![]() Kelly has at the Warsaw Jazz Jamboree, the Gehrden Jazztäge, and most recently at the Altitude Jazz Festival in Briançon, France. ![]() As a composer, he’s been honored by the West Bank School of Music (Minneapolis) Jazz Composers Competition, and the Julius Hemphill Composition Awards, sponsored by the Jazz Composers Alliance in Boston. ![]() Kelly’s blog Harder Bop was cited on NPR’s A Blog Supreme. His writings on jazz have reached a worldwide audience his article James Carter Ruined My Life was translated and published in French and Dutch, and featured on Dee Dee Bridgewater’s NPR program JazzSet. and Europe with luminaries across the jazz spectrum, from James Carter and John Zorn to Don Menza, Bill Watrous, Bobby Shew, and Louie Bellson. There’s much very worthy study fodder here, but if you don’t have the recording, you ain’t really getting “it”! So, get the recording if you don’t have it, and you’re in for a treat: the artistry of Dick Oatts!īridging genres from hard bop to free, award-winning saxophonist and composer Kelly Bucheger has performed in the U.S. This transcription is Dick Oatts’ beautiful performance on “Like Someone In Love,” pinned to a board. You can stare at it to your heart’s content, but you’re not really seeing what makes it so great and so uplifting and so cool. Now imagine that exact same butterfly pinned to a board in a butterfly collection. Admire it cheerfully darting about your plants, floating on a breeze, soaring into the air, disappearing, reappearing. So: imagine a large, lovely butterfly flitting around in your backyard (spring is almost here, after all!). There’s no such thing as a “staccato” note or a merely “accented” note with Dick Oatts - instead, there are thirty different ways of attacking a note, or of ghosting a note, or implying a note, or stopping a note. Oatts, the best parts of his performance ARE NOT TO BE FOUND in the transcription! He plays the tune as a duet with bassist Dave Santoro, and what defies the art and/or craft of transcription here is his marvelously elastic time feel and his vast array of articulations. This is from his live recording Standard Issue, a collection of (mainly) standards, and a “desert island” disc for me - if I’m to be banished, these amazing and inspiring performances are coming with me.Īs is often the case with Mr. Wally Jedermann, a Buffalo pianist, does this on “Green Dolphin Street,” taking the first half in C, and the second half in Eb (and thus splitting the difference in the age-old bandstand conflict of whether to play the tune in the Real Book key or in Miles's key ).ĭick Oatts does the same thing in this stunning performance of Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Like Someone In Love”: the first half is in C, and the second half Eb (alto keys of A and C). Points Of Light.You can use this modulation trick on any tune that has an ABAB or ABAC form: changing the key at the second A can give a well-worn tune a brand new vibe, like giving an old room fresh paint and better lighting. Check out Jordan’s beautiful work at his blog This photo of Dick Oatts is by James Jordan, and is used with his kind permission.
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