In my previous post, I shared a jazz chorale I had written for my arranging class on Mancini’s classic tune, “The Days of Wine and Roses.” As I mentioned in that post, I’d been planning on writing something for the U-Tubes, UNT’s jazz trombone ensemble, and I figured the chorale was a good place to start.

Well, over the past couple of months I’ve taken that chorale and run forward with it, ultimately resulting in a full-length arrangement; in fact, it was publicly debuted this past Thursday at the U-Tubes’s performance in the Syndicate:

I’ve had Mancini’s tune rolling around in my head for years, ever since running across it in a fake book in high school. Until recently, I never really bothered to look up the lyrics; I always just assumed it was your typical romantic ballad, a beautiful celebration of the joys of love and luxury. As it turns out, the lyrics are much darker than I’d expected:

The days of wine and roses
Laugh and run away
Like a child at play
Through a meadow land toward a closing door,
A door marked, “never more,”
That wasn’t there before.

The lonely night discloses
Just a passing breeze
Filled with memories
Of the golden smile that introduced me to
The days of wine and roses and you.

The tune was originally written for a 1962 movie by the same name; I haven’t seen it myself, but from what I understand it chronicles the lives of a married couple whose lives are destroyed by alcoholism. The title of both song and movie come from a much earlier poem by Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

The story behind this song, then, is somewhat different than what I’d always envisioned —it’s about lovesickness rather than love, of passions once held but long gone, of beautiful memories lost in painful regrets. That’s the story I tried to evoke through my arrangement.

Beyond that, I’ll leave the piece to speak for itself —I really enjoyed writing it, and I’m very happy with the end result. Please let me know what you think!

This past week in my jazz arranging class, we started talking about chorale writing. In jazz contexts, a “chorale” is a work of polyphonic music played without the rhythm section. Removing the rhythm section sort of changes the rules of the game; you can’t rely on their persistent improvisation to make up for a lack of rhythmic or harmonic interest in what’s going on elsewhere. As a result, chorale writing is driven by melody, not by groove.

My professor started class on Monday by listing off four basic characteristics to strive towards in jazz chorale writing: independent motion, varied melodic registers, reuse of material from the main theme in the counterlines, and a flexible tempo.

With those basic principles in mind, I went ahead and put together a basic jazz chorale arrangement of Mancini’s The Days of Wine and Roses. Since I’ve been wanting to write something for the U-Tubes (UNT’s jazz trombone ensemble), I opened up a blank score with 8 trombone staves and set to work. Here’s what I came up with:

You can also download the score if you’d prefer to follow along on paper. The arrangement has its problems, but I do think it demonstrates the basic idea pretty well. In fact, I think I’m going to fix it up a bit and then use it as an introduction to a larger chart, which I’ll be writing over the course of the semester. Keep watching for more about that piece!

Tonight as we were getting ready to start our first kindegarten choir rehearsal at church, one of the kids took some building blocks and created his own replica of the NYC World Trade Center towers. No doubt he’d been learning about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at school, what with this being the tenth anniversary and all. It was sort of odd to think of the perspective from which he saw those events; for him, 9/11 is just something out of a history book, albeit a very serious something. For those of us who watched it all unfold on TV, it’s something quite more than that.

You know, no matter how much complex modern harmony they teach me, I do still love me some twelve-bar blues. Here’s one I made up the other day before work:

I decided to call it “Ant Bite Blues,” in honor of the fact that moments before I recorded it I was bitten on the foot by a fire ant out in my front yard. It’s not my best performance, but I think it’s fair work considering how little shedding I’ve been able to do lately. Besides, no matter how many mistakes I may have made, listening to this recording is a lot more fun than getting that ant bite.

As always, if you’re interested in hearing more of my trombone playing, please have a listen to my Musical Résumé.

My daughter Ellie is now ten months old, and due to the fact that her mother and I both work full time, we recently enrolled her in a local day care program. It wasn’t the easiest decision to make, as we’d both love to be able to stay home and take care of her ourselves; however, the experience has not been without its own unique joys. To help myself remember, I thought I’d share a few.

This semester at UNT I’m going to be taking graduate-level jazz arranging. We’ve only had a few class sessions so far, but I can already tell it’s going to be an interesting term.

Well, it’s that time again: I’ve decided to switch blog platforms. To commemorate the occasion, I thought I’d share a little bit of my personal blogging history.

