About Us
Lush Life Music : We’re all about big band charts and transcriptions. We are a group of bandleaders and arrangers with many years of experience playing in and arranging for Big Bands. We specialise in transcriptions of the classic charts from the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s and are steadily increasing our catalogue, which now comprises over 700 arrangements for big band and jazz ensemble.
Many of the charts that are offered on this site have been done as a result of direct requests from our customers. If you feel that you would like to see a chart made available on this site, please send us a request using the form on our Contact Us page, and we will see what can be done. Whilst we can make no guarantees, what we can say is that if we can secure the necessary usage licenses from the song owners and the chart is a good fit for our catalogue, we will do our best to make it available.
Here is some information on some of the arrangers whose work is featured on this site:
- Jon Harpin
- Jon Harpin studied trumpet and piano, graduating from The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He subsequently worked free-lance in Glasgow in a variety of jazz and big band contexts, before working on cruise ships as a musician. Jon now lives in Trowbridge Wiltshire and plays lead trumpet for bands in Bristol and the South West of England. He has a strong interest in the music of Duke Ellington and has transcribed some of his more obscure pieces.
- Myles Collins
- Myles is the founder of Lush Life Music. His transcriptions and arrangements are now in the libraries of many bands in Europe, the USA and worldwide. He is dedicated to the task of recreating and bringing back the classic Big Band charts of the swing era, most of which were never commercially issued in their genuine original form. Myles is married to jazz vocalist Nou Nou and is based in Australia.
- Klaus Lessmann
- Klaus Lessmann hails from Burghausen in Germany. He studied classical music and jazz at the Musikhochschule Graz (Austria) and has been living in Siena, Italy since 1986. Klaus teaches jazz (clarinet, saxophone, combo, big band, arrangement) at the school of the ‘Associazione Siena Jazz’ and he is also the Italian regional coordinator of the International Aasociation of Schools of Jazz (IASJ). He performs with all sorts of groups, playing swing, dixieland and gypsy jazz to contemporary stuff. He is heavily involved with the Siena Jazz Big Band, which dedicates much of its time to two great musicians: Duke Ellington (with transcriptions of the originals, mainly of the thirties and forties) and Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (with original arrangements of the band’s greatest hits). He also writes a lot for his clarinet quartet and has had two study books published by ‘Ricordi’.
- Carl Fritsche
- Carl Fritsche is a Composer, Arranger, and trombone player from Eatontown, New Jersey, U.S.A. Inspired by his father’s love of the trombone, he first picked up the instrument when he was eight years old and became an instant lover of big band jazz when he joined his school stage band in seventh grade. During his senior year in high school Carl began writing and arranging his own music. Graduating with a degree in Arranging and Composition and a minor in Audio Engineering from the Berklee College Of Music in Boston,. He worked on both ends of the microphone as a part time recording engineer and sound technician and as a studio trombone player. His diverse musical tastes include classical music and rock and roll, in addition to his love for big bands. He has also maintained an interest in Drum and Bugle Corps ever since he marched with the Eatontown, New Jersey Royales when he was in high school.