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.
