On my channel, you’ll find videos of my musical collaborations as well as a variety of other things that I’ve served up outside of the scope of this website.
Two of my Happy Birthday videos have amassed over 136,000 views and I’d love to be getting some of the advertising revenue that YouTube makes from them. But to do that I need more subscribers and more views…Â Can I count you in, please? đ
What do you think? Please leave a comment and let me know.
The arrangement is a good representation of the original recording, but there are gaps:
It’s a vocal chart, not an instrumental. If you don’t have a vocalist, well, you can imagine how empty that sounds.
The violin solo heard on the original recording has been written for an additional keyboard (synth strings). What big band has two keyboard players? So, another gaping hole!
To fill these gaps and allow the chart to be played with standard big band instrumentation I’ve created supplementary parts:
This isn’t a transcription. I leveraged a piano sheet that I purchased from MusicNotes.com which, if you’re interested in this piece, I recommend you check out.
It’s possible that Severance has become one of my all-time favorite TV shows. So I had to cover the main title theme, as only I can!
Referencing a pivotal scene in the series, here I am performing my “Defiant Jazz” arrangement. I’m just here for the waffle party…
Update April 2025: Britt Lower, star of the Apple TV+ series Severance, gave me a shout-out on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon! She thanked me for my YouTube video and then played my arrangement on pocket trumpet with The Roots (the Tonight Show band).
Check out the moment at the 9:30 mark:
Listen for the distinctive articulations from Dave Guy, the high-octave trumpet player in the band, and the “modal jazz chords” from the rhythm section. Iâm absolutely stunned!
Britt repeated the shout-out a few days later in an interview with Josh Weiss of Forbes Magazine. Be sure to check that out too!
Forbes.com: Britt Lower Talks Acting Alongside A Taxidermied Cat In âPsycho Therapyâ & Her Viral Trumpet Performance Of The âSeveranceâ Theme On âThe Tonight Showâ
By request, here is a link to the audio mp3 of my recording, as studied by Britt Lower and the Tonight Show band:
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.
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.
