Customer Reviews

Arranging for Large Jazz Ensemble

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Arranging Jazz for Large Ensemble gives the readers the necessary skills to write for big bands. Although it is an advance subject in the Arranging area, the book starts with writing for unison and octaves. There are also great chapters about background writing with riff and guide tone lines. The Shout Chorus chapter provides beginners writers to fully understand the arrangement "big picture". All levels of arrangers can benefit from these chapters and their musical examples. They will help you memorize sound texture and effects as well as the writing techniques. As you go over the other chapters, you can easily assimilate their content and apply them successfully. It's unique and well written book, one of the best of its kind.

Arranging Jazz for Large Ensemble gives the readers the necessary skills to write for big bands. Although it is an advance subject in the Arranging area, the book starts with writing for unison and octaves. There are also great chapters about background writing with riff and guide tone lines. The Shout Chorus chapter provides beginners writers to fully understand the arrangement "big picture". All levels of arrangers can benefit from these chapters and their musical examples. They will help you memorize sound texture and effects as well as the writing techniques. As you go over the other chapters, you can easily assimilate their content and apply them successfully. It's unique and well written book, one of the best of its kind.

This book provides a wealth of priceless knowledge. The techniques revealed by the Berklee faculty have greatly improved my ability as an arranger. Although the focus is on jazz, I have found many of the techniques to be useful when arranging in other musical genres. I found the accompanying CD extremely helpful, as it provided demos of a number of famous arrangers and composers. I find myself referring back to the book time and time again and finding new techniques to use each time. I highly recommed it to anyone interested in becoming an arranger or composer.

This book was used as the text in my local college's jazz arranging class. Before enrolling in that class and buying this book, I had already purchased and begun studying the companion of this book, Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles (Berklee Guide). Although this text is written in such a manner to stand alone and to give more than enough information for the first time arranger or casual jazz student, it frequently glosses over important subject matter by giving you the bare minimum of information and then directing the reader to the companion volume. So, for an intermediate to advanced student, or someone with a good foundation in jazz arranging, this book is definitely the way to go, as it will save time but still provide a lot of useful hints and strategies for arranging jazz compositions. It is very thorough on subject matter such as upper structures, quartal voicings, and concerted writing. It also contains chapters helpful in the overall construction of a piece, such as soli writing and shout choruses. The CD provides coherent examples and illustrations of the subject matter so that the book can cover a lot of ground and provide any jazz arranger with plenty of tools that will help him or her sound better and write more playable, better sounding pieces. I would recommend readers that are new to jazz arranging look into buying this book together with the companion volume for small ensembles, as it makes the study of arranging much more thorough and provides a lot more reinforcement of many of the ideas presented in this book. (That also happens to be what I did, as I said.) Advanced students or arrangers with some experience, however, should be able to get by with just this book. Either way, this is a great book to learn jazz arranging.

I bought this book for a jazz arranging class. This book is pretty comprehensive and full of good info, ripe for beginners.

I THINK THE ARRANGING COURSE IS EXCELLANT FOR WHAT I NEEDED IN BIG BAND ARRANGING. THE ONLY INPROVEMENT THAT I WOULD LIKE IS THE SEPERATION OF TRACKS ON THE ACCOMPANYING CD. IT JUST GOES ONE INTO THE NEXT WITHOUT STATING THE TRACK NUMBER OR PAGE THAT CORRESPONDS.

I really love this book, as an alumni of Berklee College of Music, I think this is a great source of information for writing for big bands and applying that knowledge to your own arrangements.

Thank you for publishing great books!!

Sebastian Lerner

Oh amazon! I was here about to buy this just yesterday at around $26 and left it for a few hours...came back and it jumped to $40!! Goodness, sounds like the house prices in Australia! You blink for a second and it shoots up instantly.

Well I am definitely giving this 5 stars as I am familiar with the copy from another source...and dont want the authors to have a low star review just coz the price jumped- it isn't their fault. And so, I will give a proper review in part two, when amazon gets competive with the price again!

This is the first time I found how to learn about jazz arranging and how to improve my last music knowledge.
It is a wonderful book.