Cinnamon Tea

For 17-Part Big Band & Vocal Soloist

Duration

6:30

Premiere

December 18th, 2024

By the members of the

MiraCosta Oceanside Jazz Orchestra

and vocalist

Natelie Espinoza

Movements

Single

My one and only original piece of Big Band music is an expression of everything I learned and sought after during my Jazz studies at MiraCosta College. This difficult Jazz Waltz, inspired by my nightly ritual of late-night herbal tea, utilizes "cinnamon theory", a cheeky form of serialism that involves traversing the bass of each harmony up a fully diminished tetrad followed immediately by a fully augmented triad. While not atonal per-se, Cinnamon Tea still aims to present quirky dissonant figures in loud, blaring fashion ala Stan Kenton.

"Cinnamon Theory"

"Cinnamon Theory" was one of my earliest experiments with what I would later discover to be serialism. It functioned as a sort of 'harmonic guide' to my rejection of traditional Jazz Harmony, governed by tertian intervals rather than the circle of fifths ala the "ii-V-I". In instances where these tertian progressions werent 'working for me' however, some liberties were taken in applying chords in between the progression of the sequence, for example, the tritone-substituted V in the below example. Heavy use of extensions such as the 11 and 13 aided voice leading tremendously and gives "Cinnamon Tea" its characteristic sound.

The 'Cinnamon Sequence' diamond in Eb (left),

Practical Application of sequence in Cinnamon Tea (right)

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