Sax on the Web Forum banner

Slightly Odd Jazz Quartet Instrumentation-Tune Suggestions?

2K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  Tedmund13 
#1 ·
Hello world, kinda new to this medium of communication. Please forgive if this is in the wrong place or something to that effect.

I'm a fairly accomplished high school saxophonist. Senior year, first chair, honor bands, deciding between UNCo and UNT next year, yada yada yada. I play sometimes with the rhythm section of our high school jazz ensemble, minus Ms. Piano; she doesn't really have any interest in playing jazz.

This ends up leaving this quartet with a slight problem when choosing repertoire to play. Most of the time, we just get together and jam on standards and the like; it's fun, helps build some soloing chops, and so on and so forth.

We've had a couple gigs and they go okay, most of the audiences aren't really there to hear jazz (we played a show for the re-opening of a local Safeway store...), but the tunes sound kinda empty to me without piano or some other type of voice in the mix, which, apart from maybe a trumpeter, we don't really have available. My question is, do you guys know of any charts that work well for this type of instrumentation? (We all like jazz, but grew up on classic rock and that sort of this too, so we're all pretty open. Bassist can be a metal-head at times, guitarist likes more mainstream rock, drummer and I are pretty open to everything, I especially like to add in hip-hop and some different things like that)

Discovered this tune when I went to hear the Falconaires Jazz Ensemble a few months ago, very do-able for us:


Here's some playing examples of our group, recorded towards the beginning of the school year:





And finally a more recent tune, completely unprepared:



Thanks so much for reading through my long-winded message! :) ha
 
See less See more
#2 ·
You guys sound like you're having fun. You have a nice sound.

However, a jazz quartet that replaces a piano with a guitar is not at all unusual.

Check these cats out:















and, who needs a frickin' guitar:

 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top