Jared Burchfield Music

Well guys, it is approaching the Christmas season once again and you all know what that means. It is time for me to try again to make and release another Christmas album. As some of you who have followed for a while probably know, I have been trying to do this for years, and every time something ends up happening. Either I get too busy with school or I get frustrated during the process and end up running out of time, or something else happens. Anyway, this year I am out of school and I am hoping that I can compile a bunch of tunes from over the years and record a few new tunes in order to create a nice Christmas album for you all to enjoy.

I have entitled this album “A Clarinet Christmas” as it will feature mostly me playing clarinet and bass clarinet, but there will be many other instruments involved including of course the saxes and rhythm section. This is going to be a mix of older and newer tunes from my previously unreleased Christmas music experiments from the past few years even stretching as far back as high school. I have plenty of songs that are pretty much release ready, so why waste time redoing songs that already sound good? That being said though, there are a bunch that don’t sound great at all, and others that have potential but need some polishing so I will likely go back and redo a great many tunes. I hope that this year we can have finally a nice long Christmas album that you all can enjoy for years to come. I would like to have it out by mid December if possible, but like always with Christmas albums I make no guarantees. Thank you all for your support of what I try to do here at jaredsmuzic.com!

Hello everyone and welcome to my website! I just wanted to give you a couple of quick updates on the state of things and the future of me and music. Before anyone panics, my music is not going anywhere and I am not going to stop making music or anything like that. That being said though, I have went through a lot this past year and I have struggled with a great deal of musical burn out. This past year has been so busy and stressful, and creating and really even enjoying music has been kind of on the back burner. Practicing and playing have been at an all time low for me, and my instruments have done a whole lot more sitting then music making this year.

To put it short, there are some big changes coming up in my life in the next few months which may actually allow me a fresh perspective, and the changes may also allow more time to start creating music again. As a result of the changes, I hope to get back into music production again soon, and I have some new ideas of projects that I could work on.

Some of these include redoing some of the songs from Exit 27 and my other older albums. In addition, I have been branching out into other areas of music besides just instrumental jazz and blues inspired stuff, and have experimented with rock music and even some vocal stuff. Do not worry, I have not abandoned the classic use of the woodwinds and of course the wonderful bass clarinet. For context, my experimental vocal album already has 3 big bass clarinet solos and lots of wind involvement. Like always, it will be produced on a small scale in my home studio which I recently upgraded with Cubase Elements which I really like so far.

Who knows what the future may hold? I am just sort of figuring life out right now, but I wanted let you know I am still here and I am still planning to make more music for you to enjoy and of course push the limits of what you can do with a bass clarinet. Thanks again for your continued support and as always, enjoy the music!

For those wanting to buy instruments, I am going to be selling some of my excess instruments that I am not playing as much very soon, so please stay tuned for that!

Hello everyone and thank you for visiting my website! I have released another new single for your enjoyment called “Embrace the Cheese” and it is a very amusing and comical tune that was quite a lot of fun to make. Like many of my better tunes, this song began on Garageband for iOS on my iPad while I was on a trip. I was bored and I was messing with a loop called “70s Latin Piano” and while it was your typical generic loop, it had a good groove to it.

I improvised a bit and came up with the bass line and threw down some percussion using the drummer in Garageband and that brought about the rhythm section that you hear in the first 15 or so seconds of the tune. I thought it was kind of silly, but I decided to play with it more and add some horns to the mix. Now, I am a huge fan of superhero films of all kinds and the music that goes with them and what I created with the horn section was a very simple sort of brass fanfare that I thought resembled some kind of cheesy superhero theme and I kind of ran with that idea for the rest of the tune. As you all know, I love the bass clarinet and I like creating outrageous parts for it to play.

I originally played the bass clarinet part you hear about a minute in on the piano in several takes, and then decided to write it out on Musescore (yes I am a proud Musescore user) and record it on the bass clarinet. I am going to be completely honest here; I didn’t do that bass clarinet part all in one take. It was a bunch of takes actually, as I could play all of the parts separately but could never do it all in one shot. I would have loved to have a bari sax on this tune as well, but unfortunately I can’t afford one of those. Maybe I`ll release this again someday if I ever get a bari sax.

