Konitz's Skylark reharm

Here's a cool Lee Konitz reharm of Skylark that Dan Gaynor transcribed.

An audio clip from our gig at the Tugboat last weekend: Skylark mp3

Two horn arrangement of Konitz's Round & Round & Round

Here's another Dan Gaynor arrangement of one of my favorite Konitz tunes called Round and Round and Round. It's arranged for alto and tenor and it's a blast to play once you get the hang of it.

Dan Gaynor is an excellent arranger/transcriber and he's available for hire if anyone needs anything transcribed or arranged. He's quite reasonable and lightning fast. He's working on a bunch of three horn arrangements for me at the moment and I highly recommend him. You can reach him at: dan@dangaynor.com

Round and Round and Round- two horn arrangement
Round and Round and Round mp3

Toshiko's Elegy- complete two horn arrangement!!!!

One of my favorite albums of all time is Toshiko/Mariano Quartet. I listened to this album countless times when I was younger. The tunes are all great and Charlie is just burning. I asked Pere Soto to arrange a few of the tunes from the album for some gigs we had earlier in the year at the PDX Jazz Festival. Pere added a trumpet harmony part and charted out very clear rhythm section parts.

Toshiko's Elegy mp3

Full quintet arrangement of Toshiko's Elegy in compressed .sitx format

Charlie Mariano Fake book

In honor of the recent passing of Charlie Mariano, one of the greatest alto players that ever lived, I'm posting an out of print Mariano fake book that was published in the 60's by Berklee press. I posted this book a while back, but thought it would be appropriate to post it again. There are some killing tunes in this book that I've been playing on my gigs lately.

Charlie Mariano fake book

Lee Konitz's Kary's Trance- alto/tenor/concert charts

Here's a transcription of Konitz's Kary's Trance done by Dan Gaynor . There's some very nice two part counterpoint in the bridge. Kary's Trance MP3

(click the graphics for larger printable versions)

(alto)

(tenor)

(concert)

Saxophonist Charlie Mariano dies

Charlie Mariano, saxophonist, musical sojourner

By Joan Anderman
Boston Globe Staff / June 17, 2009


Charlie Mariano, the Boston-born saxophonist who gained world renown as a performer with his former wife, Toshiko Akiyoshi; Stan Kenton; and Charles Mingus, among many others, died yesterday at Mildred Scheel Hospiz in Cologne, Germany, his longtime home. Mr. Mariano, who had battled cancer for years, was 85.

“He was the dean of Boston jazz musicians,’’ says jazz impresario George Wein, a Boston native who resides in New York and was a colleague and friend of Mr. Mariano’s since the 1940s. “Charlie was a wanderer, and he left his mark wherever he went.’’

Born Carmine Ugo Mariano in 1923, he was weaned on his father’s beloved Italian operas and the big bands he heard on the radio: Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, whose saxophonist Lester Young became Mr. Mariano’s first musical hero. He would not get his own saxophone until his 18th birthday, but in short order, the ambitious young musician was playing nightly at Izzy Ort’s bar and dance hall in what was then known as Boston’s combat zone, for $19 a week.

Mr. Mariano was drafted in 1943, but never saw combat. He was tapped to play in one of the several small music ensembles that entertained at officers’ clubs. Near the end of the war, Mr. Mariano, who was stationed on an air base north of Los Angeles, heard Charlie Parker play live for the first time, during Parker’s first West Coast gig, at Billy Berg’s jazz club in Hollywood.

“He completely turned my head,’’ Mr. Mariano said of Parker in “Tears of Sound,’’ a 1993 biography of Mr. Mariano published in Germany. Taken with the sax great’s inventive harmonics, newfangled rhythmic figures, and breakneck tempos, “I chased Bird’s sound, his way of phrasing. I listened to his solos on recordings for hours, wrote them down, and played it.’’

As it was for many alto saxophonists, Mr. Mariano found his muse and musical foundation in Parker’s ground-breaking sound. After leaving the Army in 1945, he drifted to Chicago, then Albuquerque, picking up work where he could, and finally wound up back in Boston. When the big-band era began winding down and many local clubs were closed, the largely self-taught Mr. Mariano enrolled in music school for the first time, at the Schillinger House of Music, which would later be renamed Berklee College of Music.

