Thursday, December 11, 2008

Trombone in D minor

The Dixieland group I play in will be doing two sets in the Baptist church for the Music on Main Street event New Year's Eve. They've been letting me do a sing along version of Just A Closer Walk With Thee and now we're going to try to add a sing along version of Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho. The very simple arrangement I worked up just gives the melodic and harmonic outlines as a basis for improvisation, and is based on the version I did for the Ten Traditional Songs section of the music learning materials. 

In the learning materials Joshua is in C minor, but for this I brought it up a step to D minor because it suits my voice better, and I lead the singing without a microphone. Steve, who plays professional level trombone in the group, mentioned that the melody "lays" well on the trombone in that key, just as it does in the other D minor number we sometimes do, The St. James Infirmary. I took him to mean that D minor is, in general, a good key for the trombone.

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