Review

Edward "Kid" Ory
Creole Trombone:

Arranged by Jeremy Niles Kempton

3 tenor, 1 bass trombone

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Publisher: Cherry Classics Music
Date of Publication: 2019
URL: http://www.cherryclassics.com

Score and parts

Primary Genre: Trombone Ensembles - 4 trombones

The late Jeremy Kempton, an Eastman graduate under Emory Remington, was a performer (National Symphony in Tehran), conductor (the Island Chamber Symphony), a high school teacher (Chaminade), and taught at Interlochen Center for the Arts. He arranged Creole Trombone, a jazz composition with ragtime and New Orleans overtones written by Kid Ory and first recorded in 1921 as one of the first recordings of a black orchestra.

Scored entirely in bass clef for four trombones, the arrangement is aimed at moderately advanced performers. The lead part rises only to one b-flat¹, the rest topping out at a¹. The bass trombone part is perhaps more challenging, with frequent low C’s and D’s and one pedal BB-flat. With the fastest rhythm in eighth-notes at the marked half note = 92, the piece is sight-readable by experienced college level students and great fun for all.

What will challenge less-experienced players is not the pitches but the style. Other than a few glisses, there are only three instances of articulation markings in the piece, a basic accent in all three places. So performers will have to draw upon their own swing experience to recognize where the appropriate stylings should apply, such as shortening syncopated quarter notes, or accenting beats two and four. There are no dynamic markings, and some parts read continuously for more than twenty bars without a rest; so ensemble breathing-plans have to be created.

If you can address those concerns on your own, this two-minute arrangement is excellent: it swings hard, is fun to play, and includes a repeatable eight-bar section with chord changes for optional improvisation, which can be accomplished with as little as a B-flat blues scale. The score and parts are easy to read with no page-turns needed in the parts for a performance. As with many Cherry Classics products, the arrangement is available for download and/or print-shipping.

As a native New Orleanian, I’m delighted to say that this scoring offers a great and playable representation of important music by the legendary trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory; and though there’s no recorded demo of Kempton’s quartet arrangement, the readily available Ory recordings of this tune, including one pairing him with Louis Armstrong, will lead anyone down the right path to re-create the magic of this masterful composition.