Mr. Mariano started to develop his own sound under the tutelage of Joe Viola, and he became a fixture on Boston’s vibrant jazz scene, collaborating with Nat Pierce, Jaki Byard, and fellow students Herb Pomeroy and Quincy Jones. In 1950, Mr. Mariano released his first recording as a bandleader, and several years later founded the Jazz Workshop, a hands-on school that emphasized experience over instruction and later evolved into a popular nightclub At the end of 1953, the financially strapped Mr. Mariano received a life-changing call from Stan Kenton, who tapped the saxophonist for his big band. After a couple of years on the road, Mr. Mariano settled in Southern California, where he joined drummer Shelly Manne’s band and worked as a session player.

But he soon grew disenchanted with the hours spent behind the wheel of a car and the relentlessly “cool’’ jazz scene in L.A., and in 1958 Mr. Mariano accepted a teaching position at Berklee. He only lasted two terms before moving back west, accompanied by the young piano phenom Toshiko Akiyoshi.

The pair married in 1959 and over the course of several years bounced from New York, where they formed the Toshiko Mariano Quartet and Mr. Mariano performed and recorded with Mingus, to Tokyo, back to New York, and then to Boston, where Mr. Mariano returned to teaching in the mid-1960s.

“I had him for an ensemble, and every week he would stop the band and pick on somebody,’’ said Mr. Mariano’s former student, saxophonist Arnie Krakowsky of Boston. “Four, five, six weeks go by, and he didn’t stop me, and I thought I must be doing better than I think. Then one day, he stopped the band and pointed at me and said: ‘You. When you go home this weekend, I want you to tell your mother and father that you want to be a doctor or a lawyer.’ That was his way of telling me I needed to practice. When we saw Charlie walking the halls at Berklee, we would walk the other way. We were petrified of him. He was that good.’’

Mr. Mariano also became known for his work on the nadaswaram, a South Indian woodwind instrument he discovered on an extended trip to Kuala Lumpur.

After divorcing Ms. Akiyoshi in 1967, Mr. Mariano wandered the globe for years, commuting between the United States (he had yet another go teaching at Berklee) and Europe (where he eventually settled).

Following the formation of Osmosis, his early jazz fusion group, Mr. Mariano devoted his last several decades to exploring musical amalgams inspired by other cultures, as well as by pop and rock. He was diagnosed in 1995 with advanced prostate cancer and given a year to live by his doctors, but with the help of alternative therapies and conventional treatment he lived another 14.

“His music was the music of a traveler,’’ says Eric Jackson, longtime host of the WGBH show “Jazz with Eric in the Evening.’’ “Just look at the places Charlie called home in the course of his life. He was on a lifelong musical journey.’’

Ted Brown's Feather Bed

Ted Brown is a fantastic tenor player and a student of Lennie Tristano who got far less recognition than even Warne Marsh. He's still alive a well and still playing in NYC. Here is a two horn transcription of his tune Feather Bed, which was written over the changes of You'd be so Nice to Come Home to. Thanks to Dan Gaynor for this one.

Feather Bed MP3

(click the graphics for a larger printable copies)

Lee Konitz's Friendlee

Here's a rarely played Konitz tune that Dan Gaynor transcribed. The melody is tricky, although it looks quite easy at first glance. Click on the charts above for larger printable versions.

Friendlee mp3

Lee Konitz/Lennie Tristano Project @ the Tugboat

This Saturday my Lee Konitz/Lennie Tristano Project will be playing at the Tugboat Brewing Co. This group hasn't performed since the Cave closed and Dan Gaynor moved to NYC, but since Dan was back in town for a visit we decided to dust off all of our insanely difficult Konitz and Tristano (and a few Warne Marsh) charts for another show.

The band features myself on alto, Tim Wilcox on tenor, Dan Gaynor on piano, Alan Jones on drums, and Andrew Jones (who moved to town just a few months ago from Phoenix) on bass.

The music that Lennie Tristano and his students Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh wrote and played was some of the most unique, progressive, and interesting music in the history of Jazz. This groundbreaking music has never gotten the widespread recognition that it deserves. The main reason more Jazz musicians don't play these great compositions today is because they're just so difficult. Every time we perform this material I have to practice everything all over again!

