First Attempt at Composing a Blues Theme (Jazz Chart and Big Band Arrangement)

Hello everyone! 

I am studying jazz piano and today I composed a blues theme and arranged it for big band (actually only for rhythm section and saxophones at the moment). I just did it as a little exercise. I am planning to focus on piano playing for some time but I have found that applying the ideas and concepts I learn for composing and arranging helps me improve faster both in my playing and composition skills. 

For this arrangement I used the knowledge I recently acquired for piano voicings, five voice jazz harmonization, and bass walking bass. All voicings and harmonization are quite basic and I am also sure there must be many mistakes :S. I have not learn anything about drums yet so the drums were just copied big band scores I found online, so I do not know yet what the drum is doing. 

I might use this theme (or some others I might compose) for slowly practicing Big Band arranging while I learn piano so this is only an exercise that I might keep on improving on.

It is my first time composing and arranging jazz so any feedback for the theme or the arrangement is more than welcome. 

Thank you nd hope you like it! 

Hi @JorgeDavid,

I'm not familiar with jazz music at all, but your music sounds jazz to me and is quite enjoybale. Thx for sharing!

Henry

On 1/8/2025 at 10:54 AM, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Hi @JorgeDavid,

I'm not familiar with jazz music at all, but your music sounds jazz to me and is quite enjoybale. Thx for sharing!

Henry

 

Thank you @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu, I am glad you enjoyed it!

I was not familiar with it either but recently I decided to learn jazz piano and I find it fascinating. I also love the fact that if you create a melody and chord progression you already have the skeleton for a whole jazz piece, which is really different to how I am used to composing.

However, too many things to learn and understand yet, though, so I need to take it slow and keep on practicing with this theme or other ones I come up with!

Thank you so much for listening and commenting!

Hey @JorgeDavid!

I think this rendition sounds great!  For a quick first try it's really good!  The melody is catchy and bluesy with all those b3 blue notes.  I think if you used microtones it would sound even more bluesy since, often, blues singers, when they sing blue notes are deliberately out of tune and bending the notes down a bit lower than they would usually be in 12TET.  I am assuming you used diminished chords as passing chords in your passing 5-part Saxophone harmonies?  Thanks for sharing this really accessible and promising piece!  Makes me want to hear more and with a full big band!

On 1/12/2025 at 1:15 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

Thanks for sharing this really accessible and promising piece!  Makes me want to hear more and with a full big band!

Thank you so much, @PeterthePapercomPoser! Yes. I am planning on improving on it. Today I added the first solo, which I actually like quite a lot! I am trying to learn about different sections for now and, in the future, maybe add the whole band (or even making a new arrangement for it). For now, I will try to complete the solos, development and ending with this ensemble, as adding more instruments might be too big task for now! 

On 1/12/2025 at 1:15 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I think if you used microtones it would sound even more bluesy since, often, blues singers, when they sing blue notes are deliberately out of tune and bending the notes down a bit lower than they would usually be in 12TET. 

You are right, the singers and players (not on piano, of course, but even on piano they play both minor and major thirds almost at the same time to create the effect) make the tones lower on the blue third, so I think your idea is really good! But microtones is still such a unknown world for me. I see you have been composing with them lately! I heard to the invention and really enjoyed it. How does it work? Do you use it for adjusting the thirds according to the tonality of that moment so they are better tuned than with 12TET? I imagine it must be quite complex to decide on which notes to tweak and how much to tweak them. 

On 1/12/2025 at 1:15 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I am assuming you used diminished chords as passing chords in your passing 5-part Saxophone harmonies?

For passing chords I follow different methods depending on the context. I do not know much so, to be honest, for this time I just tried to keep it simple. I just harmonized in 4-voice close with the doubling of the melody in the bari sax and always leaving at least a minor 3rd between the top two notes. Then, I decided which tones to consider non-harmonic. I think that is the most interesting part, since in Jazz you could harmonize a 2nd in the melody as a passing tone or as an harmonic tone all the same. Then I followed one of four methods for the non-harmonic tones: 

1. Chromatic or step movement to the next harmonic tone in all voices. 
2. Diatonic movement to the next harmonic tone in all voices.
3. Harmonizing with the dominant (if one note) or a chain of dominants or common progressions such as ii-V-I. 
4. Free counterpoint.

