Play along trombone duets part 2

Confession time: I haven’t played a horn in over a year. From August 2020 to November 2021, my trombones sat in their cases while my wife and I went about our lives watching our child grow from an infant to a toddler through the pandemic. The “long story short” version is that I simply didn’t have the time or need to keep up practice. No gigs, no teaching, and no outside childcare for a full year. It was just us, really.

When I finally started practicing again, it was in short bursts and fits from November 2021 through early 2022. Things were still unpredictable and when your childcare isn’t reliable, nothing else will take root.

As I finally began to have more time to play again, I thought it would be a good idea to add another addition of these play along duets to my YouTube channel as an educational resource for students, as well as for me to have a project. Practicing alone in a room to get your chops back is a rather boring and arduous undertaking, so the act of recording helped me improve faster and face all the frustrating little details that I was willing to overlook before.

Here are “Eighteen Duets ” from various composers as featured in Selected Duets for Trombone or Baritone, Volume 1. Once again, I’ve recorded each duet back-to-back with panned L/R audio so that you can play along with the accompanying part using only one earbud or audio channel.

I encourage all musicians to start playing duets (sight-reading as much as possible) whenever they can. It will help your overall musicianship so much! This is why I used to always finish my private lesson sessions with a selection from this book. I hope you can do the same with these.

Play along trombone duets

These are “11 Duets for Trombone” by composer Carl Henning as featured in Selected Duets for Trombone or Baritone, Volume 1. I’ve recorded each duet back-to-back with panned L/R audio so that you can play along with the accompanying part using only one earbud.

Whenever I can, I will play through this selection of duets (and the rest of the book) with my high school private lesson students. It’s a great end-of-practice sight reading activity and one that can be re-visited each week to demonstrate each student’s progress in their abilities. I wholeheartedly believe they should be learned and enjoyed by all beginning trombonists. Enjoy!

Teaching a class: some thoughts

So my big news this month is that I'll be teaching a new course that I developed with a colleague at the Moores School of Music. You can read all about it at the new UHjazz.com site. In the process of gathering and organizing information to teach people how to listen to (and appreciate) jazz music, I've discovered a couple things and formed opinions that I did not previously hold. In other words, I really need to unload my brain.

Assembling a YouTube playlist

As part of the course, I've decided to implement a journal for students to record their listening habits and tastes as a means of developing their "active listening" skills. To help with this, I've started to build a YouTube playlist for each student to remotely access and write about. (Remember less than 10 years ago when copying CDs for playlists could be such a hassle?) In a recent post by another Houston jazz artist/advocate, I noticed the phrase, "Isn’t it funny...how YouTube has become the world’s largest free music jukebox?" This is so true, and yet, I'm a little apprehensive about the notion of assembling a large playlist of videos to obligate students to write about.

First:

Should I program their listening selections? They will already be responsible for knowing a handful of truly great landmark recordings for exams. Is it smart that I should try to continue to cram this stuff down their throats? Would that give me or the student a more honest depiction of their habits and observations? At first, I thought that maybe I should instead open up the listening journal to all musical styles, but this seems counter-productive. After all, I'll need to be reading these entries and I don't really need to read 20+ entries on hip-hop or country music or whatever else. Instead, I'll just try to include as much significant jazz music (and jazz-based music) that can be had on YouTube, whatever I feel will be relevant to the course. I just hope it doesn't discourage anyone from exploring a new realm of music, something I consider to be the most exciting aspect of listening.

Second:

YouTube has those darn user comments. Do we really need to be subjected to some anonymous person's pretentious and/or racist remarks on ANYTHING? I just read a great CNN article on this. My vote? Eliminate these completely from YouTube.

Future of Jazz?

Here's another good read on the future of jazz, or better yet: jazz today. I'm really looking closely at the history of jazz music in the United States, its cultural impact and its significance. I'll have to be teaching this to people who I assume will have had little to no encounters with the music in their past, and if they did, it was probably unpleasant. Because of this, I've been reassessing all those big artistic questions that need to be answered in order to explain and defend anything deemed "relevant" or "important". I have no problem doing this and I think it's something that a lot of artists should do more often, especially in the 21st century. (For instance: "cool" ≠ "art")

I have yet to watch Icons Among Us, but I speculate that it's a worthwhile documentary that appeals to both the jazz enthusiast as well as the newbie without being shackled by the pre-conceived notions of historical conventions of the art form. And really, that's my goal for this course. I want new people to appreciate a music that has played a crucial role in the development of our country, in addition to understanding why it's still significant and NOT dead. While you must acknowledge the history and the classics, you cannot also lose sight of the present and future.

I just hope this works. (crossing fingers)

The Remington warm-up for jazz band

(Updated August 2020) Greetings, jazz band director. I imagine your Google search has delivered you here in your pursuit to see how you can apply this classic band exercise to your jazz ensemble’s warm-up.

