It was a useful corrective to conventional wisdom: just because a group of people hasn’t been successful doing something (worth doing), it doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. They did a magnificent job and disproved my initial conclusion that they couldn’t swing (because they hadn’t before). With Swing Symphony (my third symphony), I decided to put the basses in time and let them work it out. There are too many vamps-a repeated bass riff is the signature of almost every song you hear today and every song I grew up hearing.” I laughed because many an hour had been spilled over that very problem, and I just couldn’t figure it out without putting the basses in swing time (almost a guaranteed disaster because orchestral basses don’t want to play pizzicato bass notes all night, because of their onstage distance from the ride cymbal, the weight of their sound causing a muddle of successive low notes on every beat, etc.).
#PAPO SWING MASK HOW TO#
When I played my first symphony All Rise for the great music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Lewis, he said, “Congratulations! There are a lot of solutions in here… but you still have to figure out how to get more motion in the bass. This is the best way I know to define sublime.
Sixteen bars later, when the score says “Swing Harder,” this sonic miracle of 95 individual minds working as one goes incandescent, including and exalting everyone within earshot. And then, when Wynton’s score asks us to “Swing,” we put our all our force behind it. When the Trombones and Trumpets kick in, we learn how taking the air of hardship and blowing it out in just the right way will transform experience into musical metal, inspiring and demonstrating the unbreakable bonds of love. Louis musicians have a huge heart and a dazzlingly wide range of virtuosity, but when the Reeds begin to play, we all become aware of being blessed with the best master-class in swing, in articulation (the front, middle, and end of a tone – the note’s whole soul, that is), and in how to make phrases of supreme elegance, energy, or elegy. When Carlos nods at me, with the merest hint of a smile, I know we have set the tempo in its perfect place. A conductor’s day job is to organize the music’s flow, but my awe at the sheer, perfect precision of Dan, Carlos, and Jason is reverential and unending. Nestled next to the violins, the piano, bass, and drums send out the musical heartbeat. It’s unusual to have trumpets in front of flutes and oboes yet here, power, gentleness, and grace all give to each other. Instead, we placed the band front and center, embraced all around by the orchestra. The fundamental, philosophical reach of this question: are you going to separate the two groups or blend them? One way might be to set them on opposing sides, but I don’t think that’s a solution at all. Location, location, location-the same goes for a concert hall or an urban environment. First of all, there’s the stage set-up a lot of folks to fit in a compact space.
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