have you heard?

when i was an undergraduate percussion student at umass amherst, i was a member of the marimba ensemble program, which provided a sort of developmental ensemble experience for new percussion majors who, for the most part at that time, weren’t coming in with a ton of keyboard percussion experience. my story was different in that i’d studied the piano since age 6, and had developed pretty solid ears by that point.

due to a logjam of young talent in the upper echelon of the percussion studio at that time, my particular cohort of students remained in the marimba ensemble program for 2-3 additional semesters prior to ascending to the advanced percussion ensemble, and thus we were growing tired of the traditional repertoire, a healthy mix of classical transcriptions, a few Mexican marimba band-style pieces, and a lot of Bob Becker/GH Green-style rags.

toward the end of one spring semester, several of us got together around the big wooden table in grinnell arena, the marching percussion building, and decided we wanted change. we wished to learn and perform music that spoke to our current interests, that captured the energy and enthusiasm of our own eclectic musical tastes. we wished to break out of the old ways, and forge a new pathway.

somewhat to our surprise, and much to our delight, the ensemble director Thom Hannum was on board. he gave us the go-ahead to begin shifting the direction of the program, but with one caveat: we would have to create the arrangements ourselves. the repertoire library had little to offer in the area we wished to move toward, and so our challenge was to come back from summer break, each prepared to deliver a chart of our own.

this seemed like almost an impossible task! when i think back to the group of guys that were in the group, i remember feeling a little doubtful that we would all participate in this challenge - that people would actually take it seriously and produce something… but whoa, mostly we all did! and it was so crazy to imagine what it took for each of us to pull it off, given our backgrounds and disparate skill sets. i remember sitting at my iMac (the one with the bubble back!!), headphones on, Sibelius v.3 open, iTunes open, scrubbing back and forth 5 seconds at a time trying to pick lines one by one, transcribing straight into the computer… and i had ears! imagine what it took if you had little to no pitched instrument background!

anyway - a long story remembered and now told. all to say this chart is special to me; it is one of my first successful arrangements. after lots of workshopping and later rounds of edits it was published, and has been for a long time now thanks to the willingness of Jim and Murray at Tapspace to take it on; i don’t think they take arrangements anymore - i am lucky to have signed with them when i did. looking back, my vision around creating this chart was to take something fun, something that i loved to listen to and play, and to put it on paper so that others like me, percussionists who were yearning for more, to prepare something infectious and exciting and present it after working hard to perfect it alongside comrades who feel that electricity… i still feel that electricity when i listen to this chart, and i think you’ll enjoy feeling it too.