La Princesa
I wrote La Princesa as a contrafact of the tune, Someday My Prince Will Come, but changed the key from Bb to Eb with other harmonic substitutions. The recording below was done at the University of North Florida, mixed and mastered by Barry Greene. I’m playing guitar on this recording along with the members of UNF’s Jazz Ensemble 1 band. This was my first big band arrangement.
The Battle of Apollo
The Battle of Apollo was my second big band arrangement and planned out for the purpose of performing with the Jazz Ensemble 1 band at UNF. It’s based on an untitled original song I wrote my freshman year at UNF that I developed around. The theme of the song is the battle between logic and emotion and the harmonic approaches used in the two contrasting sections is meant to emphasize this. For the ‘hero’ theme, I use lots of perfect 4th and 5th intervals, bright voicings, and brass instrumentation. For the ‘monster’ theme, I use sus7b9 harmony, heavy rhythms, and sax instrumentation. The idea is to convey each theme, their conflict, and the final resolution. The original title of this piece was The Battle of Apollo and Dionysus, which is a nod to a famous talk given by Ayn Rand in 1969.