riceonthebass

Half of this tune is old, half of it is new.

The form is AABA…classic.

The A sections(first 14 and last 7) are old.  The B Section(the part in 5/4) is new.

Here’s the Chart:

Here is the mp3:  Insomnia

Improvising on this tune is a challenge, or it’s not.  It depends on your particular bent.

My intention with this tune was to have the solos be free form, with the groove intact.

It is helpful for everyone in the group to be listening intently and periodically playing little pieces of the melody as markers so that everyone stays in touch.

You’ll hear us do that on the recording above.

enjoy!

This tune is named for the Ramada in Kill Devil Hills, NC.  There is an abundance of drama with the various characters that work and play there.

Waitstaff, bartenders, maintenance people, managers, housekeeping, front desk, vacationers, musicians.  All are witnesses and participants.  I play there every week.

Here is the mp3:  Dramada

Here is the sheet music:

One reason that this tune is interesting is because it is atonal.  Meaning that it does not belong to any key.  It is cereal…er, serial music.

Basically, Serial music employs a series of notes and does not repeat any notes until the series has been fully realized.  It can get very complicated, but his tune is fairly simple.

All i did was compose my tone row(the series) and then began to noodle around on the piano until i found some rhythmic material that sounded good to me.

by the way the row is:  C, Gb, D, Bb, F, E, C#, G, B, D#, G#, A

I can’t recall exactly how i arrived at this particular row.

If you follow the notes from beginning to end, you find the row a total of 4 times.  Sometimes notes are enharmonically respelled to accommodate reading and harmony.

I basically just hung the chords from the melody and definitely broke some rules about chord progressions, but that makes for interesting improvising.

You can solo on this tune using the chord changes, or you can use the row and apply it as you see fit, virtually ignoring the harmony altogether.  FUN! FUN!

This tune comes from an assignment from “Composing for Performers” class that i took while working on my master’s degree at the University of the Arts.

Here is an mp3 of the tune:  Whistling Dixie

The assignment had to do with Intervals.

An interval is the numeric term applied to the space between any two notes.  The larger the space between the notes, the higher the number is.

A 2nd is a small interval and a 7th is a larger interval.

My task here was to compose a melody that began with small intervals, increased the intervals gradually, and then came back to the smaller intervals as the melody finished.

Here is the sheet music:

If you’ve gotten this far, then you perhaps have some musical theory knowledge, so i will commence to write with that in mind.

the first measure starts out with 2nds and the intervallic distance peaks at measure 4 with the descending F# to G interval of a major 7th.  After this point, the tune gradually works it’s way down to smaller intervals.

The bass line was composed outside of the compositional constraints described above.  After that I decided on what the chord changes would be.