“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!

Continue Reading

Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig

This entry is part 38 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

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 …

Continue Reading

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, …

Continue Reading