blues for bruce

Surendran Reddy wrote a number of pieces for his Johannesburg-based jazz ensemble Channel 18 in the late 1980s and 1990s. This quartet featured Reddy on keyboard(s), Denny Lalouette on bass, Rob Watson on drums, and Bruce Cassidy on EVI. blues for bruce uses the musical letters in Bruce Cassidy’s name, as can be clearly seen both on the original hand-written sketch in blue biro (written after the end of another piece, perhaps during a rehearsal), and on the typeset version Reddy made on his Atari computer c1990. A page headed, ‘Concert’ is the 12-bar blues written at concert pitch (in C), and another page is transposed to D for Bruce to play on the EVI. Both have a ‘turnaround’ at the end. All three pages – the page in C, the page in D, and the sketch – are published here, because each has information that is not on the others. Reddy’s comment at the top of p.1 – ‘not for Debbie’ – is probably a reference to Martin Lund’s Blues for Debbie or maybe even Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debbie. No recording of blues for bruce seems to have survived.