Your Daily Dose of Christmas

“What? The Nutcracker already? You usually don’t share The Nutcracker until much later in the month!”

Well, yes. But there’s a difference this time, and I can’t believe I never knew about this until just this year. Apparently Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn took Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and re-arranged it for jazz band. So that’s what we’re hearing today. And don’t fear, we’ll get back to The Nutcracker proper later on in the month. But this is fantastic!

(By the way: You’ll notice that this is a “score” video, so you can track the music along as you go. Music for jazz band is as tightly scored as is music for any other ensemble, but it’s still jazz and there needs to be room for improvisation. At the 5:00 mark, when we’re in the second movement, the “Dance of the Reed Pipes”, you’ll hear the clarinet going into an improvised solo. Note that the clarinet part at that point in the score isn’t written out; the measures are marked with a symbol indicating an improv is to happen there, with the piece’s chords noted so the clarinetist can improv in the right key as the piece goes on. I remember my high degree of confusion the first time I saw that in a trumpet part back in jazz band. I asked the person next to me, who was more experienced, what I was supposed to do there. She looked at me and basically said, “You don’t do shit there! She does.” And she pointed to the lead player, who got all the solos. That bugged me for years: Why did she get all the solos? It wouldn’t be until college that I realized that I simply wasn’t a terribly good jazz player. Best to let someone else do the solo work.)