Pura Alegria Brass Sextet and Keyboard

Description

Pura Alegria Brass Sextet

3 Trumpets, 3 Trombones and Keyboard

Composed for the Stirling High School Brass Ensemble,
in East London, South Africa

By Eddie Lewis

Spice up your brass program with this Latin tinged composition for three trumpets, three trombones and keyboard. Pura Alegria is one of Eddie Lewis’ “en clave” compositions, where every rhythm from every phrase in the piece is derived from the clave.

The clave is a rhythm from west Africa that came to the tropical islands with the slaves. From there, hundreds of years later, the rhythm became the underlying groove for a number of modern Latin dance music styles. Eddie Lewis was exposed to the clave rhythms during a period of twenty years when he was making his living primarily as a salsa trumpet player.

While Eddie’s compositions are not salsa, his writing has been forever influenced by that music and the people. And that influence is not limited to only the rhythms. We are only emphasizing the rhythms here because of the prominence of the clave in Pura Alegria.

Stirling High School, East London, South Africa

Eddie composed Pura Alegria for the students in the brass ensemble at Stirling High School in East London, South Africa. The students prepared it as part of a presentation and Eddie was honored to contribute something for them to work on and perform.

The request came from Eddie’s good friend, Leonard Brandt. Leonard is a professional trumpet player in South Africa and also teaches applied brass at the high school. When Eddie was in South Africa for the jazz festival in Grahamstown (2016), Leonard arranged a personal performance of Pura Alegria for him in one of the empty classrooms. The composition was a smashing success and the students and the audience all enjoyed it!

Skill Level

When Eddie does a commission, he goes to great lengths to map out the skills of the individual players. Often times, his method’s skill levels don’t apply. Please keep in mind that skill levels in published music are not about how good the students are. Students will always have mixed skill sets. That’s part of what it means to be human. We are good at some things and bad at others.

So the skills of the individual parts in Pura Alegria are varied, not only from part to part, but from skill to skill.

That said, the highest note in the first trumpet part is written high C, and the rhythms are syncopated (because of the clave influence). We would put most of that first part in our Trumpet Pro skill level.

The highest note in the second part is written A above the staff. The highest note in the third trumpet part is top line F.

Practice Recommendations

Pay special attention to the articulations, which can feel a little awkward, but really make the piece. Sometimes the eighth-notes are long and the quarter-notes are short. Other times the quarter-notes are long and the eighth-notes are short.

Also be careful with the dynamics. There will be a tendency to play the entire piece too loud. Because it feels like that kind of piece. However, if you play it that way, it will ruin some of the compositional effects. This is especially true for the keyboard. If you are performing with a keyboard, not an acoustic piano, then what’s the amplification that it doesn’t bury the rest of the ensemble. You cannot have the keyboard set to the same volume as you would for a full jazz ensemble class.

Other than that, have fun with this piece. The name, Pura Alegria, in English means “Pure Joy!” The rhythms are delightful and the melodies are infectious.

Pura Alegria Free Trumpet Play-Along

We have a free trumpet play-along for Pura Alegria in our You Play First Chair video series. The original purpose of the series is educational. Trumpet students from around the world are using these play-along videos to practice their sight reading. But the videos also offer a wonderful opportunity for trumpet players to try these sheet music compositions and arrangements before they purchase them. To access the play-along video for Pura Alegria, please click on the following button:

Pura Alegria Demo Video

The demo video for this brass sextet was published under our Just Friends video series. The Just Friends series is a video series where I invite friends to come over and record some music with me. We started with Ricky Diaz (wonderful pianist and band leader), then Abe Cosse (tuba player from New Orleans) and now we are featuring Carl Muller, one of Houston’s professional trombone players.