Minor Scene – Gene Roland

Our main purpose at jazzleadsheets.com is to make the melody and chord progression of jazz titles available so you can perform the compositions yourself. When Gene Roland created and recorded his arrangement of Minor Scene, his goal was to create an interesting octet arrangement. In doing so, he gave the melody to different instruments in turn. Rather than outline the format of the arrangement, we've written out the AABA melody intact for each edition. Gene's expanded coda ending from the arrangement is in all lead sheets. Our audio excerpt starts with the melody.

Gene Roland had been writing arrangements for big bands since the mid 1940s, when he started with Stan Kenton. Jazzleadsheets.com has two of his classic originals for the Kenton band: Opus In Chartreuse recorded in 1955, and Opus In Turquoise, recorded in 1956. There's more historical information regarding Gene included with those entries. In 1959, before the session featured here, Gene was still cranking out great arrangements for Kenton. He liked writing for any instrumentation, but he wrote this session for his octet.

Don Sickler: "I was invited to play in a new band Gene was putting together in NYC in the 1970s. It was a short-lived project. I can't remember the exact instrumentation of the band. It could have been an octet, but I think there were a couple more horns. Anyway, Gene had just a few arrangements for this new horn configuration. I remember he said he liked the blend of the instruments. After the first rehearsal, he called another rehearsal for the next week. When we arrived the following week I was floored when he produced over 15 more arrangements for the same instrumentation. He'd not only arranged them, but he'd copied out all the parts. Obviously, he was a very prolific writer!"