I got inspired by Oliver's arrangement of "Days of Wine and Roses". The drummer in my band wants to play "Beautiful Friendship", so I thought I would try to arrange it in a Shearing style.

I understand the basic concept behind the Shearing sound, but I'm not sure if I've quite got it. In particular, I'm not sure what to do when the melody note doesn't fall within the chord-dim-chord-dim scale pattern. Chromatic notes in the melody are also difficult.

In the online meeting a week or so ago, David played a Red Norvo video and, when talking about it said, "I don't know why nobody has ever transcribed this solo.."

That was enough motivation for me. :)

To my ears, even though this was performed/recorded in 1960, it is an excellent example of the crossover point between ragtime and jazz. So much of what Red plays, from his low to the keyboard mallet technique to his linear construction, is reminiscent of the George Hamilton Green studies. Sometimes literally... check out measures 208-209.

We had a great discussion in the Sunday Vibes Coffee House meeting last week on wrapping mallets.

One of the members, Brett, talked about how he wraps mallets. He included this article about wrapping mallets.

He also talked about hemp yarn and how strong it is. How long it lasts.

Here is the article he talked about.

btw - if you want info on the coffee house sign up here:
https://bit.ly/vibecoffee

Part of my new practice strategy of just improvising a solo arrangement and recording my first take, instead of my usual thoughtfully working everything out beforehand and using maybe a third take. It's a lot more time-efficient.

Hey All,

The rest are on my YT channel and somewhere on this site. 4 more to go.

Click here to see them all!

This is a video of the concert I put on last Friday with my combo. It went surprisingly well, so we'll be doing it again in a couple of weeks. It seems like perhaps we all need to get used to the idea of outdoor gigs.

I've been working on my video and audio editing so I decided to write a duo arrangement and see if I can line everything up. This is my friend Noah Hogan on guitar (going to NYU as a jazz major next year)