Encores are too long. This one is a minute and a half but there are a lot of notes. Mostly in 5, it’s a bombastic zoom up and down various arpeggios, always tongue-in-cheek (which makes it a lot harder to play). For use as the encore to the recital for which it was written (as is the case here), before…
So Bombasticity it is. It is a feeble, trombone-like made up word, it doesn’t say Love and Peace, and it doesn’t mean what I thought it might have done even if it was a word! But it has the hook, and if I made it up, it means what I want it to: just a bit of a swashbuckle.
The hook here, and hence the title, is two repeated notes, with which the whole band joins in several times, and maybe the audience/street-liners after the end as well.
This was originally a ‘chops break’ piece for Bones Apart, a simple tune that would be sparing on the embouchure and would therefore be a valuable asset in a concert programme. But though it’s short (3 minutes) and has only simple slow notes in it, I discovered having finished it that the ideal chops break is in fact called a…
