The audio excerpt starts at the beginning of the track, with the melody. There's a lot going on, so this head will require some rehearsal time. Our lead sheets show the melody along with cues when short sections of the melody are played by vibes on the recording, so each instrument has the whole melody covered. Second part editions are available, also with cued sections that were played by guitar on the recording. Second parts will work in any quintet format.
To keep the arrangement of the recording intact, a Vibes and Guitar edition are also available.
All the information for the entire group is in the C treble clef lead sheet, so the arrangement can be played by a trio.
"Yardbird Suite" was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's legendary
Hackensack Studio.
The first Eddie Costa composition on jazzleadsheets.com,
Blues Plus Eight, had Eddie playing piano on the recording, and it was recorded two months after this one. The "
Yardbird Suite" session features Eddie playing vibes, which is the instrument most people associate with him. In 1957, however, Eddie won
both Downbeat Critics Poll awards, Vibes and Piano. Within the two months separating these two dates, he recorded four more sessions, one of which was at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 6.
Maybe some of you didn't know that flutist Herbie Mann also plays tenor sax. Here's your chance to check him out on tenor.
Eddie Costa was a great creative talent who unfortunately died young. The Lord jazz discography lists him as doing 194 sessions between 1950 and 1962. That's an average of sixteen every year.
With no piano in the ensemble on this track,
Joe Puma finds himself as the primary harmonic comper, providing the chordal hits to Costa's start-and-stop melody and laying down a smooth carpet for the up-tempo soloing of the rest of the band.
Guitar players should pay special attention to Puma's seamless voice-leading during his comping, which lends a richness and fluidity to the sound. Puma also takes two As of solo in which he displays his bebop-centric linear concept and articulative abilities.
