One Day Wonder #293

For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone and tuba.

Here’s a slick little jazz-thing with a nice concept behind it. See, the band is divided into two parts: 2nd horn/trombone/tuba and 1st horn/trumpet. Every section of the piece until the shout chorus repeats twice, only the first time through any given section is the first for one part or another. Confused yet? OK, in other words, what you hear initially in the 2nd horn/trombone/tuba playing their first section, then the 1st horn/trumpet come in eight bars later with their first time through the section. After those first 16 bars, the 2nd horn/trombone/tuba combo plays something else while the 1st horn/trumpet play the same thing they did over the previous eight bars. After they’ve played for 16 bars, they switch to something else while their counterparts repeat the previous eight bars. The whole thing is modular. Because I didn’t want them to spend all day in this building loop, I stuck in that little block-harmony shout chorus in there and reprised the beginning with the parts mostly switched. It works out nicely from a conceptual standpoint, but as with most of the jazz stuff I’ve written for this project, it barely qualifies as such because it doesn’t have any changes to speak up; only melodic lines that work to achieve their own goals. Maybe one the few exceptions is #178, my little requiem for a goldfish, and those changes are largely diatonic. Yeah, I guess my jazz skills have degenerated from non-use. Hey, I used to speak Russian like a champ, and nowadays I can barely understand Vladimir Putin. Oh well, such is the way of things.

Just so you know, I’ve devised an exit strategy for myself. Here it is: since this project didn’t really begin in earnest until wonderful #7, I am going to revamp the first six pieces (in reverse order) as my last six pieces. I’ll start with #6 for #295, #5 for #296 and so on until I reach #300, which still looks like it’s going to happen on March 6th. My goal is to expand these pieces until they’re all around two minutes apiece. Back when I started, I was just happy to get notes down on paper, so I paid no attention to duration. All of them are less than a minute long, with the shortest at just 26 seconds. So yes, I’ll have to do quite a bit of writing, but hopefully I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to write additional material that compliments the original stuff. If it doesn’t, then I apologize in advance.