Picnic Suite (Transcribed) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This suite with excellent orchestration and catchy melodies is an excellent addition to the repertoire of your combo, IF you have a skilled flute player.

The book contains 5 separately bound volumes with an unattached paper cover (pictured): parts for drumset, guitar, bass, flute, and piano. The drumset, guitar, and bass parts are straightforward, western style musical notation, with cues. Flute is the same, but Part 6 (Tendre) is scored for Alto Flute in G. The piano part is completely written out just as heard on the recording, except there is minor simplifying in the more complex passages of Gaylancholic and while the gist of the solos are provided, Bolling urges the player to embellish with "Improv" commands. The piano part includes, for the most part, the flute and guitar parts written above the main staff, and occasional bass cues.

Picnic Suite is moderately advanced music, but nothing too complex for an advanced high school or college-level combo can't handle. The peripheral movements: Rococo, Madrigal, Canon, Tendre, and Badine (1, 2, 5, 6, 7) are simple in that a classical pianist could pick it up and read it straight from the score, not winning any style points of course, but are easily accessible. Part 3 and 4, Gaylancholic and Fantasque are nasty movements that provide amazing music, but also major difficulties. The main difficulties in Gaylancholic are for the flute and the piano, who have to navigate tricky runs in harmonic E minor and long solos of increasing detail. Fantasque is very difficult for the piano given its heavy jazz rhythms and 5/4 meter. I'm not a guitarist, but Tendre and Badine look like nightmares for the guitarist of those movements.

Highly recommended product. The only reservation I have against the music is that it's not a particularly common combo; at least for me it's hard to find musicians (esp. flautists) of this caliber that are able to play jazz and in these many varying styles of it. Definitely check out the CD first to see what kind of music this is.

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Product Description:
Transcriptions to the suite featuring the jazz piano of Claude Bolling as well as parts for flute, guitar, bass and drums.

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