Practice Recap: 8 March 2010

Great job last night! I think we only have a few key issues remaining with some of the charts. I'll go through them one by one, and of course we didn't work "In the Stone" last night, but here's what-is-up with the rest of them.

"Ride the Wind" - keeping the motion during the solo section seems to be the most difficult part. Right now we're barreling through it to get through it and keep the piece moving, but there has to be a way, either structurally or otherwise to get that to push the tempo as much as the rest of the piece does.

"Samba Ti Kaye" - it's all intonation and accuracy from here on out. The dynamics were much improved last night as well as the articulations. And of course figuring precisely how we're going to do the ending.

"The First Circle" - tacking on the first six bars and running it to the end. Listen carefully to the recording. Clean individual parts. In the meantime, we have to devote practice to balancing the whole parts and working in the clapping section at the beginning, which we did a little bit of last night. The coordination of this piece is the ultimate key for surviving it.

"Malaguena" - This is really getting sharp. I am going to make a post about which measures specifically the mellophoniums have the melody, and then if you want to follow your parts to the audio recordings on facebook or the Stan Kenton video recordings from the 60's try to listen in on what they're doing. It's more difficult to make that part stand out as they are actual french horns and not mellophoniums so their bells are facing back towards the trumpets. We have to compensate for that and be conscientious. There's parts where they're unison with everyone (ex. swing section) but there are also parts (especially near the beginning) we're they're constantly trading eighth-note, arpeggiated runs and the piece would really rock if that comes out. Otherwise, great job on control and dynamics, and trumpets were much more on pitch for those fanfares that we worked last week. This is quite the closer.

I'll be posting about the ideas for the summer charts next including the ones that were discussed after practice last night by the nine of us or so who continued to chill. We'll be spending some of next week and time throughout this week seeing how much of the band prefers certain charts over others.