Robert Elkjer quartets

[tbdana]

If you like to play trombone quartets and you're not familiar those by Robert Elkjer, I recommend getting them. If you're not a snooty purist, you'll probably have fun. Audiences always love them. Always interesting, always fun, always challenging, and they always sound good. He does classical, jazz, holiday, patriotic, and even pop tunes.

Bob is a great guy. He's a piano player who for some reason loves writing for brass, and especially trombone. I dunno, just a personality defect, I guess. LOL! But we get some fun stuff from his trombone fetish.

Here's his version of St. Thomas, which is fun to play as fast as you can.

[hyperbolica]

The quartet I play with has one guy 80+, one guy mid 70s, and other mid 60s and I'm the punk at 58. They're mostly into more traditional quartet stuff, like straight 40s jazz, renaissance stuff, show tunes, etc. I personally have probably a dozen of the sets of a half dozen tunes Elkjer sells for quartets. Out of every collection we find 1 or 2 that we have a desire to work up. Some of his stuff gets a little out there. We've got one that breaks into a bum-ba-dee-da sort of cowboy thing.

It's kind of hard to get these guys interested in playing Elkjer. You know how people get. One person proclaims something a bad arrangement, so you dare not touch that again. We go through some of the Elkjer stuff every couple of years, just to make sure we remember it correctly. We do have a few Elkjers in the book, though, and some are really nice. Usually a tough 1st part, and often a demanding bass part. Both ends have to have a pretty good range. I've seen Elkjer go down to pedal Eb or F, pretty regularly to pedal G.