Posts tagged "Music"

The first major project in this semester's jazz arranging class was a simple, 8-bar melody orchestration for brass and rhythm section—all told, no more than 15 seconds of music. The idea was to give us an opportunity to hear how we're doing before applying what we know to a full-length big band chart. The project was due on Monday, and we recorded them all live in a two-hour demo session Wednesday afternoon (I got to play in the trombone section, which was both fun and repetitive).

In keeping with tradition, I thought I'd post a recording of my project, along with a few comments. To tell you the truth, before I heard it out loud with the right instrumentation, I thought I had done a pretty good job. Once I did hear it, it still wasn't terrible—but there are a few things I wish I had done differently. Here, to begin with, is the recording:

Just Friends, 8-Bar brass orchestration

And, for reference, the score:

And now, some comments:

1. In bars 4-6, I decided to go with unison trumpets supported by trombones in density (one of several stock techniques we've been learning). I do like the effect, but the trombone harmonies I decided on are extremely plain. If I did this exercise again, I'd probably change the chord on beat 3 of bar 5 to add some extra color. Either that, or have the trombone chord slide up a half step and then back down again with the trumpet lead.
2. The trombone rhythms in 4-6 are completely out of sync with the trumpets. If nothing else, move both half notes back one eighth note to line them up with the trumpets, and take out that silly punch on beat 1 of bar 6 (the rhythm section can handle the setup for beat 2 just fine on its own).
3. I'm also not a fan of my trombone lead lines; I chose them more with regard to their intervallic relationship with the lead trumpet than for their own melodic integrity. I'm especially unhappy with beats 1-2 of bar 6, where the lead trombone actually moves down a third at a key climax of the passage—it just doesn't seem to fit. Either of the above two corrections, however, would seem to fix this problem by keeping the intensity relatively high until after bar 6.

So, hopefully by writing this down I will have solidified these particular lessons in my head, and might be able to avoid them on my full big band chart. That's due in April, so if you follow along, I imagine you'll get to find out if I succeed or not.

This past month's ITA Journal included an article titled "What's on your iPod?" The article featured the must-have playlists of several high-profile trombonists, and I think I'm going to be referring back to it frequently as I expand my music library over the next several months.

In the spirit of that article, though I am a much, much lower-profile trombonist than anyone featured in it, I thought I'd share a few of the albums I've been listening to lately. Here goes:

Of these, I'd like to call special attention to two: Jiggs Whigham and Wolfgang Kohler's Two-Too and Joshua Redman's Back East.

The former (Two-Too) is an excellent example of what I love about the trombone: it sings. Whigham has been one of my favorite trombonists for a long time (I even play his signature trombone), in no small part because his melodies are all so convincing. Oftentimes improvisers (myself included) sound like they're just stringing together a battery of go-to licks; Whigham, however, always seems to be relaxedly composing beautiful new ideas. He really highlights the vocal qualities of the trombone, and this album's duet format helps that shine through even more than usual.

Redman's album (Back East) shares a lot of the same qualities, though it's quite a bit more adventurous on the arranging side of things. The artist has taken great pains to refresh several old standards with playful new rhythms (including a lilting 7/8 rendition of East of the Sun), but never loses track of the heart and soul of the original when doing so. His sense of time and groove are impeccable (see especially The Surrey With the Fringe on Top), and his improvisations unique and engaging.

So that's what I'm listening to these days. It's kind of nice to be hearing new music again; ironically, I'm doing a lot more listening now that I'm not a full-time music student …I have (a bit) more money to spend on it, and a lot more time to listen (since I'm in front of a computer all day). No complaints here, though—I love music, and if I get to hear more of it, that's a wonderful thing.

Hope you enjoy these albums as much as I do.

Yesterday evening I spent a lot of time hammering out some new lead lines for various sections of my jazz arranging project. This is probably the longest piece of music I've ever written, so I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep my eyes on the big picture; instead, I'm discovering I have a tendency to "chunk" things too much, such that each successive section of the piece follows right after the one before it with very little transitional material.

Actually, in Wednesday's class we talked about this issue quite a bit; the lecture was given by guest artist Lyle Mays, and he spent most of his time discussing how each section of his piece proceeded naturally from the next. It was a bit eye-opening for me; up until now we haven't really spent much class time on how transitions are supposed to work.

