects include Nosferatu, Snow White, Alien: Romulus, Twisters, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Meg 2: The Trench. In games, Evan was the lead orchestrator and conductor for Payday 3, lead orchestrator for Disney’s Illusion Island andLuna Abyss, composed by longtime collaborator David Housden, and orchestrator on titles such asCall of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Jedi: Survivor among others. Upcoming projects include Mortal Kombat II, Kraven the Hunter and The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.

Evans has a resource on his web site that is an absolutely incredible reference for big band composing and arranging. He deals with fundamentals, such as instrumentation (transpositions, great descriptions of range capabilities, and doublings), score and part layouts, articulations, voicing techniques, and much more.

I was looking for information on standard practice on setting up big band scores and came across this reference. Even though much of it was already familiar to me, I learned new information reading Evans’s entire resource. I happen to be helping to put together a concert of big band music composed by several musicians in the Asheville Jazz Orchestra and ended up forwarding this reference to the other composers to help them put their music together for the band to play. For anyone around western North Carolina August 3, 2025, come check out this concert.

Breathing Easy for Big Band

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I’ve been working on some big band writing lately. The last two I completed were big band arrangements for my friend, Wendy Jones, to sing with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra. Both those songs were originals she wrote, The Day I Saw You and All the Years. Since those charts are not my compositions you can follow those links to hear Wendy’s combo recordings of her songs and come to our concert in August where they will be featured.

After completing those two arrangements I worked on an original ballad of mine, called Breathing Easy. I wrote the A section of this tune many years ago as a demonstration of how to use melodic cells to come up with ideas for composing new melodies. It was long enough ago that I don’t recall exactly how the melody for this tune got developed, but I do know that the melodic cell I used was the first two bars of London Bridges.

If you want to give it a listen, here is a mockup I did of this chart. I used Dorico for the notation and then to generate the midi realization for the horns, with the Atomic Big Band Horns sound library. The rhythm section and tenor sax “improvised” solo were generated using Band-in-a-Box. I dumped all the audio files together into Logic Pro and cleaned up some of the glitches there.

Can you hear London Bridges in there? I’m not sure I can, but I think I did some octave transpositions and inversions to get the melody sounding so different.

I’ve found Dorico makes it easy to put together parts, but it isn’t quite as easy for me to layout the score as easily, so the last bit I have to complete is to fix the layout of the score. I’ll be able to get this printed and then sent off to the current directors of the Asheville Jazz Orchestra very soon, so I hope that we’ll be able to perform it sometime soon.

It’s the Plumber I’ve Come to Fix the Sink – for big band

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I’m getting much more comfortable using Dorico now, after decades of using Finale for my music notation. The bulk of my composing and arranging is for big band, so putting together a couple of new big band charts has been helping me learn the new software. It’s a different work flow compared to Finale, but as I’ve gotten used to it I find Dorico has some very nice features that I think are good improvements. The engraving side of working is particularly easier than with Finale, as Dorico I think does a better job of initially laying out the score and parts for printing and generally require less editing than I’ve found on Finale.

Like the last chart I recently wrote, this one is pretty straight ahead. I messed around with a couple of things harmonically, such as keeping all the V chords as C7sus, sometimes even a C7sus(b9), an idea I picked up from Tom Coppola, who was a pianist that I taught and performed with before his passing. The ii chords tend to be a tritone substitution, in this particular case a Db7. So instead of a standard ii-V-I I wrote bVI7-V7sus-I13 (Db7-C7sus-F13 in this key).

I also played around with the trumpet section playing with plunger mutes quite a bit, which gives it somewhat a Basie style feel to it, there’s definitely a Sammy Nestico sound to this one. The trumpet and trombone solo are also meant to be played with plunger mutes. That’s where the title comes in, It’s the Plumber I’ve Come to Fix the Sink.

Apparently when I was a kid I found this cartoon hilarious.

Over time, this line became an inside joke in my family, to the point of where I still remember us joking around with this line well after I had forgotten this cartoon. When I came up with this line as a title for this chart I looked it up, just to make sure that someone hadn’t already used it for a big band tune, and found this cartoon. It brought back some memories of the TV show Electric Company and some other childhood experiences.

Here’s a MIDI realization of the actual chart. The sound library I used for the horns is Atomic Big Band Horns. The rhythm section and solos were generated in Band-in-a-Box, using their “Real Instrument” samples, so the solos aren’t quite the style I wanted, but ok for a demo. I changed around the EQ of the solos in a DAW (Logic Pro, if you’re curious) and added a guitar “wa-wa” plugin to simulate plunger mutes as much as I could.

