1 | Intro
Late Autumn, a few years back, in a world-famous London studio, I got the gig of a lifetime. The band were booked, 17 top jazz session players in the London scene, chatting, tuning and talking about their mortgages, while I, the arranger, at the tender age of 21, was with the composer in the booth. The red light came on, ProTools was rolling and 8 free clicks later came the downbeat.
It was a mess.
Every composer, orchestrator and arranger knows the heart-in-mouth feeling of your music hitting a player’s stand and their hand going up. There were that many questions from the players I might as well have been playing Jeopardy. It was one of those situations where you just knew it came up in the pub later with awkward laughs and downward glances.
Interestingly, if you had been there, watching the session, I don’t think you’d have noticed anything amiss. Anybody who has worked with top session players knows that they have an amazing ability to make whatever you put in front of them work, and these players were no exception. I think most people in the booth were convinced. But I knew I hadn’t done a great job, and so did the players. I’m formally trained in jazz so ‘spoke the language’ but the truth is arranging for the big band is much less forgiving than the orchestra. The pro orchestra is a comforting, enveloping sound that invites you in, tells you to take off your shoes and sounds ‘correct’ just by the virtue of having 70 people doing the same thing. A big band throws you naked out of the front door and shines a spotlight on you, encourging the neighbours to point and laugh.
I realised quickly I’d have to up my game if I was going to hang onto this gig. I dove into all the resources available to get better - books, videos, masterclasses, contacting my more experienced friends and colleagues. I was incredibly underwhelmed (not by my friends of course if they’re reading this). Books were vague and offered an arranging process that felt a bit like baking a cake, only with less delicious end results. There didn’t seem to be many comprehensive videos around and any articles I could find were to do with one-off topics. So I turned to the music and tried to get my hands on as many scores as possible - another difficult task for modern scores, especially for big band charts relevant to the studio. Other books were frustrating for someone with arranging experience as it took time to sift through the many detailed pages explaining what a C major chord is to get to the useful nuggets of info.
A few years later and I’ve been fortunate to work as an orchestrator and big band arranger in London, arranging big band charts for Disney, Montreal Jazz Festival, West End pits, TV pilots, production music companies like Loopmasters, Universal, EMI and Audio Network and a ton of other live performances around the world. I thought if there were a collection of articles explaining some of the pitfalls, terminology and good practices of big band writing, I could save some unwitting arranger from a cringe-worthy session like mine.
I intend for these articles to be as hopefully somewhat comprehensive as the format allows, while acting as a quick-start guide to busy, experienced composers, orchestrators and arrangers to get them up to speed on arranging and notating for big band effectively.
I’d recommend going through the articles in order for them to make the most sense, but dipping in and out should also work. Of course, it’s such a subjective, interpretive craft that I’m not going to pretend to hold all the answers - I’m still learning on every gig - but if this collection of experiences helps someone get their jazz arranging chops together, even by a small amount, it will have done its job.
PERSONNEL
This entire series has come out at 55’000+ words, 320+ notated examples and 150+ audio examples. I couldn’t have done it without my friends and colleagues for their time and talent when recording the examples. I’m a bassist by training, but am also a saxophonist of considerable mediocrity so also recorded the sax parts to save any of my friends dealing with such a crazy volume of examples and revisions. I apologise in advance for any discrepencies in tuning and general lack of taste.
