Rockus Nachas (2011)
Genre: Big Band Jazz
Some of my music has evolved over time, interrupted by long stretches of non-musical, life responsibilities. This song is a classic example.
It started out as a short ditty called “David’s Theme,” named for my parents’ first grandchild. When we visited Michigan in 1987 to meet him for the first time, it was a joyous event for the whole family. On the road trip home we stopped in Cleveland to see my wife’s sister, who happened to have an upright piano in her basement. Flush with excitement at meeting my new nephew, I noodled an upbeat motif on the piano and then (mostly) forgot about it.
Seventeen years later (!) Apple introduced the first iteration of GarageBand and I was eager to learn the new software. I bought a couple of how-to manuals, notably MacAddict Guide to Making Music with GarageBand, coauthored by local Denver audio engineer, Jay Shaffer. In 2005, Shaffer offered a GarageBand course through Red Rocks Community College and fortunately it met after school hours, so I was able to enroll. It was my first real experience with a digital audio workstation (DAW). Two projects came out of that class: the first recording of “Smart Bomb” and the first instrumental arrangement of “David’s Theme,” which had been lying dormant for all those years. For both songs, I played all the “instruments” on my Roland D-20 keyboard.
By 2011, (six years later) I had taken four weekend jazz courses through Gift of Jazz in Denver, three from composer Tyler Gilmore. These composition classes generated three pieces of music: “Effigies of Angels” (Big Band Arranging), “Premonition of the Hunter Gracchus” (String Quartet Writing), “Little Moon,” a re-harmonized jazz version of Antonín Dvořák’s aria “Song to the Moon” from the opera Rusalka (Vocal Jazz). The fourth class Tyler offered was a return to his own forte: big band writing. It would be the last class he taught before he headed off for graduate studies at Eastman School of Music.
I had had one earlier opportunity to learn big band arranging, but that instruction was also interrupted. In the early 1970s, long before the Internet and on-line classes, Berklee School of Music offered a correspondence course on part writing. They would mail me a booklet of lessons, I completed the exercises, and sent them back to Boston to have my work evaluated by one of the reviewers there. My instructor was Hal Grossman, who provided encouraging corrections and feedback. Unfortunately, of the 25 lessons offered, I only completed 12 before life intruded.
As a result, writing for a big band, with its 16+ different instrument charts, still presented a challenge for a novice like me. When you introduce transposing brass instruments and expect them to play nicely (i.e., harmonize) with one another, you’ve just complicated your life exponentially. It’s always helpful to have a good teacher and Tyler Gilmore was the man of the hour.
He had won the 2009 ASCAP/Columbia College Commission in Honor of Hank Jones, followed by the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer’s Award in three consecutive years beginning in 2008. At that time he had also recorded two albums with his ensemble named for the intersection of the old Dazzle building, Ninth and Lincoln.
Tyler introduced us to the textbook Jazz Arranging Techniques from Quartet to Big Band by Gary Lindsay, a practical (and comprehensive!) textbook on jazz arranging. It’s an excellent text for a college-level semester or yearlong jazz arranging course; and we tried to take it all in during the eight sessions of weekend classes at Dazzle (!). It was dense and way over my head, but still I plodded along, following the adage “fake it till you make it.”
Composing and arranging are two different skills. I had my hands full just trying to employ several techniques from the jazz arranging book, so I decided I shouldn’t complicate my life by trying to write a whole new piece. I opted to rework an earlier song (“David’s Theme”) under a new title: “Rockus Nachas.”
If you are familiar with Spanish, you may know that the word “nachas” is slang for butt cheeks, which probably explains the humorous asides from the musicians when they first read the parts sitting on their music stands. Here’s where attention to ethnic nuance is important. In Yiddish, the term “nachas” has a very different meaning. “Nachas” is what makes you “kvell”: it’s the deep feeling of pride and joy at the achievements of loved ones. It seemed to fit nicely with the familial love I first felt for my baby nephew. On the other hand, the earlier GarageBand recording of “David’s Theme” was rockin’, so “Rockus Nachas” it was.
The Gift of Jazz class I took that session was called “Big Band in the 21st Century.” Typically, these classes had an afternoon rehearsal before the show where the musicians would read through our pieces, each composition receiving approximately 20 minutes for read-through, questions and clarifications, and special attention to tricky parts. Considering the short rehearsal time, it was always a wonder to me that things came off as well as they did. These guys are experts, amazing at what they do.
However, in the case of “Rockus Nachas,” there were a few extraneous factors that stood in the way of perfection. First, I was dealing with some 16 different musicians, each with their own parts, and I couldn’t guarantee that my lead sheets were absolutely flawless. Second, I wanted the interplay of flute and clarinet for the beginning and end of the piece and these were not usual instruments for modern big band. There were musicians on hand who could play them, but they weren’t their main axes, so there were a lot of miscues and mistakes. Third, that summer our family took another road trip to Michigan to see my folks. I timed it so we would be home from the 19-hour (!) drive in time for the evening concert, but I was not able to attend the rehearsal in the afternoon when I could have clarified any issues in my score.
Overall, I was thrilled with certain aspects of this live performance. On the down side, the flute and clarinet interludes were a serious disappointment. I decided to scrap the live intro and outro from the audio track completely and substituted MIDI instruments generated by Sibelius, my notation software. If you listen carefully to the track, you can hear where the artifice ends and the actual live band begins. It’s not a perfect solution, but it salvaged an otherwise great performance.
The “Gift of Jazz Orchestra” performed my big band arrangement of “Rockus Nachas” on the evening of Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at the old Dazzle building at Ninth and Lincoln. It featured solos by outstanding local musicians, Greg Tanner Harris (now Dr. Harris) on vibes, Matt Fuller on guitar [I particularly loved the interplay of those two instruments], Pete Lewis (saxophonist, and co-founder/owner of Muse Performance Space in Lafayette, Colorado). Brad Goode (jazz faculty at the University of Colorado) elevated the piece beyond the actual notes on the page with his stunning trumpet solo in the final shout chorus. My gratitude to all the talented musicians involved.