Review

Various
Eight Swinging Christmas Carols: for trombone and piano

Arranged by Keith Terrett


Vancouver, BC, Canada
Publisher: Cherry Classics Music
Date of Publication: 2010
URL: http://www.cherryclassics.com

Primary Genre: Solo Tenor Trombone - with piano

This is an interesting holiday music set and a nice instrumentation change from the usual holiday brass ensemble music. The arranger presents eight standard carols: Ding Dong Merrily on High, Silent Night, We Three Kings, Away in a Manger, God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, Deck the Halls, and Silent Night in various jazz styles, including jazz waltz, blues, swing and jazz rock. The strength of the arrangements is the piano part, which contains most of the interesting material. The piano creates a lot of fun grooves and displays much more interesting harmonic substitutions and rhythmic contrast. It will take a confident pianist with excellent rhythm and sense of jazz style to perform these well. Unfortunately the trombone writing in almost every arrangement consists of the same embellishment patterns in sixteenth notes: stepwise fills, turns, etc., and do not venture far from the key. As a result, the trombone writing begins to sound the same from one arrangement to the next. In addition the registration lays fairly consistently in the staff for the most part which makes technical execution difficult and requires a solid double or doodle tongue to play. The writing reflects Mr. Terrett’s background as a cornet player and might be more effective on trumpet or euphonium which could play these figures with ease. In addition some of the arrangements are rather short and in some cases I found myself wishing the arranger would have expanded the settings beyond one or two verses. Overall this is a nice set of arrangements in a fresh style presentation that is a welcome addition to the holiday literature.

-Timothy Howe
University of Missouri