Brand-new Jazz Ensemble charts!

Hot off the presses!

Here’s a fantastic treatment of Vince Guaraldi’s beloved Christmas Time is Here (from Charlie Brown Christmas). It is scored to feature your flugelhorn soloist, but I've made it easy to feature anyone, whether that’s on saxophone, trombone, C instrument, or vocals (with the lyrics)!  

Clambake is a classic up-tempo tenor battle with smokin’ a cappella sax section choruses a la Maynard’s Cruisin’ for a Bluesin’. And the whole thing sits on top of the always-catchy Bo-Diddley beat. And, in case your second tenor player isn’t quite battle-ready, you can feature your lead alto player instead.

Dream Big is a grandiose-yet-concise composition. It’s built on lyrical melodic themes, an uncommon time signature, several mood changes, and a dynamic narrative arc that culminates in triumphant celebration. All this and it’s still swinging!

Feature your pianist in grand fashion on this lovely interpretation of Wonderful Tonight. I've leaned into the warm nature of Eric Clapton’s gem with rich harmonies and lush scoring throughout the winds.

Giddyup in the Royal Albert Hall

The Devon Youth Jazz Orchestra had this excellent performance of Giddyup! at the BBC Proms.

They’re directed by an excellent musician-educator Graham Dutton. Great work, gang!

Sausage-making: How I Wrote the Underscore for a Book Trailer

I was commissioned to compose underscore music for a picture book trailer.

As you’ll see below, a book trailer typically shows some illustrations from a book while a narrator gives a brief overview of the text. The underscore is the background music under the narration.

Here’s the finished product for this assignment:

By the way, did I mention that my wife Rebecca E. Hirsch is the author of this amazing book? (She is so inspiring to me in so many ways).

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If you’re curious as to how Rebecca and I made this book trailer, read on. Here’s how the process looked from the composer’s standpoint.

1) Book immersion

Seated at the keyboard piano in my music room, I read the book and immersed myself in the feeling of the text and illustrations.

2) Develop a few different themes

Using my phone’s voice memo app, I recorded myself improvising 3 different themes. I would then send these to Rebecca (the author) so she could decide which one seemed to create the mood she wanted for the trailer.

Here’s what I was thinking when I came up with each theme:

1b: Gentle twinkling of stars, space, sweet innocence of a child.

2: More motion than the first, but also with space and a warm feeling.

3: This one was a little more generic and didn’t really seem tied to the feeling of the book, though it does use a couple of the motifs heard in 1b.

(My instinct was that offering a ‘wrong’ option would help the other ones seem more ‘right’).

3) Author chooses the theme she likes and sends any feedback

Rebecca chose theme 1b, which was also my favorite (though, I didn’t reveal this to her until after she decided).

4) Flesh out theme to full length.

By this point, Rebecca had made a rough draft of her slides and narration in iMovie. As it turns out, she timed her slides to go with shifts in the music, like when the owl appears in sync with the musical color change. It was truly a two-way collaboration.

To flesh out the music, I improvised while viewing her iMovie draft to make the music support and complement the full narration. (I watched the video on an iPad resting on my piano keyboard’s sheet music holder). When I felt like I had it down—and could play all the way through with out messing up—I made a ‘good’ recording. (This was important, because my piano-performance chops are quite limited. Trust me on this).

To get a clean recording I plugged my keyboard into an audio interface using two speaker cables (one each for the left and right channels). The audio interface sent the signal into GarageBand on my computer.

5) Finalize the A/V

We imported the final audio recording into iMovie and reduced the volume of the music during the narration. Rebecca did some final tweaking of the video and narration timing to make everything fit together seamlessly.

6) Notes:

• I didn’t notate the music, as there was no need. It was easier for me to remember where my fingers were supposed to go, than to take the time to notate and then practice the notated music. (See note above inre my limited piano chops).

• It was fun!

• Here’s the final audio at full volume:

Now go get a copy of this book for your favorite kid!

Food Coma live

One of my newer jazz ensemble pieces is a Grade 2 jam called Food Coma.

Dig Caleb Chapman’s Crescent Superband with a spot-on interpretation. This was the premier performance of Food Coma at the 2020 JEN Conference in New Orleans.

The ending is must-see-TV.

Yuletide update

Three months ago I wrote about new saxophone music in the works.

Since then the music has been edited, revised and engraved; a graphic designer has designed the cover; the text pages have been written and typeset; demo recordings have been made; and a local print-shop is all ready to print the first batch of books.

Yuletide Improvisations is a book of fifteen beloved Christmas and Chanukah songs reimagined.

Here are final-versions of two of the hand-written sketches shown in the original post.

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New music in the works

I do the crossword in pen, but I write music in pencil.

Here are some draft sketches of new music I have in the works: a twelve-song collection of Yuletide Improvisations for unaccompanied saxophone. (Estimated publication: late summer/fall 2021)

I’m sharing these snapshots simply to show that music doesn’t come out (of my brain) fully formed. It’s a process that involves capturing an initial idea, then revisiting it over the following days to slice, dice, nip, and tuck into a nice whole. Of course, there’s also simply tossing things out that are just not making it.

Click the thumbnails below to view.

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Václav's on C Melody

Dig this: Spanish concert saxophonist David Hernando Vitores recently recorded this video of my composition Václav’s Dream.

Interestingly, he performed on the less-common C Melody saxophone, which looks like an overgrown alto, but sounds more like a tenor.

His interpretation is wonderful and has a lovely mournful quality to it. Bravo, David!

Composer: Rick Hirsch.C Melody saxophone: David Hernando Vitores.HARIA Proyect.Václav, incidentally, is from that part of Eastern Europe whuere the folk musi...

Trio improvisation

A few years ago I spent a day experimenting with the Acapella app. I ended up improvising three one-minute saxophone trios.

Here’s the first one, a sweet and tuneful little theme:

Saxophonist Rick Hirsch improvising a sweet little 3-part song on tenor saxophone. I did this in late 2016 as a gift for family friend who, among other thing...