Edition: Jazz Nonet Arrangement

Description: Swing - Medium

Publisher: Jazz Lines Publications

In the late 1950s, when I was a teenager learning to play jazz, Randy Weston had a summer-long job playing at Avaloch, in Lenox, Mass, across the road from Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony spends its summers. My parents had Indian Hill, an arts camp for teenagers, down the road in Stockbridge. I spent summers there and evening after evening at Avaloch, listening to Randy’s band and occasionally being invited to sit in.

It’s nearly unimaginable now to think there was a rural environment, three hours from Brooklyn, where these musicians were from, where a supportive audience, often filled with musicians and listeners relaxing, eating, and drinking after an earlier Boston Symphony performance, supported a sophisticated jazz quintet. Lots of fine players went through the band over a few summers: bassists, Peck Morrison, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Ron Carter and Jim Atlas; trumpeter; Richard Williams; baritonist, Cecil Payne and several good drummers. I must have heard Hi Fly a hundred times. It became part of my jazz DNA. The arrangement wrote itself.

One day, Randy, Cecil, and drummer, Connie Kay came walking by Indian Hill, and stopped in to visit. There was a basketball hoop set up and these guys, two of them really tall (Randy was 6’ 7” and could almost palm a basketball, and Connie was a big guy too) and brought up in Brooklyn street basketball culture, wanted to play and invited me to play with them. After about a minute, I caught the ball wrong and jammed my middle finger. That was the last time I played the game, although I maintain an appreciation for those who do it well.

Full Score
Alto Saxophone
Tenor Saxophone
Baritone Saxophone
Trumpet
Trombone
Guitar
Piano
Bass
Drums

Trumpet 1: E5