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Between Two Oceans

3/3/98 (rev 2025) for jazz big band​

A suite of three pieces:

  1. Good Hope
  2. Copernicus
  3. Ninety Mile Beach

Originally written in 1998 for Steve Kettley's 'Odd Times' (but I think never performed by them), now substantially revised and rescored for big band.

The first piece to be written was titled after my mother's visit to Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand, which is one of the places in the world where one can see two oceans at once. From the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa (which I have myself visited) one can see both the Indian and Atlantic oceans; Copernicus is a crater on the moon lying between Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Tranquility, and Oceanus Procellarus, the Ocean of Storms. Neither my mother nor I have been to the moon.

The original sketch for Copernicus, written on a plane to Venezuala:

Scores and demos (musescore)​

All of these are perhaps not quite finished, a little bit of tidying up needed and decisions about who the soloists will be:

Notes​

The last movement 'Ninety Mile Beach' was rearranged at one point for Invention Ensemble and performed by them on a number of occasions. For fun, here's that original midi demo:

ninetymilebeach.mp3 ) (1'17, 1.5 MB)

Durations​

  1. Good Hope 7-8'
  2. Copernicus 6-7'
  3. Ninety Mile Beach 5-6'

Total 18-21 minutes.