The original soundtrack for M*A*S*H the movie (not the TV show) features some nice harmony vocals – very much sounding like 1970 folk music. For fun, I transcribed and recorded the vocal lines for harmonizing flugelhorns. Strings transcribed, guitar solo inserted, and trumpets thrown in for a musical climax.
I enjoy looking at the statistics and metrics from this blog, from time to time. I like seeing the number of visitors and the files that they download. I thought I’d publish a list of the Top 5 downloads since WordPress started measuring them in 2019.
I’m so pleased to see that the works of one of the greatest artists of our time consistently rank at 1st place. It sure looks like the trumpet players who visit this site really dig music with a groove!
I continue to record new Virtual Collabs all the time, so I continue to transcribe trumpet charts to make that possible. There’s a steady list of transcriptions in the works and they’ll be added to this blog as the recordings are finished.
Spanish “saxofonista” José Luis Santacruz invited me to join him to record a cover of Chuck Mangione’s composition The Cannonball Run Theme. José expertly transcribed the flugelhorn part for me to play, shared here with his kind permission.
Chuck Mangione composed and recorded the theme for the 1981 movie The Cannonball Run, which starred Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and a long list of others.
I recall my surprise at hearing the theme for the first time while watching the movie with several friends at my local cinema. I was about age 14 and had been listening to Chuck’s recordings day and night. I had no idea that Chuck had contributed to the movie soundtrack so I wasn’t listening for it, but when I heard his unmistakable flugelhorn sound I immediately recognized it and excitedly shared the news with my friends seated next to me. Of course, they had no idea what I was flipping out over…
In addition to the movie soundtrack, the original recording was released on Chuck Mangione’s 1982 A&M album 70 Miles Young.
In my formative years, I considered Bryan Ferry to be one of the coolest cats around. He seemed to look the part of a lady’s man, while his persona oozed with confidence. I loved that a horn section was featured in some of his recordings. Even the comedic monotony of the horns repeatedly playing a single note to feature in Let’s Stick Together was somehow epic.
My favorite Ferry song has always been This is Tomorrow. The lyrics captured my youthful imagination and made me feel optimistic about what might be ahead in life. It felt promising! Musically, I loved that the horn section was dropped in at a key change (like a gear change?) and was then embedded into the band for the remainder of the song. Almost as rhythm section instruments!
It’s always fun to be able to record a song that you love, and to be able to do it with some of my great friends from our time on Bandhub makes it even better. Here’s a video of our musical collaboration, with charts for trumpet and tenor sax for you to print and play.
Chuck Mangione composed the song Soft, showcasing the beautiful vocals of Esther Satterfield, and released it on his 1975 album Chase the Clouds Away. The intro and outro feature delicate flute lines played by Gerry Niewood, while Chuck accompanies on Fender Rhodes without ever picking up his flugelhorn.
For our 2022 recording of Soft, we’ve not attempted to clone the original. Instead, the flute melody became my flugelhorn part, Jean Michel covered the piano lines on baritone guitar, and Jasmine added the voice of an angel.
No transcription to share this time around. The melody is simple enough, but for the chords I (finally) used a piano sheet from the long-out-of-print Chuck Mangione 1977 Song Book that has been in my collection since I was a teenager. Finally, after all those years on my bookshelf, it feels so good to be able to play something from that book. 😉
All too often brass and string players quietly bottle up the disappointment of hearing “their” parts performed on keyboards instead of the real thing. Occasionally we get our own back and turn the tables when a producer wants to hear something done differently. This is a Moog synthesizer part transcribed for flugelhorn, adding a little extra tone color and personality to our recording.
I transcribed this in both 6/4 and 12/8 times because I couldn’t decide which was the most appropriate. Ultimately I played the 6/4 version because visually it helped me to think about playing with lots of space…
Paul McCartney & Wings recorded this song in the studio without brass, but later added horns to their live performance for obvious reasons. 🙂
I’ve transcribed for trumpet, two saxes, and trombone based on a YouTube video from one of the band’s 1976 live performances. Trombone players don’t grow on trees in this neck of the woods, so for our recording I played the trombone part on bass trumpet.
Gary Badger's Trumpet Transcriptions 