Dear friends,
yesterday evening, at Carlo Aonzo's New York Mandolin Workshop, a work of mine titled Broadway '79 was given its (MOST gratifying to the composer, I must add) world premiere. As is my custom, I had promised Carlo, who commissioned the piece, not to circulate it prior to the premiere, for reasons that are self-evident. After the premiere, it is now effectively "in circulation".
Broadway '79 is my own celebration, shared musically with all my mando-friends, of my 30 years in New York. As many of you know, the Big Apple went virtually bankrupt between 1974 and 1975. When I arrived, it was still an indescribably rough, grimy, crime-infested, down-on-its-luck kind of place. Yet, what an AMAZING place it was! New York was then truly the Great City of the Arts: every other loft was an avant-garde art gallery, every other basement housed a performance-art company, there were jazz clubs galore!
I spent many, many happy hours in those legendary jazz clubs, listening to the likes of Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and countless others. Emerging in le ore piccole, the wee hours past midnight, from those suffocatingly smoky clubs, greeted by the night chill --and... *ahem*... ever-so-slightly buzzed-- with ALL that music still ringing in my ears, left an indelible impression on me. Thirty years later, the music is still with me-- no, FYI, the buzz itself is gone.
Broadway '79 is an instrumental jazz ballad, scored for two soloists in alternation, playing one "chorus" each, joining on the refrain, twice over (the form, in other words, is (A-A'-B) X 2; the rest is a (VERY simple, chordal, sempre tremolando) orchestra of first and second mandolins and mandolas, plus "walking bass" mandocello. The piece lasts about 5 minutes, and can be put together with just a couple of rehearsals-- once the soloists know their own parts, that is.
The score is yours for the asking, entirely free. My home e-mail is vkioulaphides@earthlink.net and I can easily e-mail score and parts in PDF format to anyone around the world. All I ask for "in return" is that, should there be any performance(s), the respective performers could be so kind as to let me know the who-where-and-when, just for my own sake and further gratification.
Enjoy!
Cheers,
Victor
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