![]() The separate CD, A History of Ragtime: Tex Wyndham Live At Santa Rosa, is available for $13.00 plus $2.00 shipping. On request, Tex will autograph the inner sleeve and add a personalized note (be sure to tell him to whom the note should be addressed). Tex Wyndham’s 3 CD Guide to Dixieland with music and commentary is available for $20 plus $2.95 shipping. This book is available $20.00 plus $2.95 shipping from Tex Wyndham, On request, Tex will autograph the book and add a personalized note (be sure to tell him to whom the note should be addressed). The full run of “Texas Shout” has been collected into a lavishly illustrated trade paperback entitled Texas Shout: How Dixieland Jazz Works. Shouldn’t the prospect of such results be worth a try for a few times, just to see how it goes? If you do - trust me on this - you’ll play a jazzier show, your sidemen will improve (at least the ones who want to improve will do so, the others may complain), and the audience will get more out of the experience. All you have to do is remember that you’re not leading one band, you’re leading 131 different bands, and you should give many, if not all, of them a chance to play during the evening. You can do the same thing with your band. James Reese Europe and the Clef Club Orchestra A fan later sent me a tape of it, and it stands up as well on repeated listening as I remembered it in the event. What came out was absolutely gorgeous, the audience listened so closely you could hear a pin drop, and the applause went off the meter when that spot ended. Just to try something a little different, we decided, while the performance was going on, to do a three-chorus routine consisting of an unaccompanied clarinet chorus, an unaccompanied clarinet-soprano saxophone duet, and a trio of clarinet, soprano saxophone and tuba. Each member of these combos may find himself playing all alone or together with any combination of the others at any time, and the response from the crowd and the musicians has been most satisfying.To illustrate, one of the high points for me of the Revellers’ appearance at the 1989 South Coast Metro festival came near the end of our last set, while we were playing “Faraway Blues”, a tune that’s been in our book since we first got together. Lest you think I am idly theorizing, I can tell you that the two bands I regularly lead, The Red Lion Jazz Band in my hometown and The Rent Party Revellers at festivals and cruises, follow the principles set forth above and those principles work just fine. It’s easy for a horn player to get lazy on his solos if he knows he’ll have four sidemen filling out the sound - he can’t hide as well if the only instrument behind him is a tuba or a string bass or just the drummer’s brushes. If you keep surprising them, they won’t chatter as much because they won’t want to miss something special.įurther, deploying your musicians in novel ways keeps the sidemen alert and stretches their abilities, two things that will guarantee the steady improvement of your lineup. I firmly believe that, once the listeners think they know what you’re going to do, they will listen to you less intently. Will they then start to table-talk a little more? If your first few tunes suggest that, for the rest of the night, it’s going to be either full ensemble or solos with rhythm, the fans will realize that all you’re going to do from here on out, on each tune, is the same thing you just did but on a different chord pattern and at a different tempo. Such variations do much to keep the audience interested over the long haul. However, for today’s column, let’s stick to the variety that can be obtained through subunits.) (Other ways to use the instrumental resources at hand include dynamics - how many bands anymore play those really quiet but highly-charged ensembles, such as those you frequently heard on Kid Ory’s revival-period recordings? - and chase choruses. A Dixieland band should be an ideal laboratory for varying the tonal mixtures. And yet, as I have previously discussed at length in the June 1988 issue of The Mississippi Rag, Dixieland players have, in general, the most widely-developed ensemble skills of any style of jazz. Why do we get so much unimaginative programming? I suspect that many leaders are not fully aware of the musical resources within their ranks waiting to be tapped.
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