For the last 25 years or so I’ve been doing a fair amount of composing, arranging, and orchestrating for orchestra.  I first got into it writing for TV shows, and have accumulated a pretty formidable library of cues from this film or that TV show.  And writing to picture is still one of my very favorite things in the world.  But in the last several years a lot of great opportunities have arisen to write and arrange for live orchestras, especially for the incredible Herbie Hancock.  Lately that has broadened out to include such artists as Residenté, the great rapper from Puerto Rico, for whom I did 4 arrangements for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Below is a sampling of a bunch of the work I’ve done in this world;  I am always looking for more opportunities to enjoin with the wealth of talent and colors the orchestra world provides!

Play America The demo of an arrangement I did for Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, who were working on a duo CD; this is “America” from West Side Story. Dig the “classical piano” I came up with for Lang Lang; this project got shelved, but the arrangments burn pretty hard!

Play I Have A Dream My arrangement of Herbie’s “I Have A Dream” for the LA Philharmonic.  Quite an odyssey, this this gorgeous tune, and it was just stunning with Herbie and the Phil playing it;  this is me on piano (and on the “guitar” solo!), you can only imagine what this was like with Herbie on it!  4-minute standing ovation after we played this one at Disney Hall on March 5, 2020…

Play Ostinato: Suite for Angela The other long-form piece from Herbie’s “Power To The People” performance with the LA Phil.  On this one, the original tune is mostly just that 2-bar riff, the ostinato, and the incredible imaginations of Herbie and band;  everything else in this arrangement I built around that 5 seconds of information, keeping it playing through the whole piece on every variety of orchestration.  The whole last chunk is a sax solo, and again, me doing my “Poor Man’s Herbie” on piano on this one.  Fun as hell, and Herbie’s band and the Phil of course crushed it.  Samples of Angela Davis played great in the middle, too!

Play Dreamer A chunk of film score I wrote and orchestrated, recorded live at Fox Newman Studios with a 45-piece orchestra. This was a scene from “Dreamer”, the great girl-loves-horse story, and this played under the climactic horse race at the very end. Written for ASCAP’s Film and TV Scoring Workshop with Richard Bellis, where I was awarded the Harold Arlen Award for best score, yeah baby!

Play Apocolipto One of 4 arrangements I did for the great rapper and social force Residenté and the LA Philharmonic, played March 7, 2020.  Residenté’s music has great purpose;  this piece is a great one about the environment;  even translated into English the lyrics were still quiet poetic.  These played beautifully, and he is a different sort of energy than you usually see with the Phil, huge fun!  The people at the Philharmonic asked me to extend these some, and I thought it was a good idea to let the orchestra run sometimes, too, so I wrote the last 1:45 (and an intro, too) on this one myself.

Play Chameleon Herbie hired me to write 3 orchestra arrangements to play at the LA Phil’s 100th anniversary concert at the Hollywood Bowl and at Disney Hall a couple weeks later. And the idea was to just GO FOR IT, so we really did…!  I’m playing piano on the demo here.  At the rehearsal with the Phil Gustavo Dudamel turned to me to ask what it meant that the chart said “Flush the Toilet” at the end, and I explained that that meant to give Vinnie Colaiuta a nice chance to fill things up on the drums over the fermata.

Play New York, New York (It's a Helluva Town) The late, great Glen Roven put together a CD called “Keys To The City” full of New York-based pianists each playing a New York-themed tune.  LOTTA great piano players on it, Dick Hyman, Paul Schaeffer, Robbie Kondor, Billy Stritch.  Glen asked me to “do that thing I do” and put together some kind of vivid arrangement of something.  All the most obvious tunes were already spoken for, so I decided to do a weird-in-a-New-York kind of kinetic arrangement of this tune, trying to capture that way that everybody in New York goes at it twice as fast because their f’ing RENT IS TWICE AS HIGH!  But when I do stuff like this I always take care that the melody still fits perfectly with the lyric.  Why is it in 7/8?  I don’t know, why was there a car on fire on my block in Brooklyn every Friday night?  And yes, that is me on the mic in the middle doing the Subway Announcement and at the end doing the garbage truck driver.

Play Footprints This is an arrangement in the works for Herbie and Wayne Shorter.  Herbie gave me this assignment:  Take some incredible duo performances he’d done with Wayne and build orchestral arrangements around them.  So what you hear on this track is a live concert performance by Herbie and Wayne, and I built the orchestra around what they did that night. As I was listening to the duo hit in Herbie’s studio, I asked him “so did you and Wayne used to do stuff like this at soundcheck on a Miles gig?” And I loved his answer: “Oh hell no, we could never have done this kind of thing back then”. 79 now and still expanding exponentially, a real role model. Hell of a fun project, this!

Play Butterfly Another of the LA Phil 100th Anniversary arrangements for Herbie.  This piece, on “Thrust”, probably as much as any other as I was getting into jazz, touched me with the incredible soulfulness of it;  Herbie’s solo on the original is so incredibly spacious and beautiful and inventive.  This tune was one of those that was like a lifeline to to a lonely kid in my teenage years, I wore my precious vinyl out on this one cut and had to spray the record with this kind of lubricant goo called “DiscSaver” to keep it playing.  On this one I took Herbie’s beautiful horn arrangements on “Speak Like A Child” as my inspiration for a nice warm sound.

Play Rockit The third Herbie/LA Phil piece, Herbie’s classic tune, and again, I got the message to just use my imagination.  Dig where it goes by the end, this big cascade…!  Like the others, this is the demo with me doing my 20% Herbie impression on piano.

Play Don't Give Up My warm strings/horns orchestral backing is featured in this cut from Herbie Hancock’s “Imagine Project”, featuring John Legend and Pink on vocals, and the most gorgeous touch ever to grace a piano on the piano…

Play Somewhere Here’s another arrangement from the Herbie/Lang Lang project. My original concept was more spacious with the pianos; I envisioned it as a kind of “touch piece” rather than quite such a florid thing on the Lang Lang part, at least. But Clive Davis, who was digging the project, wanted me to “challenge our piano players more” (as if!), so I wrote more piano in there.

Play Sonrisa Another of the Herbie/Wayne pieces, this is Herbie’s great tune “Sonrisa”. And again, the original duo recording is a completely spontaneous on-the-spot version that was probably 180 degrees away from the previous night’s performance.