In college I took a Harmony class which included composing a tune on the piano. The March of the Dwarves was my contribution. Later, when I was working on The Rock and Roll Wedding project, I thought about scoring The March of the Dwarves for a marching band as part of the finale. Carl Smith, the leader of the Portland big band, the Natural Gas, recommended Larry Dunlap, who had scored for marching bands before. Larry listened to a cassette recording of the piano version and created an arrangement. Carl did beautiful manuscript work on the individual parts. Joseph Adams, who helped a lot on the Rock and Roll Wedding project, played the sax parts and used a synthesizer for all the other wind and brass instruments. I used a LinnDrum machine to do the percussion. We recorded it on a Fostex 8-track. I had Larry write horn section scores for most of the album’s tunes and Carl created the charts. Interestingly, another great local artist, Carlee Smith, Carl’s daughter, now sings regularly with Seymour the Band.
I started to negotiate with a local high school band to play it in the Rose Festival parade, but the seed didn’t sprout.
Perhaps some day…
© 2015 Love Seed, LLC
