Brassbones the movie

If you thought the last batch of video downloads for Christian Lindberg were exciting and crazy, wait till you download the trailer for his spaghetti western!!!

A few years ago Lindberg in collaboration with Håkan Hardenberger, Trombone Unit 2000 and other extremely talented Swedish brass players, were playing a suite of pieces by Fredrik Högberg based around a story about "Kit Bones - the fastest slide in the West". Well now they have turned this bit of stage theatre into a 20 minute professional film in widescreen no-less!

Chrissie and Håkan are cast as outlaws who strut around what looks like the set to a Clint Eastwood movie, battling in crazy glissando shootouts with other hotshot brass players including trumpeter Ole Edvard Antonsen and trombonist Jonas Bylund. Will Lindberg win the loose girl at the saloon? Who knows - the DVD is due out soon apparently, but you can watch the trailor for free here:

Quicktime movie (12.7 MB) recommended for Mac
Windows Media (14.8 MB) recommended for Windows

More about Brassbones - the movie
Brassbones' homepage (in Swedish...)

Thoughts from South Carolina

It isn't the one who can play the loudest who will win the audition.
It's the one who sounds the most comfortable playing loud.

Jay Friedman

This was noted by Brad Edwards who teaches trombone at the University of South Carolina. He's recently made a nice little website and a blog which he's been updating the past few weeks with interesting thoughts. A good read, so I hope he keeps it up. Check out the Mona Lisa smile on his publicity shot too!

"A brief torture for unaccompanied trombone"

He only left the Royal Academy this summer, but London-based trombonist Matt Harrison is impressing many with his big sound and sharp technique. Last year he performed the torturous Keren for solo trombone by Xenakis at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and has quickly built up a CV that includes the likes of the Halle Orchestra and Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.

So if you are around London tomorrow, see if you can make it to a concert where he'll be performing the ridiculous (and great fun) Doolallynastics by Brian Lynn. It's a real show-piece requiring theatrics, oodles of technique and a real sense of humour, originally crafted with John Kenny in mind. Matt will be performing it in a concert of music along the theme "Ravel, Stravinsky and all that Jazz", with the Sounds Underground Ensemble, who definitely seem up and coming.

I'll be there and will ensure Matt follows the directions at the end of the Lynn piece "Now drink seven pints!"

Ravel, Stravinsky and all that Jazz
Thursday 27 October 2005, 19.00

Bishopsgate Institiute, London EC2M

London's freshest new music ensemble presents a lively evening of jazz-inspired works by some of the world's best loved classical masters.

The Sounds Underground Ensemble recreates the heady ferment of the early 20th Century, when the crazy rhythms and catchy tunes of dance hall jazz exploded onto the musical scene. Classical music would never be the same again.

Ravel's dazzling string quartet takes us on a thrilling journey, conjuring up Impressionist Paris and exotic Japanese sonorities, and the irresistable spring of American Jazz. The young Leonard Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata, performed here in an exciting orchestral arrangement, contains all the zest and drama of hils later hit West Side Story. And from the opening bars of Stravinsky's concert suite, A Soldier's Tale, we hear the up-beat and off-beat energy of ragtime and Dixieland jazz.

So banish those autumn blues and join the Sounds Underground Ensemble for an evening of unforgettable music-making


Leonard Bernstein Clarinet Sonata (orch. Ramin)
Maurice Ravel String Quartet in F major
Bryan Lynn Doolallynastics for Solo Trombone
Igor Stravinsky A Soldier's Tale

Matt Harrison Trombone
Sounds Underground Ensemble
Hazel Cropper Conductor

Music colleges?

As a chief breadwinning occupation, orchestral employment is barely viable.

Commenting on the recent gloomy results of the Musicians Union pay survey, Norman Lebrecht suggests biting the bullet and closing some of the specialist music colleges.

He describes society's decline of interest in hearing orchestras and says musicians should stop whinging about pay and start developing other skills. Rather than having 10 British conservatoires providing training that is purely focussed on becoming a full-time performer, he suggests just having two or three national centres of excellence, and make the rest run courses in broader, liberal arts. He's talking about a more rounded education, and praises Trinity College musicians' involvement with contemporary dance and a digital arts facility.

I'm not sure I agree totally with Norman Lebrecht - he has carved a profitable niche in broadcasting doom and gloom about our industry. But perhaps there is a bitter pill we need to swallow sooner or later. The question remains: at a time when one or two trombone jobs come up every year here, why do we have a national intake of more than twenty bright-eyed trombone hopefuls, onto courses narrowly focussed on little more than playing in an orchestra?