I guess I used some diminished chords but mostly as a way of using the dominant with the b9. I did not use diminished chords as a "free pass" since I composed it mostl for getting used to the different methods. 

Finally I just changed the bass here and there but rarely, sometimes doubling other voices and sometimes with free melodies. It is a really "practical" method but, in the end, it actually gave much more freedom than I expected, even if following those simple steps. There are much more complex voicings that I want to get into in the future, but for now I decided to focus on the basics first!

Thank you so much for commenting!

7 hours ago, JorgeDavid said:

You are right, the singers and players (not on piano, of course, but even on piano they play both minor and major thirds almost at the same time to create the effect) make the tones lower on the blue third, so I think your idea is really good! But microtones is still such a unknown world for me. I see you have been composing with them lately! I heard to the invention and really enjoyed it. How does it work? Do you use it for adjusting the thirds according to the tonality of that moment so they are better tuned than with 12TET? I imagine it must be quite complex to decide on which notes to tweak and how much to tweak them. 

It is not that complex really.  Have you heard of just tuning?  The concept is to bring the tuning system into better alignment with the harmonic series.  In the harmonic series the major 3rds and minor 3rds are much more pure and sound more satisfying than in 12-tet (12 tone equal temperament).  But 12-tet preserves perfect 8ves, 5ths and 4ths which is really important to keep the whole tuning system consistent with itself across all octaves.  But that comes at the price of compromised major and minor 3rds.  If you google "justly tuned 3rd" it will tell you that major 3rds in 12-tet are 15 cents sharper than their justly tuned (much nicer sounding) counterparts and minor 3rds are 15 cents flatter.  So I just basically wrote a 12-tet piece and whenever I arrived at a major or minor triad my objective was to sharpen the minor 3rd of a minor triad by 15 cents and flatten the major 3rd of any major triad by 15 cents.  I sought to do this by using 1/6ths of a tone which amount to 16.666 cents (which I considered a good approximation) but it turned out that Musescore Studio doesn't have 1/6th tones yet.  So I did the next best thing which was using syntonic commas (around 20 cents).  That's all I really sought to do in the Microtonal Invention to give it a more authentic feel of a justly tuned Baroque Harpsichord.  (Although there's also 1/4ths of a tone which I used in my Microtonal String Quartet).

9 hours ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

It is not that complex really.  Have you heard of just tuning?  The concept is to bring the tuning system into better alignment with the harmonic series.  In the harmonic series the major 3rds and minor 3rds are much more pure and sound more satisfying than in 12-tet (12 tone equal temperament).  But 12-tet preserves perfect 8ves, 5ths and 4ths which is really important to keep the whole tuning system consistent with itself across all octaves.  But that comes at the price of compromised major and minor 3rds.  If you google "justly tuned 3rd" it will tell you that major 3rds in 12-tet are 15 cents sharper than their justly tuned (much nicer sounding) counterparts and minor 3rds are 15 cents flatter.  So I just basically wrote a 12-tet piece and whenever I arrived at a major or minor triad my objective was to sharpen the minor 3rd of a minor triad by 15 cents and flatten the major 3rd of any major triad by 15 cents.  I sought to do this by using 1/6ths of a tone which amount to 16.666 cents (which I considered a good approximation) but it turned out that Musescore Studio doesn't have 1/6th tones yet.  So I did the next best thing which was using syntonic commas (around 20 cents).  That's all I really sought to do in the Microtonal Invention to give it a more authentic feel of a justly tuned Baroque Harpsichord.  (Although there's also 1/4ths of a tone which I used in my Microtonal String Quartet).

Oh! It does not sound as complex as I would expect it to be! So basically you composed tonally but then make use of the microtones for adjusting for those tuning differences that the 12TET does not account for, right? But the, I am wondering, is it done only on the third of the prevailing harmony? In other words, if you have a bar where the harmony is Cmajor, for that whole bar you would flatten only the note E every time it appears? Or you flatten the notes respectively to the counterpoint? For example, if you have a melody in thirds you flatten the third with respect to the bottom voice? 

The first movement of the string quartet sounds amazing! Microtones seem to feel much more natural for strings than on the harpsichord. But I imagine it takes a little bit of time to get used to the new sound since we are so accustomed to 12TET. It is a really interesting concept and so convenient that we can change the tune so easily with the notation softwares!