One of the tunes the concert band has been working on is an arrangement of Joe Zawinul’s Birdland.

Many bassists will know the Weather Report version, where Jaco Pastorious jumps straight into “follow me if you dare” territory by playing the main theme using a series of artificial harmonics to step far above the range normally expected from bass guitar. This version is somewhat simpler but that isn’t to suggest that it is easy.

Of particular interest in this recording (and a couple of others of the same arrangement) is a short bass solo at 0:50 which isn’t included in the notation. I know a couple of the other players have ‘solo’ written in and just a series of chords at various points but there’s not even a hint in my score. I’ve chatted with the conductor though and got the go ahead to work up this little featurette but it certainly comes with a learning curve.

I had been using Audacity to loop and slow down the section in question and had scribbled out a first draft but it was somewhat complex to follow. This evening, I decided to load the track up in Reaper, primarily just to play along with it multiple times and try and get it in my ears and fingers. I discovered that Reaper also has the ability to slow down a track without changing the pitch and also to estimate tempo. With those two tools, I got the piece roughly lined up on a beat based grid and used that to help focus in and refine my transcription.

The result? It still looks like about the hardest thing to play out of the entire pad but I’ve found a few spots where it made sense to simplify the notation a little and I’ve done a lot more playing along with it at various tempos. More practise needed but I might be ready to unleash it next week.