Blue Interlude – Kenny Dorham

Don Sickler: "Our audio excerpt starts at the beginning of the track, with drummer Art Taylor playing his own version of the 12-measure melody. A.T. told me that this was K.D's idea, which A.T. loved."

This head is the definition of "hard" as in "hard bop"! The rhythmic melody and accompanying figures have a no-nonsense drive, an infectious momentum. Much of the melody lines up with rhythm section hits, with a different chord on each hit. This reharmonization of a blues uses a mostly descending progression; from B♭ minor in the fifth measure to C7 in the tenth measure the root motion is entirely stepwise descent. The solo changes are closely related, slightly simplified but keeping the general descending quality.

This song is subtly a drum feature, with the head's rhythm section activity. An interesting drum shout chorus is played twice before the out head, which contains a 3-measure and a 2-measure drum break. Like the drum shout of Philly Twist, the melody of this chorus is related to the head but goes in a few different directions; the drums actually lay out on the two "turnaround" measures between the two breaks in this chorus.

Full Score and parts are available for the quintet arrangement. As the 2nd horn part goes very low in the range of the tenor sax, our E♭ second part is a baritone sax part instead of alto sax. Alto players can read the same part and transpose down an octave where it is above the 1st part melody; passages that would be in octaves, if tenor or baritone had the 2nd part, will thus be unison instead.

Don Sickler: "Missing bass note? In the eighth measure of the melody, Paul Chambers also plays the root on the 4th beat in the first melody chorus and on the one-chorus out melody. On the second chorus of the opening melody he rests the 4th beat. Which is correct? Fortunately A.T. gave me a copy of K.D.'s original bass part which clearly shows a quarter note rest on the 4th beat each time, so our bass edition is written that way."