Jared Burchfield Music

Hello and thank you so much for visiting my website! My name is Jared Burchfield, and I am a freelance clarinetist from Cleveland, Tennessee. I play local gigs in the Chattanooga/Cleveland TN area, repair woodwind instruments, produce and write my own music, and teach applied lessons on clarinet and saxophone. In addition to playing clarinet, I also have a good deal of experience playing bass clarinet as well as alto, tenor and baritone saxophone. I am currently pursuing my masters degree in clarinet performance from Lee University starting in the fall of 2025.

If you need to contact me, you can contact me by email using the contact information found on the About page of this website.

Feel free to look around and as always enjoy the 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!

I have just finished and released my latest album, Diminished Tuesday. It should be appearing on all major streaming services within a week or so. This was a big project and school is starting back so I am probably going to take a break from recording. I do plan to release a Christmas Album around late November or so that consists of various Christmas tunes I have covered and arranged over the years, but there probably won’t be any more big album releases for a while as I would like to focus on other projects. One of these includes getting some sheet music up on the Compositions page on this site. In other news, I will probably be taking the song “The D Funky” and “Another Funky Tune” off of streaming services soon, as I think these songs didn’t really turn out the way I had hoped. They were rushed and could have had more development, not to mention my poor trumpet playing on “The D Funky.” I plan to re-release these songs as part of a new album once they are more presentable. Thanks for visiting the site and I hope you enjoy the music!

I have just released a new album of tunes that I recorded with my friend Luke Mercer, who is a great drummer and keyboard player. He and I wrote all of the songs on this album together and we are pleased to release it to the public. I plan to release another volume of our work together later on, but this is the first volume. Special thanks to Luke Mercer and his family, and to One Strum Media for their support and involvement in this album!

I am currently working on my newest album, Diminished Tuesday. It will feature songs that span across a number of styles from Bossa Nova to Dixieland Jazz. It is a work in progress as school has been eating up a lot of my time, but I work on whenever I can. I will release it to Apple Music, Spotify and many other music platforms when it is complete. Thanks again for visiting the site and listening to my music!