This is one of my more recent big band charts, “Rifts.” This is the recording from the Spring 2008 One O’Clock Lab Band at Lab Band Madness.
This is a clip from a few weeks ago of the UNT U-Tubes performing my arrangement of “I Thought About You” at the Greenhouse in Denton. After having written quite a few non-swinging charts, I decided to get back to basics and something straight ahead.
Roommate Betsy told me that I may have some more gigs at Hector’s starting next week. I’ve yet to get confirmation on this, but it looks promising.
I’m in Minnesota for a short while, then it’s back to Texas in order to gear up for fall auditions and the school year. Also, I anticipate to be recording some original pop/rock tunes when I get home.
So I haven’t really updated this very much, but that’s ok.
My summer has consisted of a good bit of practicing, and recently a fun project. My friend, drummer Sean Philly Jones called me to do some keyboard parts on a track he’s recording. The idea is to meticulously recreate “Rock With You,” from the Michael Jackson album Off The Wall. This project was started so Philly could learn to use his recording program, Digital Performer, better. At the beginning of the week, all Philly had down was a completely accurate drum part.
One day, I played the main rhodes part and a functional synth bass part. Over the next few days, we added synth string parts (which will later be replaced with real strings) and additional synth parts. Yesterday, Scott Mulvahill added the true bass part and Kelyn Crapp laid down the guitars. I also played most of the flugal and trumpet parts. The track has a ways to go (Quincy Jones as producer made the original track immensely and intricately layered), but it already sounds really good. I may post it when it’s finished.
Even though Philly is doing all the tracking and mixing, I’ve probably been the next most involved person and I’ve adopted it as my own project too. The most likely candidate for our next project is “Peg” from the Steely Dan album Aja. Philly, Brian Stark and I are going to see Steely Dan in August when they come to the Nokia Theater in Grand Prairie, TX.