Thursday, July 9, 2009

Great advice from a Colleague...

Kerry Marsh - director of vocal jazz studies at CSU Sacramento - gave me some killer feedback on my arrangement of Ellington's I'm Beginning to See the Light. My head arrangement was a submission for one day of my 30/30 Composition Project - a project that has me compose a 30-second composition each day for 30 days. I cheated a bit with that entry. I had that almost completely in the can and needed to post something that day. But, his feedback will cause me to alter it quite a bit and repost my new version. Kerry is astonishing - his groups have won the Downbeat award for best collegiate vocal jazz group for six straight years and his arrangement of Selfless, Cold and Composed (Ben Folds composition) was selected by Ben Folds to be featured on the A cappella University CD project that Ben produced. The CD contains 18 or so hand-picked performances of Ben Folds tunes as done by vocal groups affiliated with schools. It is a great project and the Sac State tune stands out on the CD as the most developed and most interesting adaptation on the disc - by a long shot.

Here is that video:

Anyway, for Kerry to take time out of his life to listen to and critique my head arrangement of Beginning to See the Light is very cool and I'm gonna work my tail off on it to show him that his time was not wasted.

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