Sometime in the early 1970s (best guess, 1971-1972) trombonist Urbie Green made a promotional film for King Musical Instruments, giving a clinic to students from Willowbrook High School and filmed at Proviso West High School, in the Chicago suburbs not far from where I grew up.
The clinic covers basic trombone technique mostly, but he also covers some more advanced multiple tonguing and slide techniques. Throughout the whole video Urbie demonstrates and performs for the students, which alone would make this video worth watching.
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.
I learned yesterday of the passing of my mentor and friend, Paul McKee. He was an amazing musician, an excellent trombonist and composer/arranger. He was also one of the best teachers I’ve had the pleasure of studying from and was an all-around great guy. He will be sorely missed.
I’m always looking for new trombonists to check out, but it can sometimes be hard to find those hidden gems if you don’t know where to look. Often the trombonists on a jazz recording are sidemen and you have to go out of your way to find them. Shannon Barrett has put out a new public tool that helps jazz trombone fans find recordings, called The Hidden Trombone. Here’s what is said about this project.
This research project was established by Professor Shannon Barnett at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany. It aims to combine the knowledge of several professional trombone players and educators into a functional database that can be used by anyone interested in good examples of trombone improvisations in jazz and adjacent genres. These can sometimes be difficult to find, as many are ‘hidden’ on albums where the trombonist is not the bandleader. In this age of streaming that can lead to some players being overlooked when considering the history of the instrument in jazz.
Each participant was invited to submit up to ten examples of trombone improvisations or features that they value, along with the reasons for their choices. The participants were chosen due to their experience in performance and/or education, and come from varying musical and geographical backgrounds.
The result is a database of 75 examples, which can be searched by trombonist, style, focus or recommender (or a combination of those categories). It is not meant to be a thorough overview of the essential examples of trombone improvisations from the history of jazz, but rather a curated collection of personal favourites. There is potential to expand the database in the future.
They helpfully include links to where you can stream and purchase the music, which trombonist recommended the track, and also a short description of why that track was recommended. Go check it out and purchase some music to support great artists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
