updates

• jazzleadsheets.com's new Holiday Classic "Almost Christmas"

  Lena Seikaly (2015 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition semifinalist) is the voice behind jazzleadsheet.com's newest holiday video "Almost Christmas." With a beautiful voice singing a melody as timeless as any of your favorite holiday classics, this is the song you'll want to add to your repertoire!

  Eddie Higgins composed the instrumental version of this song, Moonlight On Kinkakuji, named after a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. It was recorded on Eddie's last album, "Portraits Of Love," in 2008. When lyricist Roger Schore, a longtime friend of Eddie's and of his wife Meredith d'Ambrosio, heard this recording, he was inspired to write a Christmas-themed lyric. "Upon hearing that piece of music, I had the impulse to try and write a lyric for it. For whatever reason, the music and arrangement summoned up images of winter, snow and Christmas." He finished his lyric just in time for Lena to visit the jazzleadsheets.com studio and team up with pianist Cecilia Coleman and 18-year-old bassist Kanoa Mendenhall to record this memorable holiday song.

  This is the latest video from jazzleadsheets.com, a website geared to inspire, educate and supply a new generation of jazz artists with historical as well as current, innovative music. With a captivating performance by rising talents, Almost Christmas is sure to be a new Christmas standard! Especially if you add it to your Christmas repertoire! Of course, Eddie's composition is great for instrumentalists, too.

  Stay in touch; we plan to add more holiday titles in the next few days. Enhance your December gigs with new arrangements!

• New, new and more new.

  Since launching the new look of jazzleadsheets.com a couple of months ago (June 1), we've been creating and posting both a weekly Recording Anniversary Video and a weekly Birthday video. We hope you've had time to check these out. Each week they can be found by clicking on the dots under the NEW ARRIVALS slide on the HOME page.

  This week's Birthdays include four of our composers who have already been on jazzleadsheets.com for some time (Steve Nelson, Eddie Costa, Carl Perkins and Mal Waldron). This week also celebrates the birthdays of two of our composers who are new to jazzleadsheets.com. You may not be familiar with them: arranger/saxophonist Leon Mitchell and pianist Steve Corn.

  Once you've heard their music, however, you'll see why they're part of our family, and their birthdays give us a double reason to celebrate their music.

  Because we wouldn't have known about Steve Corn and his great music without composer/pianist Steve Allee, we thought this would also be the perfect week to introduce Steve Allee's wonderful music to jazzleadsheets.com. We feel it's also very important to see artists perform, so we're also posting a video of Steve performing his Morning Glory (solo piano - recorded at the Rudy Van Gelder studio). Now that we have the ability to include video on our site, we're also posting a video of Steve Allee telling you more about Steve Corn on Steve's Who May Climb The Mountain page.

  To round out this week's New Arrivals, we're celebrating trumpeter Ryan Kisor's recording anniversary with two more of his compositions.

  STEVE ALLEE: Morning Glory
  A medium up Latin with a comfortable background for a beautiful melody
  STEVE CORN: Who May Climb The Mountain
  An elastic and floating bossa
  RYAN KISOR: The Dream and Panic Attack
  A lyrical waltz and a challenging uptempo swing
  LEON MITCHELL: Late Spring
  A medium swing from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers book, with second parts

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