Mind you, music education is changing under the feet of music colleges. If you look at instrument lessons in schools, the trend seems to be towards learning transferable skills. I get the impression that you spend much less time nowadays learning Bach and Mozart and more time doing clapping games, improvising, studing non-classical music, self-reflecting, etc. and I worry that these extras can swamp the heart of music.

If we are not careful, all music colleges will no longer have any time for inspiring people with Bach and Mozart because all the funding will be for 'creative projects'. Is there much value in doing workshops with an aboriginal nose-flute to improvise a rain dance, compared to expert tuition in bringing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto to life? I'm not saying don't do these creative projects - they often have useful value, I'm not convinced they can survive without a healthy core of traditional music training.

So maybe it would be valuable making a few of the music colleges into 'centres of excellence' and protecting their focus on music performance. Ring-fence their core activities, ensuring funding for standard lessons, ensembles and orchestral coaching. And make sure that not all of our next generation of stars get bogged down in transferrable skills workshops.

(Lebrecht article was from the Evening Standard, 14th Sept 2005)

Pyatt on off-days

Even the best horn players will have days when they will pick up their instrument and it just doesn't work well. One day it's dreadful; the next day it's great. The scary thing is that you've got no real understanding of why this happens.

These words from David Pyatt (from a recent LSO programme) may be comforting for us mere mortals, but I suspect that a 'dreadful' day for him is still going to be very good!

David Pyatt is a real star horn player - there is no doubt about it. Check out the score for Shostakovich 8 and there is a very simple eight bar phrase for solo horn accompanied by strings, but Pyatt shaped it so beautifully last week. It was a really special moment, seemingly from nowhere. He's yet another reason to go and hear the LSO while they are on this form.

With the British Horn Society anniversary festival going on all this weekend in the Guildhall, and Pyatt playing the solo first horn part in Britten's Nocturne in the Barbican next door tonight, horn players are spoilt for choice today. Or maybe having been to two and a half days of horn masterclasses and concerts, the festival goers will be a bit horned-out by tonight...

Lessons from Claude E. Gordon

As a young player I was happy and never worried until I started to take lessons

wrote Claude E. Gordon, who went on to become one of the best dance band trumpet soloists in Hollywood in the 1950's. I've been enjoying reading about this legend in some articles by Scott Schwartz in the Brass Herald.

Apparently in 1936, aged 19 he became frustrated with his cornet lessons with his local professional teacher, that he decided to take his new wife Glenny to California and continue his studies with a famous cornet/trumpet player and teacher.

We left everything and went to Los Angeles and applied for lessons with Herbert L. Clarke. We had no money. Many nights we slept in the car. We ate oatmeal three times a day and went hungry most of the time.

His first lesson with Clarke was memorable:

He taught me very forcefully - 'Will you put some air through that Horn!!!' He then knocked me flat. When I got back on my feet, he knocked me down, all around the large room where he taught. When he finally stopped he shouted: 'Now that's the way you play that thing and don't you forget it!!!'

And I thought my teachers were strict!

Norwegian trombonist scoops British prize

Congratulations to Runar Valheim Vaernes, Norwegian trombonist who won the "best soloist" prize at this weekend's National Brass Band Championships in London. The twenty best British bands competed for the most-sought title, National Champions, and the Manchester-based Leyland Band came away victorious, with a performance featuring the lad from Stavanger.

The set work for the bands was a new piece from John Pickard called Eden. The piece has solos for euphonium and cornet, representing Adam and Eve, but the most taxing extended solo is taken by the trombone representing the snake. Most trombonists of the day seemed to get into the ferocious start to the solo, and several brought out the expressive and seductive part, but of the bands I listened to (admittedly only 9 of the 20), Runar was the only one who really nailed the fast jazz section. He oozed panache, projected it very convincingly over the fast swing of the band, and was one of the few who actually went for the high E - more than half of the competitors mimed while it was put in by a flugel or horn!

Runar was drafted in to fill a space in the band, and this lad, who normally plays for the excellent Stavanger Band must have given Leyland the edge in a tight field to win the competition overall too. More of the story is on barsrest.

Once upon a Thein

Yesterday, well known instrument makers, the Thein brothers, were in London and I went to find out more. They have been making trombones for several years now and seem to be getting some good traction in Europe, with people like Ben van Dijk playing their instruments. They seem particularly successful with their contrabass trombone which I understand their model is "the one" everyone is buying across the world.

In the opulent surroundings of the Crush Room at the Royal Opera House, Max and Heinrich Thein displayed their range of trombones and several of the Covent Garden players and about a dozen students from the Royal Academy and Guildhall came to give them a try.

