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Community Band Section Leaders

Gandalfe

Striving to play the changes in a melodic way.
Staff member
Administrator
One of the things I do for my sax section is to carefully select the soloists. If there is an especially important solo coming up, I will get the music to the soloist way before the first practice. I like to wow our director, and band members, with our soloists.

This year the chart "Mancini!" was put on the list for our May concert. You can listen to it here. There are a number of solos in this arrangement including a tenor (at the beginning) and alto sax (at the 5:38 minute mark) solos. The tenor sax solo, done correctly, has a lovely va-va tonguing that I want our soloist to have down pat. The alto sax solo as played by the studio musician has some jazz interpretations that are not usually annotated in the music. I might even get to do the alto sax solo as I usually do the jazz ones for the section.

I listened to some community band recordings on YouTube and the intonation and sound quality was sooo bad, that I would have never picked this chart from those renditions.
 
Nice recording. As the sax section leader I would have worked with the tenor to get more of that va-va (fuzzy) sound in the pink panther solo and there was no jazz inflection with the alto sax solo at 6:17. It's my challenge to get my section mates to wow our director and the rest of the band. That way, maybe we'll get more solos in the future? Thank you for sharing. I should have a video of this in our upcoming concert and I will be doing the alto solo. I'll share if I remember to.
 
We did the Mancini a few summers ago. Nice arrangement. You can find it somewhere online--Westchester Band.
 
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