SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  4/7/01; 10:43:12 PM Msg#:  1694 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  1693/1695 Reads:  1943

Calendar of new submissions

I've added a calendar on the right side of the home page that will allow you to check recent messages submitted to the Discussion Group. Since most of the pages submitted to the site are new additions to The Changes, to a  composer's tune list, or to The Rhythms, this is a great way to find  new musical material that was recently added to the site.

Bernard's still busy

Bernard Chinn added four more tunes to his repretoire on SongTrellis this week. He has twenty compositions listed now. The new ones are Contraro, Popcorn, Oddity Waltz and Bernie's Rag.

Wayne Shorter's changes

It's not immediately obvious, but if you look at the tunes listed in The Changes you'll see that Wayne Shorter's name appears frequently. Shorter is a brilliant saxophonist who gained his reputation by playing with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the early 60's and as a member of the Miles Davis Quintet for the remainder of the decade. After Miles, he co-led the Weather Report band with Joe Zawinul.

Wayne's been a prolific composer of tunes for improvisation for the last 40 years. Many believe that as a composer of jazz tunes, he stands in the company of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Horace Silver. I'm one of those people.

It's a temporary statistical anomaly that will be corrected as I add other music to the site, but as of today, nearly 10% of the tunes in The Changes are Shorter tunes. I've recently found transcriptions of a large number of his early compositions, so I've been busy preparing arrangements of the changes of those tunes. This week I've added Sincerely Diana, Down In The Depths, The Chess Players, and Sweet N' Sour.

Why do I like his work so much? He's a great harmonic explorer. He continually opens up new territory and creates new kinds of musical games for the improvisor to play. He finds new moods. He's a musical impressionist who tries to paint many kinds of musical pictures. The titles of his composition demonstrate his wide interests: Nefertiti, Masquelero, Go, Night Dreamer, Mahjong, The Chess Players, Footprints, Twelve More Bars To Go, Infant Eyes, Speak No Evil, Water Babies, Tom Thumb, Sanctuary, Lusitanos, Running Brook, Lost, Angola, The Big Push, Rio, Dear Sir, Fall, Eurydice, Limbo, Prince Of Darkness, Shere Khan The Tiger, Pinnochio, Armageddon, Witch Hunt, Schizophrenia. He's done wonderful  musical portraits of people he's known: Ana Maria, Diana, Miyako, Vonetta, Iris, Delores, Lester Left Town, Sweet Pea.

Other new changes

We have:

• Charlie Parker's Dewey Square
• Cole Porter's Get Out Of Town (a request from a visitor of the site)
• William Henri Woode's Broadway
• Walter Donaldson's Making Whoopee
• Brooks Bowman's East Of The Sun (West of The Moon)
• Sam Coslow's My Old Flame
• Frank Loesser's On A Slow Boat To China

Please join our community at SongTrellis. Our contributors welcome your comments, suggestions and requests. As soon as you join the site (or login if you are a member) a response form will appear here.