Jazz Gig in Louisville, Kentucky

Hello all,

This past weekend I had the wonderful fun of playing with my old friend John and his big band.

He called me about Tuesday of last week and asked if I could drive up and play with his group over the weekend. He had sent me the links to the music and charts. (Of which I only looked at a few minutes on Friday night.)

It was a big band jazz gig. And I drove up there Saturday morning and got there in time to set up for our 3:00pm rehearsal.

To my surprise, the band was fantastic. Some of the best players from Chattanooga, and Louisville, as well as a few extras like myself made up the band. And the band was cookin' from the first song. Wow, it was a lot of fun.

From Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" to "Star Dust" to "It don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing" and a few big band arrangements of some hymns.

It was about 20 tunes of several pages each chart. About a half an inch stack of music was on my stand ready to be read at the beginning of rehearsal. During rehearsal we touched on the beginnings of most every song. Occasionally we would go through some tricky passage. But that was it. I only think we played one song at rehearsal all the way through.

If you want to see what the music looked like here it is...

http://www.learnandmaster.com/dpk/downloads/Krenz_BigBand.pdf

And of those 60 or so pages of music, not one of them was in TAB.

Now, as you look at the music, don't freak out!

How this works is that most of the parts I was reading off of were piano parts.

So when I look at this music I am trying to learn 3 things...

1) What the chords are.

2) What the specific rhythms I need to play.

3) What the overall form of the song is.

And everything else in the part I just filter out. OR, if the information that I need is not there, I just use my ear and my knowledge of music or the song to fill in what needs to be played.

The first song "In the Mood" is written very confusingly.

Here is what it sounds like... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJE-onnw2gM

It is a pure piano part with no chord changes written in, and then it looks like someone along the way tried to fill in some chords by analyzing one hand of the piano part. So, I quickly found out that the written in chords were not accurate. But I did notice on the part that the song was in the key of Ab.

So, for the first song, I just used my ear and knowledge of the tune to fill in the chords. There were really only about 6 basic chords in the song so if you kinda know how the song goes then you can pretty easily figure out what you need to play.

Now, the second song, C Jam Blues is much more of a normal guitar jazz band guitar part. But I didn't try to figure out all of the notes in the chords at the beginning. I just looked at the chord name and the rhythm and used my own voicing.

The third song is a jazz arrangement of the hymn Rock of Ages. Here is the mp3 of it if you want to listen to it and follow along in the music for fun.

http://community.legacylearningsystems.com/index.php?page=music§ion=view&mus_id=101179

Anyway, it was a great night of just sight reading jazz tunes with a great band! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here is a homemade video of one of the songs that we did. Battle Hymn of the Republic. You can't see me very well. I'm behind the last tenor sax player to the side of the drums.

But you'll get an idea of what we were doing.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP7no_DCFHA&feature=player_embedded#at=14

I thought you might be interested in what this musical adventure looked like.

Playing guitar is a blast!!!

- Steve Krenz