Ofam 2018: "centerpiece" at Oregon Festival of American Music at John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts

Vicki Brabham's muse, she tells us, was a book: a collection of unpublished lead sheets of classic Broadway songs and jazz standards transcribed and collated by a group of students at Berklee School of Music in Boston during the 1970s as a way of facilitating the playing and teaching classic jazz improvisation. The Real Book was (and remains) a must-have for professional musicians; Vicki ran into as a high school student in the '80s while serving as accompanist for a community college class — an “ah-ha moment” for her of sorts, a heightened awareness of the full extent of the rich creative potential that she could tap in the classic show tunes as a jazz musician and arranger...

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Vicki Brabham's muse, she tells us, was a book: a collection of unpublished lead sheets of classic Broadway songs and jazz standards transcribed and collated by a group of students at Berklee School of Music in Boston during the 1970s as a way of facilitating the playing and teaching classic jazz improvisation. The Real Book was (and remains) a must-have for professional musicians; Vicki ran into as a high school student in the '80s while serving as accompanist for a community college class — an “ah-ha moment” for her of sorts, a heightened awareness of the full extent of the rich creative potential that she could tap in the classic show tunes as a jazz musician and arranger. The book has served as an important source of inspiration for her, as it does for so many working musicians, to this day. For this concert, Vicki and friends pay tribute to that inspiration in a celebration of the Broadway songbook as jazz.

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