Anyway, in addition to playing the usual woodwind instruments, I also played trumpet, trombone and flute on this tune and I really hope you can hear an improvement in my playing on these horns. Now I am not a professional brass player nor will I claim to be, and you can hear that on this tune particularly with the trumpets. This wasn’t ever meant to be a super polished and professional recording, it was mostly for fun and I think it came out sounding much better than expected for sure. As for the title, “Embrace the Cheese” was a saying that a band director friend of mine always said when playing silly songs with his band and I thought this was a brilliant saying.

When I created this tune, I thought that it was pretty cheesy and that “Embrace the Cheese” would be a most appropriate title for it. I mean the whole band plays the melody in unison when the horns first come in, what is cheesier than that? And that brings us to the senseless album art. You might be wondering what on earth I was thinking when I made this and to be honest, I was just trying to come up with something that was as cheesy as the song that I had just made. In keeping with the superhero theme, I needed a generic and cheesy logo and thought “Well, what is cheesier than poorly drawing a shooting star (the most generic superhero logo ever) in Paint on an old computer?”

The computer in the photo is a 2001 Gateway E-1400 and its basically a cheap home and office machine running Windows XP that is a member of my extensive computer collection, and the monitor in the photo was my very first computer display that I got back in 2006 or so. The clarinet in the photo is my 1970s Bundy that I played on the “Embrace the Cheese” single. Truly this whole thing was a more of an amusing work for me than an attempt at making some professional high end big band arrangement.

This piece really represents several different things to me, but the biggest thing it represents is that music should be fun. It is good for musicians to enjoy their work and create things that are fun to play and listen to, and for them to play and practice music that is fun for them. Music should never be a painful experience where the musicians are so focused on achieving perfection and trying to fit in with the so called “stereotypes” of their instrument or the genre they are playing. Music should give you the freedom to express yourself in any way you see fit. And in my case, that is playing crazy jazz bass clarinet solos and making fun stuff like this with all kinds of different instruments and inspirations. I hope you all can appreciate it and enjoy what I was trying to do. Check it out on any major streaming platform and as always thank you for listening to my music!

I have just finished and uploaded a new single that will show up on streaming services soon. It is called The Cry of Garland and is simply a re-release of the song “The Cry of Garland” from my old album Diminished Tuesday. I was not really satisfied with my performance of the background horn parts in the original, and so I recorded all of those parts again and I think it is a much better performance overall. I also added a more soundscape like intro and outro to the tune. If you recall, this song is based on the beeping of a grill in a restaurant that I used to work at and I added the soundscape to sort of represent the industrial kitchen environment where this grill was located. I know it’s an odd thing to write a song about, but music is an art and people create art about everything. The song was born when I was bored on my shifts and thought “Why not write a song about sounds I hear around me all of the time? It is musical and has pitch, so lets mess with that.” I proceeded to arrange a great deal of my song in my head before I ever wrote it down or recorded right there in the restaurant and that kept my mind busy on the shift. The song also represents a specific time in my life too, a time where I was just struggling through college not sure where I was going or what I was doing. The newness of it all was wearing off, and I was starting to get drug down by all of the requirements and obligations I had to fill. And that was only going to get worse in the next year as I gained a whole new set of obligations. This song both represents a look back to the past, and a look at where I was, and a bit of being unsure about the future. This song also was inspired by my love for marching band in particular as most of the alto sax lines remind me of things that the altos and mellophones would be ripping behind the main melody in marching band. With a little background on the song out of the way, let me update you on the sites future. I am currently completing my student teaching, and that is taking priority over producing music at the moment and will continue to do so as I apply for band director jobs and move into music education, so the next releases not come for a while. The Plastic Sessions and a couple of other things are still in the works though, and hopefully I’ll have it out this year. The instrument sales are on hold for right now, as I really don’t have much time to focus on it but if any horns of mine are to be sold, I will post them here. The instruments and equipment page is slowly turning into a place where I review instruments that I own and encounter and I plan to make new pages with more instrument reviews and organize that more as I go on. I also have some clarinet choir pieces in the works and I will try and get those out soon. As always, thanks for visiting the site and for supporting my music!

