Counting At Rosewood
03/03/03
The year was 2003, and Dave Holland’s quintet was the critic’s darling at the time. People were comparing it to Miles’ second quintet. In our little weekly session in Joe Bagg’s converted tool shed on Rosewood St. in Riverside, we were struggling through some of Holland’s tune’s like “Looking Up” and “The Balance”. “Counting At Rosewood” was written with these tunes in mind and as an attempt to help gain some fluency with mixed meters. It’s written in an 11 beat cycle and originally I thought of it as a measure of 6/4 alternating with 5/4. Years later, after using it in my sight reading class at Musician’s Institute, I found it was easier to feel if it was written as 3 measures of 3/4 and a measure of 2/4. The counter melody was written only recently when revisiting the tune in 2021.
