The other day, I mentioned some work I’d completed in digitally notating my arrangement of some Thelonious Monk tunes. This is a follow up to that post.
Category: MY MUSIC
“Monk Suite”
I recently mentioned a bunch of ongoing projects, including multiple musical ones. I figured I’d post about a few of those right now, one at a time. This is the first of a few that will be getting posted by scheduling, between today and the weekend. Short version: I’ve been inputting an old arrangement of some jazz tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet plus chamber orchestra using Musescore, and it’s going well. I have no audio of that to share at the moment, but hopefully will in the coming months!
Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig
As always, I’m posting this quite a while after finishing the book. Despite having gotten a decent foundation in classical music theory, and some jazz theory of the sort a young improvisor learns, I never managed to find a good source for horn arrangements. A while back, I was inputting an arrangement I did for jazz quintet and orchestra (meaning classical orchestra), when I realized that I didn’t know much about how one goes about actually doing proper jazz arrangements, especially the kind of classic block chords used in sax soli, horn section arrangements, and stuff like that. Not that …
Daerijeon OST
This post is a short discussion of the work I did on my wife’s film adaptation of the Korean short story “Daerijeon” by Djuna. It’s got a free downloadable copy of the soundtrack available for anyone interested.
Bodhi Dharma’s Work Song
I recently made some updates to the Dabang Band subsite, mainly just fixing broken photo galleries but also adding song lyrics from the old archived site so they’re better formatted and more easily reachable. While I was doing that, I ran across lyrics for a few songs that never got recorded. One of them wasn’t mine, so I don’t know how the melody went–I’m pretty sure I never even heard the song, and I’m not sure how it ended up on the website. However, I also found the remnants of several of my own long-ago attempts at songwriting. It was a tough, …
Learned in the Studio
Recently I stumbled upon a track online that happens to be the first studio recording I ever made. It was a guest appearance on a folk-pop album titled Xylon I, by a local musician named Xylon Cozens, and I play soprano sax on a single track. It’s odd: there’s basically nothing online about Xylon, or the album, even though it was recorded in 1995: I guess that says something about my own personal sense that the Internet caught on about that time: it did for me, but everyone was still on dialup, and it didn’t seem apparent that the Internet and music would necessarily …
Back Onto Flute
Ah, new challenges. I’m back onto practicing the flute again, and it’s driving me bananas. I probably would have been playing the soprano sax instead, except that I haven’t made it out to the sax repair shop on the other side of town, so that cleaning swab is still stuck in the neck… so flute it is. It’s hard to master this instrument. Practicing makes me dizzy. I’m constantly tempted to put off learning the proper (crazy, sax-altissimo-like) third-octave fingerings, because I can get over half that octave out by overblowing the left hand of the second octave. I …
Daerijeon Soundtrack–Insight Strikes!
So, I had a realization the other day, while trying to wrap my brain around this project I’m working on. Essentially, the insight came in two steps. I was talking to my wife about creative ways to get around the fact we’re missing clips and video content that was originally mandated in the screenplay for our current film project. One of the points I made was that, since we cannot reshoot anything, it’s up to us to think creatively about how to rework the script to tell the story, while taking up the challenge of turning the missing pieces into …
Monk Suite, One Page at a Time
I’m no sure how many people out there are really tracking my notation projects, but this is an update about my current one, notating “Monk Suite”–an arrangement of tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet and orchestra that I put together as an undergrad student.
One More Composition: “When She Dreams of Moonlight” (1994)
I’ve added another composition to my Music page: it’s an underwhelming score, in fact a royal mess, but I figured it was worth notating in Musescore for the practice, as well as to capture the way I thought about music and composing in 1994, about halfway through my formal music studies. I suppose you could call it my attempt to compose “Third Stream” music: that is, music that combined jazz and classical approaches to create something new and alien to both sides of the divide. Here’s a copy of the score, though it’s pretty useless without the tape (and still …