This is a very special album release for me, and I figured since I am about to graduate and head into the world of band teaching and music education, this would be a good time to release this sort of legacy album. It is a collection of songs that I have worked on and wrote over the years from about 2016-2019 which have been rewritten and recorded multiple times. Many of these songs come from a previously unreleased album called “Bass Blues” which would have been considered my first actual album. My goal as a self-proclaimed “jazz bass clarinetist” was to prove to the world that bass clarinet was more than just a band/orchestral support instrument but had a unique solo voice that could and should be shared with the world in any style of music. In many ways I can consider this album a journey back in time through my musical development to about 2016 when work on these songs first started. In those days, I thought of music a lot differently. Music was more simplistic and more mysterious to me, and I had this mentality of just making music that sounded good and was fun to play. I didn’t worry about sounding like anyone else or following any composition rules, nor did I care to understand any of that. I just used musical motifs and ideas that sounded good to me and wrote songs based on them. This yielded various results, but at its best I ended up with many of the songs that you will hear on this album. I wasn’t concerned with proper theory and complicated chord progressions or any of that; I just wanted to make music. And believe it or not, I consider some of this some of my best and most genuine music, and here is my reasoning. My thoughts when I sat down to make music back then were about expressing myself and having fun with the musical experience, which is something that I felt like I lost later on in life.

After going into music college, I felt like I was always pressured to “fit the mold” and make my music fit a specific genre. I was so concerned with proper voice leading and theory rules and trying to conform my melodies to the “standard” chord progressions. There were many songs that I wrote that were an attempt and sounding like another artist or trying to be complicated when it was not necessary. While these songs were good, I didn’t feel like they were truly my work. I felt like I was loosing myself and the ability to express myself because I was trying to be the musician that other people expected me to be rather than the musician I wanted to be. No longer could I be a jazz bass clarinetist, I had to be a classical clarinetist or a jazz saxophonist. Now don’t get me wrong, both of those things are a lot of fun and I learned so much from doing those things, but neither of those were really me. I am really a bass clarinetist who just happens to play clarinet and saxophone. Working on this album really helped me to rediscover myself in my music and helped me to understand that it is good to do your own thing. This album is supposed to be more individual and will be kind of different in some ways from my other stuff I have released recently.

You will hear some basic chord voicings and progressions and repetitive melodies, which may lead some to criticize and call it “too simple” or “harmonically boring” but the important thing here is the expression of emotion in the music, not the over complication of something that doesn’t need it. If we all made the same music the exact same way, none of it would be special. And yet that is what so many people seem to push upon us. They impress this idea on us that we always have fit the stereotypes of our instruments. We are told that we must be “traditionally correct” or have to sound and model ourselves after a specific artist or we are not “real musicians” which is a terrible and false message. Music is an emotional thing that is different for everyone and we have the right to interpret it and make it whatever we want it to be. And that is what makes music so beautiful. This is kind of what I am trying to get at with this album, as well as share some of my old tunes with you all. Fun fact: the tracks “The Bass Meets The Blues” and “Suspense and Sorrows” are original unedited recordings of me playing bass clarinet in 2017 in high school. Also, I use the term legacy to describe my musical journey but this is not the end of my music production whatsoever, as I have several albums planned for the future that I will work on outside of education. With all of that being said, enjoy the music!

Hello everyone! I just wanted to update you a little bit. I have a Christmas Album in the works, and an all new collection of tunes from high school and before called Bass Blues and Other Old Tunes. It’s kind of a reflection on my musical journey. Those will be coming out soon, and I have some ideas for a third album that features all of my plastic clarinets. I am about to be student teaching in the spring, and then graduating after that, so content production will probably be slower after this semester. Thanks for your support of my music!

