Frederick Maggio
Les Productions D’Oz: 3 pages
The title refers to a Jazz festival held every year in France and not (as I wondered at first) anything to do with listening to Jazz whilst at your Grandmother’s residence! This relatively short piece is marked to be ‘swung’ so as usual, everything is written in straight quavers, but to be played in triplets with the first note double the length of the second.
This piece proved to be quite complex to get a true hold of, as the two voices it is written in are quite difficult to assimilate and one has to take real care to take notice of the fingerings as marked. Written in E Minor, it has lots of off- beats rhythms and places where you are using unusual figurations that are not as easy to play as they might look, when first glancing at the page, so there are quite a few places that stop you in your tracks until you get a feel of what the composer requires.
Having said that it does successfully capture the jazz style, but in an individual way that is unlike anything I have personally come across before, so with that in mind, this piece is very useful also for any players who need a bit more practice in the off – beat rhythms and strange timings that can occur in jazz inspired pieces.
Chris Dumigan
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