Appalachia Re-Imagined: Appalachian Folk Songs Arranged For Jazz Sextet

The combination of genres is nothing new; different traditions have influenced each other throughout the known history of music. There are numerous examples of this happening specifically with jazz: Latin-influenced jazz has a wide variety of subcategories, the hard bop era had a significant influence from more popular forms of funk and soul, and jazz fusion is the combination of jazz and rock. For this project, I arranged four Appalachian folk songs and one original song to be performed by a jazz sextet. The goals of the project were threefold: to build more knowledge of arranging techniques and formats, to create a work that would honor my Appalachian roots in a genuine and original way while paying dues to the jazz tradition, and to give and roughly document a performance of all original arrangements that was separate from my senior recital.