One of my favourite pieces of jazz music has to be Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol‘s Caravan. It’s one of those pieces of music that’s very hard to get out of your head once it’s there.

On Monday night I got to play an arrangement of Caravan at the JSU Volunteer Band. It was amazing, though it’s going to need some work to get it up to speed and together.

It was a great rehearsal on Monday as we also did “String of Pearls” which has a solo in for lead trumpet. I didn’t do too badly on the first sight-reading run through, but contrived to mess it up on the second run through. Fortunately, Steve, the Band Sergeant had the foresight to do a copy of the solo so I could take it home to practice. I’ve been managing to sustain practicing every day for the last two weeks by doing it immediately after putting the kids to bed, it seems to be the perfect time to fit in half-an-hour or so. I’m working hard on slurring at the moment, and in particular lip slurs (which involves changing the pitch of the note purely by the position of the tongue in the mouth and pushing more air into the trumpet), which is good as the String of Pearls solo requires lip slurs.

I’m going to have to sign the Official Secrets Act for attending rehearsals in the future to allow me to go onto the JSU base at Northwood unescorted. Last week I’d turned up to rehearsal but couldn’t raise anyone to escort me to the building and had to go back home:(