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The Score: Jazz Scores after the Jazz Age After having watched Mike Hammer, My Gun is Quick (1957) on youtube, the interwebs led me to the below post from Hearing the Movies, a really cool blog by Jim Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer. The opening credit sequence is the first installment of Marlin Skiles’ jazz score: a really cool big band piece, with a drum solo (what! say it isn’t so!)…turns out that Skiles was a prolific composer and arranger, and his jazz-noire score for this film rivals my all time favorite, Elmer Bernstein and Chico Hamilton’s Sweet Smell of…

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Repost: Blues for Pablo: True to Form

 Yes, it’s another retread…the following is a popular post from my other blog: What do you call this…something like “orchestrational and harmonic gestural writing”, or “tonal consequence”, or even “temporal textural tautological antiphony”?…maybe you just mean “music”. “Blues for Pablo”–True to Form Posted on October 8, 2011 by Scott Healy View the original article at professorscosco.com.   Blues for Pablo is to me the best piece of music on the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans 1958 record Miles Ahead (also titled Miles +19.) It’s a rich and detailed work. Gil’s techniques–transparent orchestration,  use of instruments such as alto flute, french horns, tuba and…

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Digging Upon “The Contemporary Arranger”

Sebesky Contemporary Arranger

I know I’m a tad obsessive about jazz arranging. Why else would I sit around in my free time and read textbooks. I picked one up the other day, Don Sebesky’s “The Contemporary Arranger”. I had it in school; my edition from the 80’s is still out “on loan” to someone, I have no idea to whom…so I bought the latest edition from the 1990’s…it’s shocking how the music jumps off the page. The first page has a little excerpt and talks about economy in orchestration, and the little example blows me away–worth the price of the whole volume. Who…

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  I have a jazz composition blog, ProfessorScoSco, and of course this one, which you are reading now. So I publish a post in the other one, now I’m compelled to tell the world about it here. I am definitely spending too much time on shameless self-promo, but I actually enjoy writing about music theory, probably because I love the sound of my own voice. Perhaps it’s therapeutic too – but I do recognize that most of the theory crap I learned in school is useless, and wasn’t applied to anything concrete. I have a series going on Linear Harmony,…

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