The Recital. Eight brand new pieces for trombone and piano. If I’ve had a Big Idea in the last few years, this is it. I noticed, when at student recitals, that too much of the repertoire was the same stuff I’d been playing at college 30 years ago. To gain the contrast they needed for their performance, students are still…
RBY is a piece of many colours, not just the three primary ones. I have tried to portray some facet of the tones you get when you mix two of the three colours on a palette, i.e. orange, green and purple/violet, and of course black, the dark heart of the piece when you mix all three colours together. Thus black…
Another piece that’s more rock than classical really. In fact there is a version with drum kit, which is the version I always listen to. And another of my weird titles. It’s just because it’s lovey-dovey at the beginning and end, with what I then considered rather astral, floaty chords. The middle is all driving rock for trombones.
After the intensity of 6845, a gentler piece, possibly for a youth band at 4 minutes. A relaxing sailing trip hits a storm thrown at it by Steve Reich, before the boat sails off into the sunset with a sultry flugel solo.
Here's a little brass quintet I did in 1998. This is easy listening, and not too hard to play either. I couldn't settle on a title, both seemed to suit the music well, see below. Grade VI upwards.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
Here is a five-movement, continuous twenty-minute piece depicting these beautiful islands. We first went there in 2008, and standing at the very top of Britain, at Hermaness, in freezing rain, watching the furious sea crashing on the rocks and the cliffs round the lighthouse, the gulls and terns whizzing around above the water, I knew this would be great for…
I’d had this tune going on for years, scribbled on a piece of paper somewhere. I showed it to Amos one time and said I’d never known what to do with it. He suggested his group, the Big Buzzard Boogie Band. Speedbird is a punchy piece, always driving forward, propelled by a ‘push’ in every bar. The featured solo is…
This is the first of 2 pieces in the style of Steve Reich. SRI is Sacro Romano Impero, the Holy Roman Empire, which of course was the First Reich. Har bleedin’ har. But I liked the title enough to keep it, because 3 stark capitals are a bit mechanical, as this sort of music is, and there’s also more than…
It’s a ubiquitous trick in a lot of pop music, to shift up a semitone every verse, possibly most memorably used in Stevie Wonder’s hit ‘I just called to say I love you’. This is the Blaydon Races tune exaggeratedly given the same manoeuvre, with the John Iveson middle section thrown in as well (see ‘Deck the Halls’).
See above, Orchestral Woodwind Section. I wrote this piece at college when I could sort of play the piano a little bit. There are 5 short movements, I think the whole piece is under 10 minutes. They are in increasingly long compound times, and are 1. Rushing Water (3/8); 2. Gaudy Tune in A major (5/8); Tombs (7/4); On The…
A very old favourite tune of mine, this is a version arranged for ten piece brass group, and recorded by Barbican Brass. I updated the arrangement and added percussion in 2019.
Three books of five short pieces to round off a brass band rehearsal in a cheery way! Many of us start rehearsals with the old faithful hymn books. Here are fifteen pieces with which to end rehearsals, fifteen lively and catchy little numbers to end the night on. All are about a minute long, a simple blow to send us…
This piece follows straight on from the relentless Giants in the Rain, and is therefore a quiet, ethereal contrast. Giants started with a long piano introduction, Ghosts has the solo trombone softly laying out the theme, a recitative-like chant based on the most recurrent motif of the recital, a 5-note snippet going up or down towards the end. The piano…
It would help to describe this piece if I gave one of (!) its original titles, which was Fanfare, Theme, Ghosts and Hoedown. This is a melange of a piece, in those implied moods, written as a thankyou to Duncan Wilson and Kidlington Concert Brass for performing Sketches of Shetland, which I must say they did brilliantly. When I couldn’t…
