Recently I was reminded of this arrangement of mine. “The South Wind” is a beautiful Irish tune, I first discovered it on Joanie Madden’s album and arranged it at the same time as “Down by the Salley Gardens” but released it only years later (something that happens to me a lot, as I rush to work on new things forgetting about old ones). It ended up to be fairly challenging to play but I’m happy with how I managed to maintain the sense of constant movement in the rhythm and yet avoid tiring repetitiveness by working with contrasts and adding some original motives.
I especially love arranging traditional tunes as they are basically quintessence of the musical culture they belong to, going through many iterations with generations of musicians playing and perfecting them they come out as perfect simple basic unit of music which with the help of decent composing and arranging skills can be developed into something unique and complex.