INTEGRATED TASK COMMENTARY
For my performance I have chosen a Trinity Guildhall Grade 5 piece called Lime Tree Bay. It is a jazz piece composed by a session musician and composer called Malcolm Ball. I will play my own interpretation of this particular piece of music, which differs subtly in the “feel” from the way Malcolm ball plays it. Malcolm Ball’s version lacks a degree of subtlety in the way it played, which modifies the way it sounds and the emotions conveyed. I believe my version is truer to the way traditional jazz is played which was reflective of the black people’s liberation in back street clubs (the birthplace of jazz). Malcolm Ball’s piece only provided a template for the piece which could be developed by the performer, acknowledging the supposition that a piece of music, much like a book can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The first twenty five bars are performed using brushes; this is not dissimilar to the way many big band pieces were played and so shares properties of both big band and traditional jazz. The use of brushes makes it easier to differentiate between accented notes and long legato “sweeps” on the snare drum, giving the piece a variance in timbre making the piece more interesting. It is difficult to sustain a homogenous sound that doesn’t vary at the apex of the stir. Instead I chose to embrace the issue and accentuate the apogee of the crescendo that resulted from an unsteady stir. The brushes also allow for greater dynamic contrast in the music, as the brushes enable the player to play very softly. This means that there can be fastidious attention to detail that makes it sound less simplistic. There is very little dynamic notation in the piece of music which if played as written would not complement the accompanying piano, and for this reason I have incorporated some changes in dynamics. This makes it sound as if there is less “conflict” between the drum kit and piano. The First bar is very simple playing a quaver-triplet rhythm and crotchet stirs with the right hand. This simple rhythm is common in many big band pieces but is not often played on its own; there is often an improvisation on top of this. The hi-hat on beats two and four acts as a pulse, throbbing to the beat of the music and in live music acts as a kind of metronome for the other instruments.

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This is a well written essay although I wonder if the use of overly complicated words has clouded the clarity of what the writer is trying to say. The final paragraph feels rushed and I would have liked the writer to have gone into more detail about what they will be including in their own composition.