I tried several of their tenor options and was intrigued to compare them with my trusty Elkhart Conn 88h. These hand-made instruments certainly felt carefully designed - the tone, response and tuning was noticeably more even than my Conn from note to note. In fact this is something I've noticed in the Rath, Shires and Edwards instruments too - you can definitely tell with these expensive custom instruments, compared to the Conn/Bach/Yamaha standards. The sound of the Theins was rather beautiful and unique - there are some colours in there that you just don't get on my Conn or old Yamaha - I quite enjoyed going through Tuba Mirum.

But the problem for me was that the sound wasn't flexible enough for me - perhaps this would come with time, but when I tried to make a bigger or lighter sound, the timbre didn't change much. Mind you, the Edwards don't much either. There just seemed fewer colours in the palette than my Conn or old Yamaha 682B which I feel has an even better palette. Mind you, with their heavier bells, the Thein had a great big Mahler 3 solo, handy I imagine for when faced with a demanding conductor in a big uncompromising hall, when my colourful Conn would be breaking up - in my hands at least.

What did take my fancy though was their alto trombone, which just felt better made than several of the ones I've played. My Yamaha is representative of the previous generation of altos in that it is not quite in tune with itself and not wonderfully even in feel. Instrument manufacturers sell a fraction of the quantity of altos compared to tenor and bass instruments, so you can understand if the same quantity of design work as been put into them. But the Thein is a really nice instrument. Again the sound was distinctive, but would probably blend better well with a Thein tenor, and fine with a Conn 88h. Although I personally prefer the lighter sound the Yamaha and Laetsch altos give, which blend better in a section with a medium bore tenor.

I also had the chance to try their "German-style" alto and tenor, which were designed in conjunction with Jay Friedman to be more authentic for the old repertoire. Really interesting stuff and a few blows on these instruments taught me a graet deal about how to sound in Bruckner straight away. They are hard work, don't easily play loud or soft, don't have such a solid 'centre' as a modern instrument, and everything feels and plays slightly fuzzy/veiled. I'd love to give them a run-out in a Mozart Req!

I had to leave the session early, but my friends who did stay tell me much fun was had going through quartets and sextets on these fine instruments, in partnership with the fine ROH players.

Benny Sluchin in London

Pierre Boulez knows a thing or two about contemporary music, and he chose Benny Sluchin to be the trombonist in his famous Ensemble Intercontemporain. He's recorded a host of contemporary repertoire including the Berio, Cage, etc as well as much of his native French music which is all nicely phrased with a traditional soft French sound.

Well he's making a rare trip to London next March, so now is a good time to put the date of his recital in your diary. Apparently he'll be playing Faure, Chopin and Jonathan Harvey, in his "Benny Sluchin trio" - trombone with piano and voice.

Sunday 26th March 2006, 7.30pm
Shaw Theatre, 100 Euston Road, London
Tickets £15, concessions £10
Box office 0870 0332600
www.theshawtheatre.co.uk

Conchobar calendar c***-up

The Guildhall School of Music seems intent in getting zero audience for it's brass ensemble showcase this term, by leaving the concert off their events calendar. So if you see this and come along, you might be the only one in the audience.

But it might well be worth it. Eric Crees is conducting his recent interesting piece for large brass ensemble called The Birth of Conchobar (which he conducted with the ROH brass in the summer), as well as Gunther Schuller's slightly stodgy but classic Symphony for Brass and Percussion.

Thursday 13th October 2005
Great Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London
1.05pm

Vegetable orchestra

You thought that the trombone was a silly instrument, what with it's funny changing shape, razzy tone and the way it attracts beards? Well I've been led to believe that there is a whole orchestra of sillier ones. In Germany no less.

The first vienna vegetable orchestra contains 8 musicians, 1 cook & 1 sound technician. Instruments include the tomato, the cucumberophone and a carrot recorder.

If you were worried that trombone ensembles playing The Simpsons was a bad direction for music, then here's something to take your mind off it completely - the vegetable orchestra is entirely serious!!

Their next concerts are on 27/28th October 2005 in Rome, so if any readers are in the area and can cope with the surreality of it all, can they email me with a concert review, please?!

Trombones rise in popularity

This weekend I went to the British Trombone Society East trombone day at Oundle School, and so did more than 50 trombonists, old and young. It was quite astounding how many of these keen souls turned up, from as far as Oxford, London, Cornwall, Manchester and the East Coast. I think these days are getting more popular, and what with Diss-Located Bones, Derrick Parker' octet in Birmingham and Ed Solomon's Trombonanza in London, I think that trombone ensembles are getting their act together and are becoming properly established.

