Low Eh!

I recently reharmonized and arranged the jazz standard, East Of The Sun (And West Of The Moon), for a quartet performance, and I want to expand it for the Prime Rib Big Band. I thought that it might be interesting to share my process, and it may be helpful to my arranging journey to distill my thoughts through the blog.

I’ll be sharing my process on –

1. Building the lead sheet with my reharmonization.
2. Preparing the lead sheet arrangement.
3. Which instruments carry the melody, and where.
4. Creating the accompanying parts, and backgrounds.
5. Composing and harmonizing a shout chorus.
6. The final arrangement.

The blog will be released over several posts, the arrangement will be finished, and performed by the band by the final post. I hope to be able to add a video with the band performing the arrangement.

Here’s the initial reharmonisation.

In the reharmonization, I use slash chords for the first four bars of the A sections. I have a bass line in mind – you’ll see it in the next post about the quartet arrangement.

When I get to the B section, I use a secondary dominant (C#7 – V7 of F#m7) – once again for arranging purposes. There’s a call and response between the melody and rhythm section.

In the last four bars of B, and the end of the C section, I’ve added Coltrane changes (with extensions to make the melody fit), and added Tadd Dameron’s turnaround from Lady Bird. With the turnaround, I substituted an AMaj7 where there would normally be an EbMaj7, using a tritone substitution in the group of parallel major chords.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Jerry Bergonzi, and I love when he drops Coltrane changes through the melody as a colour change from the common chord changes. It’s something that I’ve been working on bringing into my own playing lately.