Attitude Dance: Jazz Ensemble Conductor Score & Parts

Tower of Power's music has aged brilliantly because it was built on pocket rather than trends. This Mark Taylor adaptation captures the essential DNA of the original while accommodating the instrumentation and read level of developing jazz ensembles. Your students get authentic funk with a six-horn section that sits squarely in the ensemble's sweet spot for power and balance.

Attitude Dance sits in the pocket with infectious confidence. The horn lines cut through with precision while the rhythm section drives a deep, undeniable groove that makes sitting still difficult. This is music built for movement and collective purpose, where every musician's job is clear and the result feels unstoppable.

Jazz ensemble directors working with Grade 3-4 players who are ready to explore funk and soul traditions beyond swing. Students who can read rhythmically complex parts and who benefit from learning how discipline in groove translates to all styles of jazz. Any director looking for material that proves funk is serious music, not a sideline to mainstream repertoire.

• Lock the hi-hat and kick drum pattern first. The groove sits in this relationship; everything else settles into place once the rhythm section owns its pocket.
• Shape the horn fills as call-and-response conversations, not monologues. Notice where one section answers another and give those moments air rather than playing through them.
• Find the ghost notes and syncopations in the rhythm section parts and make them visible. These small articulations are what separates a competent play-through from a performance that grooves.
• Let the soloists breathe. Mark the tempo clearly in rehearsal and then trust your players to navigate their moments. A drummer who owns the groove doesn't need a conductor to get through a solo.

Pair this with a blues or standard earlier in the concert to show how different jazz vocabularies coexist. Attitude Dance works powerfully as the finale to a set because it leaves the audience energized rather than reflective. Consider programming it in the spring when students' ensemble musicianship is tighter and their comfort with syncopation is established.

• Executing syncopated rhythms with precision and swing feel
• Reading and performing funk and soul grooves
• Locking rhythm section parts to create a unified pocket
• Balancing ensemble blend within a six-horn section
• Understanding call-and-response phrasing in horn writing
• Ghost notes and felt rhythm in articulation