Tune writing

After much noodling, in space and over jazz standards, I ventured into doodling a jazz tune. Amazingly, my teacher and Jazz Dad, Rick Garn, at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, thought it was a Woody Shaw tune. I'm often pretty gullible, so I don't really know if he was just teasing me, trying to boost my confidence, or was actually telling the truth. In any case, we ended up recording it together with some of my fellow students at the college. Rick played his alto sax. It is a precious memory. Here is a recent remake of that tune: I continued doodling with the jazz tune thing and came up with a somewhat spaced out composition that had a 14 bar form and a few unstandard chord changes. This tune I managed to record with Andrew Glover on keyboard, Gregg Dunstan on bass, and Tom Foster on drums. I played my flugelhorn, which quickly became my favourite horn. I love the mellow spacey sound.
Having learned a few music business tricks from Tommy Banks in his Music business class at Grant MacEwan, I shopped my tune around and managed to win a University radio station contest, get a few reviews written in local newspapers and get some airplay. John Beaudin at CKXM was the first to play my tunes on his new age/space jazz program. I called the prize winning tune "Whitemud", after the little creek that I lived by where I used to walk.
Jamie Philp played bass and all the spacey background sounds on this one, and helped record and produce it as part of the prize I won for the CJSR real to reel contest. I played my flugel and classical guitar. I call it Blue as the Sky.