In the past five years the American music schools in particular have been fostering a good quantity of music for 8 or more trombones. There are a few original gems of the repertoire - somewhat highlighted by the New Trombone Collective recordings - and lots of decent cheesey arrangements.

But back to Oundle - it was a pretty special day. We had more than 2 hours during the day playing as a massed ensemble - and I think this is a key element that a lot of trombone days forget. Too often you get warmed up with a blow through the finale from Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, and then it's 10.30am and suddenly you have to sit quietly and spend the rest of the day listening to the professionals. Which is nice, but not balanced.

In an inventive move, the organiser Ben Bouzan had invited the National Youth Orchestra trombone section to come and play, coached by Chris Houlding. They performed Bruckner Equale and excerpts from the Planets with a super-smooth technique and lots of style. Really well drilled stuff - these guys have a good future. Chris had a Q & A session, and the questions from the audience focussed on the demographies of the students.

More innovation followed, with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra trombone section playing some Bone Structure charts with drums (the rest of the rhythm section weren't available). Led by Alastair White, they sounded very groovy. Rocking stuff, and I found out that the Bone Structure arrangements (5 trombones and rhythm) are all available from Stanza Music for a tenner each - which sounds like an easy way to get a similar group off the ground. Assuming you have a couple of amazing players like Alastair White, Mark Nightingale or Richard Edwards - they are not easy!

I was playing with the group Diss-Located Bones, based in Diss (geddit?!). Check out the pictures of us playing here.

In the breaks there was time to browse the new pieces from Warwick Music - they really are a jewel in the trombone world with their relentless capacity for publishing great music and reselling good music from America.

I also had a go on a new alto trombone from John Packer. I understand is just less than £150, yet it felt pretty solid and in tune to me. Not quite the floaty sound I get from my Yamaha, or the clear, rich sound that the Conns have, but for a fraction of the price you can't go wrong. There seems to be several cheap models around now - using alto as a beginner instrument for kids under 11 seems to be a very attractive option now.

With so much talent having already played, and the general energy levels wearing thin, it's seemed like the day's finale act would had a tough time. But all fears were disarmed by Bones Apart, who bounced onto stage with their trademark enthusiasm and proceeded to stun the audience with an astoundingly musical and virtuosic performance of Toccata and Fugue in D minor. All the twiddly bits where not only precise, but were full of style, and the audience were left in no doubt that the limits of music for four trombones were nowhere in evidence with these talented ladies. They continued to impress with Locus Iste and some more great arrangements, this time from John Challis, before finishing with Lorna's arrangment of the finale from Faust (complete with ballet dancing) and Stars and Stripes as an encore which was even more accomplished than their recording I reckon.

The good news is that Ben is organising another day at Oundle this time next year. So keep checking the BTS magazine for details!

Tuba recital in Durham

Tuba fans in the North East of England can hear Black Dyke tuba player Joseph Cook play a recital next week. In a new series of recitals at Durham University, Joe will be kicking off proceedings next Thursday with a lunchtime menu including Vaughan Williams, Penderecki, Salzedo and Gregson.

Durham University, Palace Green
Thursday 13th October, 1.10pm
Programme features music by Vaughan Williams, Penderecki, Salzedo and Gregson

Howarth in London

Brass band enthusiasts will note that a week Saturday is the National Finals in the Royal Albert Hall, and no doubt there will be a cheesy and traditional 'gala' concert that night. More serious brass music lovers should check out the concert the next day at the Cadogan Hall, the new London venue, quite near the RAH. It promises to be a much better acoustic, but more importantly the programme contains some rich pickings, without being controversial.

Gary Howarth will be concluding his five years as MD of the NYBB by performing pieces which include his less well-known Mosaic. The band will also be joined by London Brass who I've heard will perform The Fairy Round, Old English Music and Hungarian Rhapsody. There will also be music from South Asia Music Youth Orchestra, and the incoming MD Bramwell Tovey will direct the NYBB in Eric Ball’s transcription of Edward Elgar’s overture Froissart.

Sunday 16 October, 2005, 7pm
Cadogan Hall, London

National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain
With Elgar Howarth

Bramwell Tovey
Nicholas Childs
Garry Cutt
London Brass
National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain
SAMYO Orchestra

Programme:
Howarth Mosaic
Lloyd Diversions on a Bass Theme
Muldowney Rote Fahne Musik (3rd Movement)
Howarth Concerto for Tenor Horn and Brass Band (2nd Movement)
Elgar arr. Eric Ball Brass Froissart

Elgar Howarth celebrates his five year tenure as Artistic Director of The National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain with a special concert featuring The National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain, London Brass and more special guests.

Tickets:
£15, £13, £10

More info here.