I just uploaded my newest album “A New Season” and it will be appearing in stores soon! Like many of my other releases, this album features a lot of different styles of music and a number of inspirations. This album kind of tells a story about this past year in my life, but more than that it was just a lot of fun to produce. This features 3 songs that were recorded on an Apple eMac G4 which was fun to produce with. It incorporates a number of different instruments, and marks the first recording with flute for me, which is in the background of “The Fondness of Heart.” I also use the Yamaha Portasound keyboards a few times on this album as well as a Buffet E11 Clarinet in A on “Come Back To Me”, which is an instrument that is mostly used in orchestra and doesn’t really appear in jazz; but any instrument can be a jazz instrument if the player wants it to be. I also used a very rare Bundy Mazzeo Model Clarinet on “Bossa Nova Clarinet” and “Childhood Memories.” Of course the Kohlert and the Buffet 1193 from my school held down the bass clarinet work on this album, and the Yamaha YTS-23 on the tenor sax stuff. One other thing is that this album marks the last album that has my schools Selmer Mark VI Bari Sax, as I had to return it this past semester and that was very sad, so enjoy its beautiful low notes one more time.

This album represents the roller coaster of emotions that I experienced this semester, both the good times and the not so good, and a longing for the way things were and a looking back to the past. It also represents a future of teaching music and playing music and expression though new and different styles of music, while not abandoning the old things that I have always had in my music. My goal is to incorporate other styles into my music and be inspired by other musicians, but not become a clone who sounds like and plays like everyone else. Music is expressive and individual and we as musicians should have the right to freely play and write the way we want without having someone tell us that our style is wrong or bad or “traditionally incorrect.” Music is an expression of ones self, and that means different things for different people. There is no such thing as a right or wrong way to play music. ” Take the traditional principles and twist them to make your own style, music is an art after all!

You may notice that of the instruments I list that I used, only one of them is a “professional model” instrument. That was intentional. Most of the horns I own are “student model” instruments and I use them quite a bit. In fact, very note you hear played by a clarinet or a tenor sax on this album was played on some old student model instrument and all of the Bb clarinets used were plastic. I do this on purpose to prove that equipment doesn’t make you a good musician. I enjoy using instruments and equipment that are seen in most people’s eyes as useless or are considered to be not standard, and taking it and doing something really cool with it. Sure it takes more work, and of course people are critical of it, but it’s worth it to make something really unique and special. To add to that, this whole album was produced on a 2008 Mac Pro and a 2004 eMac G4 using Garageband from the iLife 11 and 06 suites respectively. Again, this was done intentionally to prove that you can make good music that people can enjoy on equipment that is not the industry standard. There is so much more to music than what brand or model of instrument you play or what recording equipment you use, and its your right as a musician to make those decisions for yourself. Play what you works best for you and enjoy making music, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. With all of the inspiration stuff out of the way, I hope you can enjoy this album!

I have added to the site a page about my instrument sales service I am now offering. I am trying to make some extra money by repairing and selling old second hand instruments. All of the information about this can be found on the Jared’s Instrument Sales Page. In other news, I am working on a new album called “A New Season” which will hopefully be out by the end of summer. I also have an album called “Bass Blues and Other Old Tunes” which is basically a kind of legacy album that features a number of my very early tunes prior to Exit 27 that were never released or were not included on Exit 27. Thanks for visiting and enjoy the music!

Hello Everyone! This has been a busy semester already and I haven’t had much time to work on songs for the site. Sorry about the Christmas Album as I didn’t finish in time for Christmas. However I did complete it and will release it this coming year around the Christmas season. In other news, I will probably be releasing some singles and EPs soon as I have a few songs I want to release that don’t really fit into an album but I would still like to get out there and I have a plan for a big album of love songs so hopefully I can get that up and running soon. Thank you everyone for your support of my music!

Sorry for the lack of updates, this has been one of the craziest semesters ever. So much opportunity, lots of playing and tons of rehearsals and concerts. Now that the semester is just about over, I thought I would quickly update you all on what is coming up. I am putting the finishing touches on some Christmas tunes that I will release in the next couple of weeks to my usual streaming stations. It will as always feature me on bass clarinet, Bb clarinet, and various saxophones, as well as some brass in the background. My brass playing has improved quite a bit I think and I wanted to put it out to see what other people thought of my progress, please tell me what you think. If there are any other Christmas Tunes you want to hear me do for next years album please mention that in a comment as well. Thank you so much for your continued support of my work and I am so pleased to share my music with you!