Cappuccino Break

YCS008 Cavin Adams Cappuccino Break

This is a jazzy piece for tenor and piano that sounds like its title.  With a range of two octaves plus a Major third, it gives my tenor a workout, including some high notes never used before!  Although the performing instructions state "cool and relaxed", it is fairly complex rhythmically and uses slides and flutter tonguing, and includes three sections where you can either play what the composer has specified or go off on your own improvisational frenzy.  Since two of these are towards the end, the performer has been set up with many wonderful ideas that could easily blossom into an improvisation.  But the material the composer has written is also great.  Such a choice to make!  The piece ends with a "non-optional" improvisation against the specified piano accompaniment.  This is a short piece (78 measures in total), but packed with interesting melodic and harmonic ideas.  There are no ad lib sections in the piano part, and it can be sight-read by a pianist with a good sense of rhythm.  This is a very valuable addition to the somewhat limited repertoire of original compositions for tenor recorder and piano.

Susan Groskreutz, American Recorder, September 2001

YCS008 Cavin Adams Cappuccino Break

This was the winner in the Under 18 Composition Section and is a winner in these pages too!  The piano part is comfortable, the recorder line covers the whole range to topmost E (for which, along with the neighbouring E-flat, fingerings are given) in a soaring jazzy melody that is marked, hopefully, "cool and relaxed".  The composer has given the player three chances of ad-libbing, though he'll need to be good to improve on the original.  There are some flutter-tongued triplets and some glissandos but nothing way-out.  The accompanied tenor-solo repertoire is still pretty small, which makes this addition most welcome, especially as it adds a new flavour to that repertoire.

Paul Clark, The Recorder Magazine, Winter 2000, Vol. 21 no. 4