Flash Back – Warm Cafe

Flash Back – Warm Cafe

Lately I’ve been revisiting a lot of old tunes – ‘old’ as in, pieces that I wrote 5-10 years ago or more. Digging into the Myles Wright archives, blowing the dust off and breathing new life into some of them. There’s something cathartic in doing this – I was a much more immature, inexperienced musician and composer 10 years ago than I am now. As one would expect! Hindsight being 20-20 vision, I look back at some of these pieces, figure out what was wrong, fix them up and re-record. When all is said and done, I hear the new version and say to myself “yes, this is what I meant. I just didn’t have the chop to get it quite right first time round”. Its like I’m going back in time and righting a wrong.

Occasionally, I’m actually quite happy with what I wrote 10 years ago – and I just want a better quality recording than what i got back then. One such example is Warm Cafe, which I wrote as a 3rd year jazz arranging student while at WAAPA. The assignment brief was to create a big band chart that was in the ‘straight ahead’ big band style – the classic reference point being Sammy Nestico and his writing for the Count Basie Band. So I pulled out the charts (hand written back in those days! Sibelius wasn’t invented yet….) and recorded it. Here it is 🙂

You’ve already seen Paul Millard (saxes) and Mark Underwood (trumpets) in the previous post – other session players pictured here were Bruce Thompson (trombones), Glyn MacDonald (piano) and Pat Reale (guitar)

I like updating the old and making it new again 😉