Month: December 2012

This Blog discusses the development of a professional working attitude. I’ve often had the pleasant experience of people coming up to me and saying ‘how on Earth do you write music like that, you must be very talented?’. Needless to say, I have no objections at all although I’m secretly aware of the many years […]

From the beginning, budding arrangers have sharpened their skills by listening to the best examples of recorded work and transcribing them onto paper, usually to try them out with a local band. In the early years, schools of big band and jazz writing (and playing) didn’t exist so that young writers had fewer opportunities to […]

It often surprises me how readily rhythm section players take it for granted that they will be hidden away at the back of the band. Perhaps it’s because we’re used to regarding their role as being a subservient one. In the book we suggest that the emancipation of the rhythm section, which took giant steps […]

How often have we heard this comment? It was often heard during the experimental days of the late 40’s to mid 60’s. Purists wrote to one of the leading music papers in England protesting that it wasn’t jazz if you played it on the saxophone! Jazz, they claimed, had to be played on trumpet/cornet, clarinet […]