Happy Holidays!

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A Visit From St. Nick was recorded back in 2020 by the Asheville Jazz Orchestra. I wrote this composition back in 2009.

I wrote this arrangement of Hallelujah Chorus for trombone quartet. I can’t recall exactly when I recorded it.

Happy Holidays!

Sunset Finale for Big Band

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As I mentioned in my last post about a month ago, I’ve been learning to use new notation software, Dorico. Since the late 1980’s I’ve been mostly using Finale for all my music notation and I’d gotten quite used to it. But now that Finale has been sunset and is longer being supported, I’ve pretty much completely switched to using Dorico instead.

Now that I’ve been using Dorico for a while I’m starting to get more comfortable with using it. I feel that once I’ve got a slightly better handle on it that I’m going to like it better than Finale. Dorico has a number of features that I find superior to Finale. For example, laying out the final parts for printing seems to go much faster than on Finale. Dorico does a much better job of automatically spacing out the staves and avoiding collisions (for the most part). Note entry also works better for me as I can play a chord on my keyboard and Dorico will remember what I just played so I can take my hands off the keyboard and press the rhythmic value on my computer keyboard, which was harder to work with in Finale’s Speedy Note Entry.

I haven’t used Sibelius or Musescore really, so I can’t compare Dorico to those programs, but my recommendation for former Finale users is that Dorico is a good option.

I did go through a couple of Dorico’s tutorials to get started, but I figured the best way to learn how to use the software for my needs was to jump in and complete some projects. After last month’s saxophone quartet commission was completed I began working on a new composition for big band. Here’s a MIDI realization of the completed chart.

So like many of my composition, the title is stupid (Finale was discontinued, so this is called Sunset Finale, get it?). The sound libraries I used in the above demo, however, is pretty cool, I think. I purchased Atomic Big Band Horns to use for all the horn sounds, excepting the solos. While I’ve been having some playback issues with this project that caused some notes to not play long enough or too long, I was able to come up with a workaround for this demo. So all the prewritten horn parts are using the Atomic Big Band Horns sound library, while the rhythm section and soloists are audio exports from Band-in-a-Box and use that software’s samples. It’s a pretty nice end result for a demo recording.

I’ve already sent it to the current music director of the Asheville Jazz Orchestra and we’ll probably debut this chart next month.

New Software, New Arrangement – O Come, O Come Emmanuel

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By now it’s old news that Finale has been sunset and it is no longer being support. The last time I checked, Finale was still running on my computer, but it is only a matter of time before it won’t and I have many compositions and arrangements that exist as Finale files. I decided that it would be a good idea to go ahead and get started as soon as possible with new software for notation.

I’ve been a Finale user since 1989, I believe, when as an undergraduate I took a class in computer applications with music in the brand new computer lab. I believe it was Finale 2.0 that we used and I’ve been using Finale ever since. After some research I decided to go with Dorico. It’s been very frustrating at times trying to figure out how to do certain things on Dorico that are easy for me with Finale. Some of the most frustrating things about Dorico are how certain things are just a little bit different from what I’m used to. For example, the key command for a quarter note on Finale is “5,” but on Dorico that is “6.” One of the things that I like very much about Dorico is that you can customize things like key commands, so once I’m more used to the software I’ll start setting some of those up.

The best way for me to learn the new software has been to simply jump in cold turkey and use it for a project. Coincidentally, I got asked to write an arrangement again for Lenoir Sax (I’ve done a bunch of writing for them) for their Christmas concert. They asked for O Come, O Come Emmanuel in a latin groove feel. I’ve previously arranged a big band chart on this tune, so I borrowed a little bit from that but with a different groove for this arrangement it was pretty easy to come up with some new ideas. Here’s a MIDI realization of the completed arrangement.

May the 4th Be With You

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I had meant to post this last Saturday, on “Star Wars Day” itself, but forgot in all the excitement.

I happened to have a show with the band Ska City that afternoon. Since we were playing on May 4th, we wanted to do something a little special for the sci fi fans who came out. I wrote a medley arrangement of three Star Wars themes in a ska style. It included the Imperial March, Cantina Band, and the Main Theme. I think it ended up OK. Here’s a demo I put together for the band to learn it from (most of the rhythm section prefers to learn tunes by ear, rather than sheet music, go figure).

There may be a video recording floating around of us playing it. We warmed up on it on a previous gig as well as while sound checking last Saturday. On the actual show there was a major time glitch on the last tune, so it’s not the best performance we had at it. Hopefully we’ll play some other year on May 4 so we can use this chart again. It was a lot of work just for one silly tune on one gig.