That said, the topic has come up from time to time; here are some of the techniques I've learned so far, some from my lab instructor and some from the Lyle Mays session on Wednesday:

1. Overlap. Before switching to a new texture, introduce it as a background, while the original texture is still going on. For instance, if you're about to hand the melody off from the brass to the saxes, bring the saxes in with background figures a couple of bars beforehand. This one has been suggested quite often, and works quite nicely.
2. Pedal point. Kind of an obvious trick, but it's one of the few I know at this point: when transitioning between choruses, adding a vamp of several bars over a pedal bass note can help build tension. (I think I overuse this.)
3. Sequencing (and other development strategies). Again, towards the end of a section, it's kind of nice to take a piece of the last melody phrase and pass it around to different instruments in different keys/registers. This seems to help build tension and volume; I'm using this technique to introduce my shout chorus. (Seems like this is often combined with pedal point.)

If you need melodic material for a transitional section (or background figures), take a look at the themes you've used already, including the head melody. There's probably material there you can adapt (or just flat reuse) to make your transitions work. You might think you're cheating, or that the audience will be annoyed at having to hear the same material again, but if you don't overdo it, it actually lends a great deal of cohesion to the piece.

So that's what I've learned so far. Anybody else have any ideas?

This semester in jazz arranging, I'm learning the basics of big band writing; in fact, the primary project for the whole semester is a single big band chart. The project is broken down logically into smaller assignments by chorus: for example, one week I might have to bring in the lead line for the head chorus, and the next week I'd follow it up with the melody for my sax soli. I like the approach; I think my brain is hard-wired to think of complex wholes in terms of small building blocks.

Sometimes, however, I find myself using too many different kinds of blocks. Each week my lab instructor has given me the same advice: "don't write everything you know all at once." Case in point: my original head chorus started with a simple unison small group melody, but expanded to harmony and then counterpoint within two or three bars. By the end of the first 32 bars, it had built itself up into one hot mess.

My lab instructor gave me the usual advice: "don't write everything you know;" in this case, he meant that using too many different textures in a single 32-bar chorus could be a bit overwhelming, taking away from the cohesion of the section and leaving you nowhere to go for the rest of the chart. Instead, he suggested, why not start the small group in three-part harmony and then have one instrument wander off into counterpoint occasionally throughout the chorus? So that's what I did, and the end result is a lot better.

I think this is sort of a common problem among artists in new mediums; we get so excited about the new expressive tools at our disposal that we forget simplicity. We also forget that the observer of the art will not pay it nearly as much attention as we did when we were making it; and so something that seems repetitive or over-simplified from the artist's standpoint may actually be just right in the eye (ear?) of the beholder.

This is not, of course, to say that complexity is to be avoided at all costs …it's just that it might be a good idea to build up to it instead of introducing it all at once.

Those who know me well know that I really, really hate to throw away data. I have all kinds of stuff sitting around on my home server, some of it dating all the way back to middle school, and most of it of very little interest to anyone today (even me). Well, the other day I stumbled across something that was sort of interesting: trombone practice recordings I'd made early on in college.

For as long as I've been a musician, my teachers have told me that one of the best ways to discover where you need to improve is to record yourself playing; for some reason, however, I've rarely bothered.

It's partly a discipline problem—I've never been as consistent a practicer as I should be—but I think it may also have something to do with my data obsession. When I make a recording, I don't just listen to it a few times, note the things I need to fix, and then throw it away. No, I think to myself, "what if I want to listen back to this five years from now and hear if I've improved?" And so I keep it, and not just as an MP3…no, I keep the original, huge, lossless WAV file. For-ev-er.

Now, this used to take up one heck of a lot of space, and a lot of manual backup effort too. As a result, I would rarely do it …too much effort to archive a daily audio practice session when I've got other things I need to store in that precious space.

These days I don't worry about that, for two reasons:

1. Storage is cheap. I have a 500GB RAID-1 network attached storage device in my living room. If it fills up (which won't be happening soon), I'll just get bigger drives; they don't cost that much in the long run.
2. Not all compression is lossy. If I re-encode my original WAVs to lossless FLACs via some automated process, I can store them in half the space and still play them back without uncompressing …no data loss, and very little loss of convenience.