As you may have seen in the news recently, the state of North Dakota has been experiencing record flooding over the past several weeks. In Minot, my hometown, nearly a fourth of the city’s population has been evacuated (twice, actually); the Souris River, which runs through the center of town, has risen to nearly 13 feet above flood stage, nearly 4 feet higher than the worst flood the city had ever seen before. The indundation zone covers almost a fourth of the city.

The last reports I heard indicated that more than 4000 homes were affected, 100 of which were flooded up to roof level. Unfortunately, in recent years most residents were told they didn’t need flood insurance; as a result, there were only 476 active flood insurance policies in the city this year.

My parents’ neighborhood is in pretty bad shape; fortunately, they were able to move with many of their belongings out to the family farm north of town. Not everyone was that fortunate. From what I’ve read, FEMA has approved a certain amount of individual assistance for those affected, but that’ll only go so far.

I’m sure you can appreciate the dire need these people are experiencing as a result of this catastrophe. In order to assist with the relief effort, several organizations have set up donation websites; a good list is available at http://rallyminot.com/donate/. If you can spare some money to help out the victims of this disaster, I know they would appreciate it; so would I.

Additional information and pictures covering the situation can be found by visiting the KX News Minot Facebook page.

Hello again! It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything on here, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some thoughts on fatherhood.

When I write, one of the most difficult things to deal with is the sense that I’m not really creating anything unique—that my music is somehow derivative, either of my own earlier work or of somebody else’s. This is understandable—there are only so many notes in the scale, so many chord qualities and rhythmic subdivisions to play with. Jazz mitigates the problem somewhat by pushing the envelope—by allowing more complex rhythms, chord progressions, and melody-bass relationships—but no matter how far you push, the problem is still there. This can be discouraging, but I’m not so sure it should be.

I like Star Trek. Sometimes a little too much. You can tell, because the next part of this post is an oddly relevant dialog I copied from the TNG third season episode ”The Ensigns of Command”; I think it frames the issue rather nicely. (For those of you unfamiliar with the show, Data is a Pinnochio figure: an emotionless android who wants to be human.)

Picard

The good doctor was kind enough to provide me with a recording of your concert. Your performance shows …feeling.

Data

As I have recently reminded others, sir, I have no feeling.

Picard

It’s hard to believe. Your playing is quite beautiful.

Data

Strictly speaking, sir, it is not _my_ playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trinka Bronkin.

Picard

[shakes head] Is there nothing of Data in what I’m hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronkin have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet you combined them successfully.

Data

I suppose I _have_ learned to be …creative, sir—when necessary.

Picard

Mr. Data, I look forward to your next concert.

I like how this discussion frames the problem. Data is a machine, so he’s already lacking in one area typically considered necessary for creative work: emotion. However, he does have drive. Throughout the series, Data’s chief drive (maybe even “passion”) is to become more human. This leads him to pursue all kinds of artistic endeavors: painting, acting, music…anything he thinks will help him connect more meaningfully with his human creators. Surprisingly, he frequently succeeds, despite lacking the raw, subjective emotional ingredients we typically believe are necessary for such creativity.

In this instance, Data’s creative experiment with the violin involves a simple proposition: pick two master violinists, combine their styles, and see what happens. As Picard points out, this, despite requiring no emotion, is in and of itself a creative act. By choosing the violinists, Data has staked a claim in the resulting art; by calculating the best combination of their techniques, he has come up with something only he could have come up with. He didn’t have to invent anything per se, only to build out of what had already been invented by others. This kind of creativity, by definition, is derivative…but it is creativity.

Data’s approach here is hardly unique. Heck, in the real world, musicians take the building blocks of one anothers’ work all the time (often without realizing it), resulting in countless songs leveraging the same basic chord progressions. Not surprising; even jazz musicians (who love pushing envelopes) do the same thing with rhythm changes and the twelve-bar blues.

Given how common this is, I wonder why we so often think that truly “creative” folks are magically extracting brand-new ideas out of thin air. Who has ever done such a thing? Isn’t all creativity derivative to some degree? If someone could come up with something totally novel, something that didn’t depend at all on earlier ideas, would any of us understand it? If Data, instead of learning to play the violin after the tradition of the masters, had decided to invent a totally original approach to the instrument, I doubt the crew would have wanted to listen to it; it may have been original (maybe even beautiful to those who understood its mathematical qualities), but it would also have been so totally unfamiliar as to evoke all the emotional response of white noise.

Bottom line is this: we have to get our ideas from somewhere, and pushing that envelope will only get you so far. I think I’m going to stop worrying about it and just enjoy the ride.