 Ode to Silbury Hill 2012 MusicianI'm a musician (and music student) of the '60s and '70s with a jazz and classical background, so if chords with flattened ninths don't interest you, my music probably won't. There is so much drivel out there you might like to hear composition rather than 'production.' Composition If you need to contact me about material, I'm at david2@ramblingrose.eu. Here are six clips. Frère Jacques à la Bach   Frère Jacques Aeolian Mode  Frère Jacques Harp (Phrygian Mode)   Frère Jacques Tuba and Brass Quartet   A version for tuba was a facetious challenge from a musician friend. The first arrangement is of a simple melodic line for tuba with string quartet accompaniment. Subsequent versions are more adventurous. The version above was pronounced unplayable on a traditional instrument with valves. Then I saw a musician playing a tuba with keys at a Proms Concert and rest more easily. The Frère Jacques series I started for grand-daughter. I am also working on a collection of arrangements of Irish traditional songs for her to play. The Minstrel Boy   My Mum is Beautiful  This last is also for grand-daughter's portfolio and an introduction to jazz chords. Playing The trumpet was my main instrument. I started playing at twelve. At fifteen in 1965, I was lead trumpet and a founder member of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO). At sixteen I was playing professionaly. I led NYJO from 1965 to late 1968 and the World Youth Festival in Sophia, Bulgaria when booked to play with Johnny Dankworth. Cancelling this gig with Britain's top big band was odd for a young musician but I was more interested in moving to Brussels and gigging around Europe with an eight-piece soul band and Belgium's top singing duo, Jess and James before university in 1970. I should also mention a stint with Val Merril at the American Servicemen's Club in Bayswater. My last playing gig was in 1973 on solo D trumpet in Handel's Messiah with a chamber orchestra and choir of the King's School in Reading. Here is Christopher Purves playing the all-important (to a trumpet player) The Trumpet Shall Sound with the Academy of Ancient Music. Putting the instrument away after this gig to concentrate on my first music business venture remains the hardest thing I have ever done.Almost forty years on in 2011 I bought an Olds Mendez. I first blew this top-of-the-range Olds trumpet in Percy's music shop in Brussels in 1968 but couldn't afford it since it was the price of a new car and I had just started the gig. I took the almost as expensive Olds Recording on spec for the weekend gig but dropped it down the stairs and didn't have the nerve to ask Percy the following Monday morning if I could swap the dented unpaid-for instrument for the Mendez. The Mendez I was delighted to discover years later is still known as "The Governor" even though the company went out of business in 1973. That first one from 1968 played itself to altissimo C, the recent one doesn't, for some reason.The reason for buying it was when NYJO asked me if I could lead a band of 'originals' at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. I didn't make the gig at the 100 Club in Oxford Street in October 2015 mostly because of three front teeth breaking. Pressure, I put that down to ... and because I had not played for 42 years. What does it take to remind you you are not eighteen years old any more? At the end of 1967 one of my first sessions was laying a trumpet line over Keith Emerson's organ in The Nice, Diamond Blue Apples of the Moon. "Where are you going, you've got college tomorrow ..." my mother asked late that Sunday night as I left the house for the studio in St. John's Wood. (Compare this with a 1974 and I have to say, lacklustre live version at Newcastle City Hall without trumpet.) When I had finished the overlay Keith Emerson, who I didn't know was in the control booth, asked if I would like to hear the A-side, America. Yes, I heard it pre-release! For musician's reading this, Bernstein composed the song with a time signature of alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4. I knew this because my father played in the original London theatre production of West Side Story in 1959. I was taken aback at The Nice forcing it into 4/4 with triplet quavers and crotchets but said nothing, of course ... Bernstein tried to get an injunction to stop this version being released. One of my best early experiences was working with P J Proby between 1966 and 1968 beginning with a ten-day tour of Ireland. Wonderful voice and always a first rate band. Jim, "the Boy" recorded many demos in the Sun studio that Elvis would learn the songs from. Sixteen-year old Proby recorded the demos and Elvis would listen to the suitable ones and copy his rich vibrato style. Here is Proby in 1966 with Somewhere. Here are Jess and James and the New J J Band in our studio version of the single Change we played all over Europe from late '68 into 1969. Here's a clip of us in Frankfurt in early 1969 on a live radio/ television Beat-Club. |