Here's a tune called Dixie's Dilemma written by Warne Marsh (transcriber by Dan Gaynor) over the changes of All the Things You Are. The story is that Warne got involved in a sticky situation with an underage girl named Dixie. This chart is for two altos and was transcribed from the Lee Konitz Quintet record with Bob Mover, who was in his early twenties at the time.

(click on the graphics below for larger printable charts)
Dixie's Dilemma mp3 (From Warne Marsh's Intuiton album)

Chuck Israel's Jazz Arranging Online- FREE!

Chuck Israel has a bunch of great of interactive Jazz arranging lessons online. You can listen to audio clips of all the examples. The clips are all recorded using the Garritan Jazz/Big Band sample library. This is a great resource by written one of the top Jazz educators in the country.

Chuck Israel's Jazz Arranging Online

Jazz Blog rankings

I just got an email from a company called Invesq Consulting, a web research and consulting company.

"Hi David,

Maybe you're interested to know that you're ranked
at #14 on the Jazz blogs top 25 in blogRank.

http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Jazz

This list tracks close to 20,000 blogs and evaluates them based on 16
different factors. The algorithm we use is far superior to any other,
IMHO. It just took us over 8 months to develop this. I would love to
hear your feedback.

Cheers,
Khalid"

Here are some of the stats:

• Rank by the number of pages per visit: #1 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by the number of Stumbleupon reviews: #1 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by RSS membership: #2 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by the total Delicious bookmarks: #5 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by Alexa site rank: #9 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by the number of pages posted on the blog: #10 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by the number of pages indexed by Google: #16 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by the number of incoming links: #11 Casa Valdez Studios (with 5,505 links)
• Rank by the number of links to pages ratio: #15 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by Google page rank: #11 Casa Valdez Studios
• Rank by Technorati blog rank: #22 Casa Valdez Studios

Some of these statistics were kind of shocking to me, like being the number one Jazz blog by the number of pages read per visit AND the number of RSS subscribers. In your face Official Wynton Marsalis Web Site! :-)

Thanks to all of my loyal readers. I promise to start writing more as soon as I close my house sale and new house purchase. This is the most stressful and highly involved thing that I've ever done in my entire life. Yesterday I had soil sample guys in my back yard boring through my patio to take soil samples for a DEQ certificate, duct vac guys cleaning the heating system, roofers giving estimates for roof repairs, and a sewer scope guy doing an electronic sewer locate. Meanwhile I'm on the phone trying to get bids for repairs on our new place and with the city about our party sewer (which sounds a like it's a lot more fun than it actually is). We close both houses in roughly a month, which barely gives me enough time to move before I have to leave to teach at the summer Jazz workshop in Prague.

So keep me bookmarked, I will get back in the flow soon!

Who is Bob Mover?

Bret Primack's "Who Is Bob Mover" video

Streaming Jazz audio archives- FREE!

Smalls Jazz club in NYC has posted audio from a bunch of gigs over the last few years. Some of it is not the greatest quality, but there's a lot of really interesting music on here.

Smalls audio archives

NPR also has plenty of programs online for download:

Nancy Wilson's Jazz Profiles
'Live at the Village Vanguard' series

(thanks to Adam Melville for these links)

Michael Brecker interview on YouTube

From a clinic at North Texas State in the Spring of 1984
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Thanks Steve!

life....

I want to apologize to my regular readers for my lack of posts over the past several weeks. My life has been quite hectic recently. My wife and I have put our house on the market and have been looking for a bigger property. Yesterday we put in an offer on a huge place in Lake Oswego that has panoramic views. Last night we heard back with the news that our offer was accepted. Yay!

Moving sucks, but this move will be a huge improvement in quality of life for us. I'm going to really try to keep up my work on this blog throughout this relocation process. It looks like the move will happen right before I leave to teach at the Prague Summer Jazz Workshop. The other saxophone teachers in Prague will be Joel Frahm and Kristof Basco from Hungary. These guys are both smoking players, so I'm feeling compelled to practice pretty hard before I leave. Kristof is one of the few alto players who has a sound that I really like.

I need to brag a little here- Nicole Glover and Patrick Sargent, two of my saxophone students, got in to the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra, which is a national Jazz honor band run by the Monterey Jazz Festival. I was in this band when I was in high school and now it's directed by my first sax teacher Paul Contos. This year my student Aaron Johnson got the lead alto chair in the Grammy Band. Way to go guys.

I don't care what they say, teaching is rewarding once in a while. :-)


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