Category: Jazz

My Favorite Things for Sax Quartet

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I’ve written another saxophone quartet arrangement for Lenoir Sax. This time they asked me to write an arrangement of My Favorite Things. Originally written in 1959 for the musical The Sound of Music, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, this song has been associated with Christmas music since Jack Jones recorded it on his 1964 Christmas album. Of course, John Coltrane’s 1961 recording helped make this tune a jazz standard. Here’s a MIDI mockup of what I did with this tune.

For the introduction I took the last couple of phrases and arranged it in a slower rubato section, then went into a bright jazz waltz similar to Coltrane’s feel of this tune. The fugue-like section that follows began as a test early on to make sure that I had the swing playback set correctly on Dorico (the software I used to notate this arrangement and produce the audio file). I improvised the 8th note moving line just to have something to play back that I would easily hear if the swing 8ths playback was working and ended up kind of liking the result when it was used as a countermelody. Towards the end of the arrangement I return for a bit to the rubato feel before ending in the jazz waltz, with a nod to Coltrane again with the soprano saxophone solo at the very end.

Lenoir Sax has a couple of public performances coming up where they will be performing holiday music, perhaps even this new arrangement. It’s a fine saxophone quartet and worth going to hear them play, if you’re in the area.

A Visit From St. Nick for sale at PDF Jazz Music

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My chart for big band and narrator has been recently published by PDF Jazz Music. This Christmas chart is original music set to the poem by Clement-Clarke Moore, A Visit From Saint Nicholas. I wrote this chart a while ago, in 2009, for the Christmas performances that the Asheville Jazz Orchestra plays usually every year at some venue or another. In 2009 we were still performing each Christmas season at Trinity United Methodist Church in west Asheville and Rodney Hagans was the paster. Rodney is an amateur musician himself and was the narrator on the premiere performance. Later Nancy Walton became the pastor and she also is an amateur musician and was able to step into that role.

A few years ago during the pandemic I got musicians from the AJO to record their parts at home and send them to me. This recording has the AJO’s featured vocalist, Wendy Jones, as our narrator and she has been performing this chart with us ever since. Here’s the video I put together.

I think that this chart would fit very well into a holiday concert that a lot of school music programs perform every year. If you’re a jazz ensemble director looking for something to perform on an annual holiday concert that’s outside of the typical holiday music this piece might work very well for you. It could also make for a nice way to involve your department chair, principal, or whoever you might want to feature as narrator. It does require some conducting.

You can purchase this chart (and more Christmas big band music) at PDF Jazz Music’s Christmas Charts page.

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.

Guess the Embouchure Type – Bruce Harris

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Greg emailed me a video of trumpet player Bruce Harris trying out some equipment at the 2023 ITG. It makes for a good example to play guess the embouchure type.

While we’re at it, check out this video of Harris blowing over Ornithology, along with a transcription.

Harris’s embouchure type is very clear to see. Greg mentioned in his email that this would be a good example of mouthpiece placement on the red of the upper lip working well. Harris’s very low placement is an obvious example of the “low placement” embouchure type. Because his placement has more lower lip inside the air stream gets directed upstream.

You can also easily see Harris’s embouchure motion of pulling the mouthpiece and lips together down (and to his right) to ascend and pushing up (and to his left) to descend (the Ornithology video shows the slight side to side track better than the ITG video). Pretty much every player has some of this side to side deviation in the track of their embouchure motion, some players have more or less than others.

I enjoy watching examples of great players who place the mouthpiece like this, partly because that’s how I personally play and party because so many otherwise good teachers so strongly believe that this is a feature “to be avoided at all costs.” Harris plays great and shows that the lip vermillion is really an arbitrary feature and isn’t something in particular to be concerned about with regards to mouthpiece placement.

Urbie Green King Promotional Clinic

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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.

Check out both parts:

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.

R.I.P. Paul McKee

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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.

Here is an interview Paul gave me back when I was a student.

The Hidden Trombone Database

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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.

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.