As a result, I've started recording my practice sessions again. This has had a few important benefits:

1. I can listen to my playing after the fact, discovering issues I didn't notice the first time around.
2. I actually practice regularly, since I don't want my archives to be missing a day when (if?) I look back into them five years from now.
3. Also, I've found it a lot easier to notice the negative effects of skipping a day of practicing.

But at the end of the day, the best benefit is that I'm starting to recover some of my old improv chops. I've still got a long ways to go, but it's really encouraging to feel somewhat skilled at the trombone again.

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Well, my first semester of jazz arranging at UNT is drawing to a close; it's been a great experience, and I'm looking forward to doing some big band writing next semester. I feel like I've learned a heck of a lot, and gotten over some of the hurdles that usually get in my way when I want to write something. So that's good, right?

Anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and post a couple of the better recordings; one of the nice things about studying at UNT is that there are plenty of musicians available that can read your charts down for you without any trouble. These recordings are mostly performed by my fellow class members; I haven't listed them here, but if you're one of them and you'd like me to list your name, just say so in the comments (and feel free to link to your own website as well).

I'm not terribly proud of my own playing on these, but that's not what they're for anyway …this is about the writing, and I think I did OK on that front. Here goes:

• Sax Soli for Joy Spring
• Circular (original composition)
• The More I See You

Tonight Jamie and I went to see the One O'Clock Lab Band's fall concert, with guest artist John Mosca, trombonist and co-leader of the Village Vanguard jazz orchestra. I don't think I'd been to a One O'Clock concert since I graduated a few years back, which is odd given how much I like jazz, and how close we've lived to UNT this whole time. But no matter; it was an excellent concert, and I hope to keep going back.

It did put some things in perspective as far as my playing goes—if tonight's trombone section is any indicator, I probably shouldn't have ever been in the band myself. Don't get me wrong, I can play the trombone…but I think I was never quite disciplined enough to play as cleanly and effectively as these guys did.

Since I am taking jazz classes again, I'm hoping to improve; once I get started with lessons and ensemble playing again I'm sure some of it will come back to me…but not without a good bit more shedding than I did last time around. Here's hoping for a better sense of discipline in the semesters to come.

This afternoon Jamie and I co-directed another session of the Denton Bible kindergarten choir. We took the kids "Christmas caroling" around various empty classrooms as a way of teaching them some new Christmas songs without losing track of their attention spans…turned out to be a great way to keep them on task. We've also been teaching them about various kinds of musical opposites: fast/slow, loud/soft, notes/rests, and so forth. I don't really remember what kinds of concepts I was learning at that age, but they seem to be getting it pretty well.

I really enjoy working with these kids, for quite a few reasons. For starters, I absolutely know that the work we're doing in there is making a difference. We're not just teaching them about music; we're giving them a reason to use it. A few weeks back some of the kids sang on the way out: "Love one another as Jesus loves you." We taught them the song, but we didn't tell them to sing it right then; they just wanted to. That's a very encouraging thing to see; they may not understand it completely, but it'll stick with them until they do, and that's an incredible blessing for them and for those of us teaching the songs.

I'm also learning a lot about how I relate to children. I've always been a bit awkward around little kids; I never know exactly what to say or do, or how to say or do it. For some reason, I'm always scared that they're going to judge me or tease me or something like that…which is sort of stupid of me, considering (a) it doesn't make much sense to fear the opinions of someone who's only been alive 5 years, and (b) these kids haven't really learned that behavior yet anyway (it's not like they're printer-puncher). No, none of those fears have turned out to be justified; these kids actually seem to want to know what we're teaching them, and they consider it important to respect their teachers (even if they don't quite know how just yet).

I suppose all this is part of the reason why Jesus encouraged us to come to him like little children. Children definitely aren't perfect, but they understand that they are in need, and that gives them a distinct advantage over guys like me when it comes to learning important lessons.

Beyond that, it's been very encouraging to me to see this kind of thing valued by the church. I've already blogged a bit on my other site about adults' participation in church music, but I think the issues apply to children's music ministry as well. Kids need to understand and appreciate the joy of serving God in this way, and having a program like this is one of the best ways to teach them that. Hopefully we will continue to do so effectively throughout the rest of the year.

Most of my blogs are distinctly lacking in personal narrative, probably because I feel like I always need to say "something important" (it is the internet, after all). This, however, is not one of those "something important" sorts of posts…

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