Whether or not this your first time directing a jazz ensemble, I believe I can help you with a Remington Exercise in four variations using “jazz chords” and designed to instruct students on the uses and common practices of harmony in a jazz setting. This is a workout for the rhythm section as well as the horns.

Hey! Did this help you out? Well, then maybe you'd consider leaving me a tip. Any donations are welcome and I will not collect your personal information for any marketing records. Thanks in advance!

What You Get

• Variation A: Major

• Variation B: Minor

  • These variations are great for middle/high school ensembles that are still learning the essentials of how to play and tune in a jazz setting. Every tuning note is heard within each chord’s triad. these variations stay in one key signature and use standard chord progressions that each last one measure apiece. Nothing tricky here!

• Variation C: Functional harmony

  • This gets a little more complicated for your rhythm section. Variation C introduces a slew of basic chord progressions that they will see in jazz standards, big band and most modern jazz tunes. This includes the ii-V-I progression in major and minor keys, the IV-VII-I progression, the use of a secondary dominant (I-II7), some ii-V-I sequences, a deceptive cadence from major to minor, and some diminished chords. Additionally, the tuning notes begin to rely on 4th, 6th abd 7th of some chords.

• Variation D: Advanced functional harmony

  • Everything and the kitchen sink! The harmony moves quickly here (usually in two beats) and will give your rhythm section a headache trying to keep up. There are several quick modulations and extended voicings against the tuning notes. Good luck!

How to Use This Exercise

1. Use it “as-is” and focus on primarily on tuning and blending with your rhythm section playing along!

2. Use an isolated four-beat rhythm to play on each written tuning note. This can help work on your band’s articulations. This can also be done in different styles—not just a 4/4 swing feel.

3. Make this a voice-leading exercise. Have your students write a sequence (1-2-3-5, etc) to be modulated and played on each chord/starting note. This is similar to the Patterns for Jazz approach and works great for Variations A & B.

4. Have chord players write their own voicings over written notes (using closed harmony for pianists). This is fun to teach the essentials of voicings and “box in” harmony players by limiting their choices.

5. Similarly, have younger bassists write out their own walking bass lines. Make sure that they are using notes from the actual chord on beats 1 and 3. Add depth by asking for a more vertical or horizontal line.

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Original post from 2010:

If you're a wind player, particularly a brass player (and ESPECIALLY a trombone player!), then you are probably aware of the Remington warm-up method.  It's probably the most used warm-up method and tuning exercise for band students.  But, just in case you are NOT aware of this method: the idea began with Emory Remington trying to teach his trombone students how to play 1) in tune, 2) with good sound and 3) with a good legato articulation.  Eventually, he developed this exercise (expanded and published by Donald Hunsberger): [slideshare id=1798433&doc=theremingtonwarmupstudies-090801081739-phpapp01&type=d]

Simple, eh?  That's why it's used so often.  The idea is that by limiting the notes to those on the same harmonic partial, the trombone student focuses solely on articulation, sound and slide positioning (tuning).  Because it's an incremental exercise utilizing descending half-steps, it should be easy for a student to hear and understand when each interval is in or out of tune.  At the University of Houston Moores School of Music, the wind ensemble program uses a similar warm-up based on the descending F major scale, a method popularized, and probably initiated by, Director Emeritus (and Texas band legend) Eddie Green.

That being said, you can imagine my challenge directing a bunch of wind ensemble students for their first outing in a jazz ensemble.  In wind band, these students usually only encounter the major, minor and diminished chords; so they're only used to hearing the I-3-5 and sometimes 7 or 9 chord tones.  My goal was to get 15 horn players to start hearing the extended jazz harmonies that rely on 7-9-11-13 chord tones and their varying alterations.  So as a transitional tool, I wrote out the Remington warm-up harmonized in a jazz context.  It's my gift to you, the jazz band directors of the world:

Jazz Remington Warmup

It has proven to be quite useful.  It not only gets the students to hear extended harmony, but it also allows the the rhythm section to participate and work on getting around the keys.  I tried to keep the exercise simple, with each written note occupying only a 1-3-4-5-7-9 chord tone.  This way, it's not too hard a stretch for the horn players to hear how the chord progression relates to the written "melody".  It's also endlessly variable:

• The exercise can be re-harmonized infinitely and there are numerous substitutions for the chords written here (but I do stress that each variation maintain a chord progression rather than unrelated chords back to back)

• Sometimes I would have the lower instruments play the roots to even out the balance of 15 horn players to 4 rhythm section players

• I would often substitute a rhythmic idea for the whole note to work on articulation, style and phrasing with the horns

• It's also great for music theory pop quizzes: "What chordal tone are we on now? How does this chord progression function?"

I hope this helps, and best of luck to anyone who uses this exercise!