Alien Cyclops Pickles jazz trumpet quartet

Alien Cyclops Pickles

Jazzy Trumpet Quartet

by Eddie Lewis

MTR 0465 4161

Jazz up your trumpet program with Alien Cyclops Pickles jazzy trumpet quartet. This is a six minute composition in swing style.

Alien Cyclops Pickles is an ambitious piece of chamber music composed in the swing style. The harmonies are a modified, 24 bar blues. The meter and rhythm of the composition is based on the clave, which gives it hints of a New Orleans second line feel.

The original tune used as a bases for this composition was written during a class I taught at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. In the 90’s I taught the advanced jazz improvisation class at the school. I composed this altered blues during the class as an example of how to write a jazz tune. When the tune was complete, I asked the students to name it. They are the ones who chose Alien Cyclops Pickles, because that’s what it sounded like to them.

There are a lot of dissonances in this trumpet quartet version of Alien Cyclops Pickles. All of the dissonances are derived from the chord progression. So, they are functional and almost pleasant to the ear.

The form of this piece plays out like a jazz band arrangement. There’s an intro, the head (2X), then each member of the quartet takes a solo (written out), then there is an ensemble tutti section, a modulation to the shout section (the climax of the composition), a brief return to the head, and then a tag/outro/coda to finish with a bang.

On a personal note, Alien Cyclops Pickles has a lot of meaning to me. It’s “life” began in my improv class, but my jazz group, Living Rhythms, performed it several times over the years. On one of those occasions, we performed it in Corpus Christi at the Texas Jazz Festival. I had David Caceres (the best jazz musician I’ve ever worked with) and Malcolm Pinson (a legendary Houston drummer) in the band and people were talking about that performance long afterward.