Sea Zora Village (Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) Symphonic big band jazz cover - Joe Landry

Turning the beautiful zora theme from Echoes of Wisdom into a symphonic big band jazz ballad!

Sheet music - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/d0sinz...
Email - [email protected]
Instagram - sphalt_joe
Twitter - LeGeaiBleu

Oh god this was a lot of work, but it came out great! I believe this is the first time I upload a musical project this big on my YouTube channel, I've made a couple similar in scale this past year but they were for other projects (I'll probably upload them in the future 🙂). This is now my favorite ensemble to write and perform all the parts for, I call it a symphonic big band but it really doesn't have an official name as it's not common. It includes a regular big band, so 5 saxophones (+1 as a soloist in this arrangement), 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, drums, piano, guitar, bass and percussion; a string ensemble with violins, violas and cellos; a woodwind section with 4 flutes, 3 clarinets and a bass clarinet; a choir and some other fun instruments like accordion. All of these parts are actually played live by me with the only exception being the string ensemble, which is programmed since I don't feel confident in my violin skills yet. One thing I love about this is that usually, big band charts have sax players switch instruments to play flute and clarinet parts, but I like always being able to use all of them!

As for the arrangement itself, I had a lot of trouble deciding between making it a swing ballad or a bossa nova. As you can see, I ended up doing both! Telling a story through music has become my #1 objective with these arrangements, and I feel like the groove change that happens near the end makes this piece evolve in a very natural way. For this tune, I've reharmed quite a few parts from the original to make it more and more exciting and jazzy as it goes on. Oh hey also, I wrote a full sax soli for this! This was very fun to write and record, a bit of a challenge since I don't have an alto saxophone, so I had to go in the altissimo register a lot with the lead part, but I feel like my altissimo playing on saxophone sounds good enough that it doesn't stand out too much when it happens.

Thanks for watching, it means a lot!