4 posts tagged with "jazz"

I’ve written two new ‘suites’ for big band for the Byres Road Big Band concert in the Blythswood Festival on Sunday 17 May.

I say ‘suites’ – actually each of them is just three pieces, so, as I’ve been joking, two three piece suites, that’s four amchairs and two settees :)

Seriously, though, this music is important to me. The start of my dizzing career in music – culminating in a PhD in composition and my role as Head of PG Music at the Conservatoire – starts with me hearing ‘Take Five’ on the radio sometime in the early 80s and being inspired to teach myself jazz trumpet.

This led me on a journey through a roster of currently-residing-in-the-where-are-they-now-file bands in the Edinburgh area, picking up skills in writing, arranging and music theory as I went.

Through the 90s and 00s I was still gigging as jazz trumpet player, but, creatively, I broadened out into ‘contemporary’ composition: often jazz ‘informed’ perhaps, but not actual jazz writing.

That led on to the PhD which, again, had no echt jazz in it, although the collective away in which I ‘devised’ the music in collaboration with a group of players certainly bears a relationship to jazz practice.

I perhaps shouldn’t say this in public, but unfortunately the PhD kind of killed me, in terms of straight contemporary writing. I’m still proud of the music I wrote during that period, particularly my final show ‘The Other Other Hand’ but, creatively, I found myself at the end of that process kind of fed up with jumping through the hoops of formal ‘composition’.

After the PhD, I escaped for a while into the world of livecoding – certainly a strong improvisatory element there, but, once again not jazz.

Finally, the epiphany. Although my first instrument is trumpet, I’ve also played trombone on and off for many years. After spending the covid years woodshedding on trumpet, it occured to me for some reason to get my bomtrone back from the person I had lent it to and dust it off.

For a lark, I decided one week to go and sit in on trombone for a rehearsal of the Byres Road Big Band.

At the end of that rehearsal I made this kind of tearfully-joyful confession to this room full of musicians – that I really didn’t know at all! – to the effect that it had been one of the greatest musical experiences of my life, and that I finally realised I should have been playing trombone in a big band all along.

So. For the last two years ago I’ve been working with the band, slowly improving my trombone playing to the point where I can almost cope with typical big band repertoire.

Along with that, I’ve been writing for the band, both dusting off and reorganising old pieces and coming up with new ideas.

There is a good deal I could say about that, but this posting is long and rambling enough as it is, so I’ll leave that for next time.

Here’s the gig:

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/jsimonvanderwalt/2125487

Sun 17 May 2026 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM
National Piping Centre, Glasgow
Doors 1900
Band 1930-2200 with interval
£13/£7 concession

In May 2026 I’m going to be 65 years old :) and I’m planning a couple of events around that time to celebrate and enjoy some of the music I’ve written over the decades.

One of the most important events I’m looking forward to is a concert with the Byres Road Big Band (date tbc). I’ve been lead trombone with them for two and a bit years now, greatly enjoying playing my second instrument just for fun.

I’ve written several original charts for them, sometimes (but not always) rearrangements of older compositions of mine. The major ambition for the concert in May is to perform ‘Between Two Oceans’, a suite of three jazz pieces originally written in in 1998.

I tried out some of this material last year with the Mackintosh Jazz Composers Ensemble, and am now in the process of rescoring it for the BRBB. I’ve decided to make the whole thing a guitar feature for our excellent young guitarist Matthew, who has recently started studying at the RCS.

Here’s the probably-nearly-finished BRBB version of the third movement of the suite ‘Ninety Mile Beach’:

https://musescore.com/user/12368/scores/30475634

One of the earliest compositions of mine that I have documented on this site is How Two Minds Can Know One Thing.

I wrote this the year after I finished my LLCM at Napier University. In retrospect I can see that, by taking on the writing of a three-movement piece for chamber orchestra, I was cementing my ambition to move beyond being a jazz trumpet player and arranger, in order to position myself as someone who was also a 'composer' of 'contemporary classical' music. In that sense, it was succesful: I even managed to get a Scottish Arts Council funding for the work.

However, truth is, with 28 years of hindsight, there always were some problems with the piece. I remain very grateful to the staff and students involved in the original performance, but the truth is not everything came off that well. I suspect the concert was recorded, and that somewhere I might still have the file, but I seem to have deliberately lost it. In fact, I've recently been reminded by someone who played at that concert that the third movement broke down and had to be restarted.

As I approach my 65th year, I'm looking back on my younger composer-self with mixed feelings. I admire the clarity that I had then about the kind of music I was writing and why I was writing it. I'm less fond of the passive-aggressive (or just aggressive!) programme notes, and some of the music seems to me a little short-winded now, not developed at enough length.

Also there has often been a conflict between the rhythmically driven jazz/prog phrasing that is natural to me, and the way that classically trained musicians tend to play these rhythms once they are written down. To take a very simple example, the obvious way for a jazz trumpet player to play this:

Is like this:

Whereas a trumpet player used to playing in a classical context will aim to play both notes equally. To go further: if I was playing that phrase I would stop the 'dit' note with my tongue: which is always wrong in straight trumpet playing! So even if I mark the notes with a tenuto and a staccato, the straight player will still not get it right.

So, to make a long story short, I'm in the process of revisiting and revising How Two Minds, to make it more like the piece it was trying to be.

The first movement I may abandon. The second movement is actually fine as it is, and I've already re-purposed it elsewhere. The third movement I'm in the process of rescoring, moving away from strings and oboe to clarinets, accordion and trumpet, with the aim of getting a more direct jazz/prog sound and a better articulation of the rhythmic material.

Pic below is trying out some of the clarinet material with the help of students from the RCS.

A wee jazz tune which I came up with the other day.

Happy Me by tedthetrumpet