article How to start your own quintet

How to build your own jazz quintet

Start with twenty five jazz players in your band. Don’t fall out with anyone because you might need them as deps after they leave. If you ask others to join you then they’ll want to know much they’ll be paid. Can’t it just be a quartet, they’ll ask - more money to share from each gig.

If others ask to come in to your band that’s better but you’ll end up with a blues guitar specialist, a professional viola player and a soprano sax. Your keyboard player will get fed up with playing the walking bass part, and you’ll all get fed up with using the electronic drum beats on the keyboard because you have got neither a bass player nor a drummer – but there is a good classical violinist who wants to join. Secretly you yourself want a conga player but no one else seems interested.

Every member of your band will give you a list of the songs they want the band to play. If they are singers then they’ll bring you manuscripts of the original show tunes and you’ll have to re-write the chords for jazz. You’ll also have to transpose them for different instruments. The keyboard player will just bring you the chords because he/she does not play the dots. Chords will be no use to classically trained soloists who will generally improvise around the melody. The way to stop them all bringing you new songs is to tell them that they have to do the manuscript transcription, not you, and they’ll immediately want to play your songs after all.

When you get a singer, he/she will want all the songs to be transposed to another key. The keyboard player does not mind this because he has got a little device enabling this to happen easily.