Jazz Suite (Clarinet & Piano)

Program Note: I wrote this piece for my friends Ben Coleman & Kee Poh Lim while we were students at Queens College, and it’s one of the few pieces from my student days that I’m still proud to have in my catalogue.  It has been performed in several U.S. venues, but also in Canada and Europe. I began the piece as part of a jazz composition class that I was taking with the famous saxophonist and composer, Jimmy Heath.  I was only a sophomore, and the rest of the class were all graduate students who knew the vocabulary of jazz forwards and backwards.  I spent much of the semester playing catch-up, but got the basics down by the end.