Jazz

Recordings of some of my performances with the Cal Poly jazz bands. Listed in reverse chronological order (well, by concert date.. I'm not reversing the setlists).

University Jazz Band 1

The Heat's On: No guitar solo, unless you count the fact that I start the song by myself and play a three-note ending lick. But it's a fun song with nice chords and saxaphone solos (first by Nathaniel Martin, then Kevin Wong).
Tiananmen! (mvts. III & V): Pianist Jon Jang joins us for a performance of selected movements from his composition, Tiananmen! A very interesting piece that was a great deal of fun to play, and combines aspects of Chinese music with diverse jazz influences. The score specifically called for a "Hendrixlike guitar solo".... don't forget to listen to the sixth movement after this!
Tiananmen! (mvt. VI): The final movement from our performance of Tiananmen! Jang finally shows off with a piano solo!
Nice to Meet You: We now travel back from the May Jazz Night concert to February's Just Jazz concert. By some extremely strange turn of events, I wound up opening UJB1's set at both performances, even though I was new to the group and undoubtedly the worst musician among them. In May we opened with The Heat's On, and although I did not have a solo in it, I was still the first musician you heard. In February we opened with Nice to Meet You, which started right up with a short guitar solo. There are some excellent solos later in this song.
Blues #1: Our guest for the February performance was saxaphonist Red Holloway, who decided that he wanted to sing some blues jams at the concert. These were not rehearsed... we even had to wait for him to tell us what key they would be in! I played solos in both, but as with all the other solos in these two jams, they came about when Red would suddenly point at one of us and say "solo!" I was really nervous about this beforehand, but it actually went quite well and was a lot of fun.
Blues #2: The second blues jam with Red Holloway.
No Tears: One of the rehearsed pieces we performed with Red Holloway. No guitar solo, but it's a nice song with excellent solos from Red and others in the band.

University Jazz Band 2

How Sweet It Is: A jazz/blues progression with guitar solo and fills toward the end.
Fly Me To The Moon: A popular jazz standard, and one of my personal favorites. Fans of Japanese anime might recognize this as the song played over the ending credits of Evangelion. Anyway, I specifically requested my solo on this song to challenge myself. Most of the solos I'd been given in the jazz band were on blues/funk/latin charts where more rock-like guitar solos were acceptable. So I wanted a solo on a swinging jazz standard where I could try my hand at a real jazz solo. It didn't turn out as one of my better solos, but I'm very glad that I did it. It's certainly a different style of playing than you'll hear from me in most of these other recordings.
Afterburner: This is kind of a cheesy chart, but I think this and Tiger of San Pedro have my two best solos that were performed at Cal Poly with the jazz bands (there were others, such as my solos to Oye Como Va in China, that might have been better). This song originally just had a tenor saxaphone solo from Craig Jacobson, but I thought it would be really fun to solo to (I like this sort of chord progression). So I finally worked up the courage to suggest a trading solo between me and Craig.... and much to my surprise, both he and the director thought it was a great idea! And I was certainly right, playing off Craig was tremendous fun (he's better than me, but not to an intimidating degree). We actually played our best during the sound check before the concert, but this is still decent.
Tiger of San Pedro: My other favorite solo. Craig also has another solo on this, and personally I think it's one of my favorite solos that I've heard from him... which is interesting because during rehearsal he would complain about how much he hated soloing on this song. This was also the first time that I got to play a significant written melody line that wasn't drowned out by the winds. The original recording of this song won a Grammy.
Caravan: Another very popular jazz standard. We played this same arrangment my freshman year, but the director kept things interesting for me by giving me a guitar solo this time around. This was my first big solo with the jazz bands. There were some others before this, but this was the song that got me some attention, and this is the earliest song that I feel is worth putting up on this site. My later solos were better, of course...