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My name is Simon Christopher Buck, and I am a bass-player and composer. This web site introduces and explains my current musical project RIVERBANK 26-27, in which my mission is to  record and perform original big-band jazz music I have written.

BTW, I live next to the river in Hammersmith, London (UK), and my postcode starts SW6, which is the inspiration for the project name (see also SW S¡X). "Tales Of The Riverbank" was the name of a television programme I remember from my childhood, and I have carried out two previous musical projects named (or partly named) after it, and this is the latest.

This is a multi-purpose website: different pages will be of use/interest to different visitors, but is mainly aimed at potential collaborators and parts of the music business itself. This page provides the background and an overview of the RIVERBANK 26-27 project. Each of its four key objectives (see article below) is also discussed in further detail on its own page (see menu at the top of the page).

RIVERBANK 26-27 Project Overview

In the last couple of years, I have written over two dozen contemporary original scores for seventeen-piece big-band, and arranged some of them for six-piece small-band. Project Riverbank 26-27 has the following four main objectives.

• Launch a fundraising initiative to finance a professional recording project of a good portion of that music

• Form a jazz-fusion ensemble to perform the six-piece versions of the same material

• Make "gonzo" recordings of some of the songs (six- and perhaps seventeen-piece arrangements) outside of the professional recording studio using minimal resources

• In the slightly longer term, assemble a seventeen-piece jazz orchestra to give one or more live performances of the recorded material.

Each of these objectives will be addressed in four overlapping phases, which are each discussed separately below. Note also that I have many ideas for further scores in the same genre and continue to compose in parallel to working on this project.

How I Got Here

Three years or so ago (at time of writing) I joined a big-band who played a wide variety of sub-genres of the big-band style, from early swing through post-bop sixties arrangements to jazz fusion and more. I immediately realised that I wanted to write my own material for the big-band instrumental forces, probably in some kind of jazz-fusion style, though I started off with my own arrangement of "Simon Smith And His Amazing Dancing Bear" by Randy Newman. I then tried arranging one of my own non-jazz songs that I had written in the past in sort of a synth-pop style. Since then, (at time of writing) I have finished twenty-seven scores either written specifically for big-band or else arranged for big-band from my own songs.

Tales of the Riverbank '25

In order to move this material out into the world, I decided to make recordings with live musicians of some of these scores. After several false starts I decided to record four songs in a small professional studio. This started with guitar, bass (myself) and drums recording all four songs in a single day with one rehearsal. This recording formed the basis of all subsequent recording, whereby with the help of further very talented and helpful friends I was able build up the full seventeen-piece arrangements one layer at a time, with never more than three musicians in the studio at any one time, often only one or two.

Big Band with Vocals

For one of the songs ("Taken Some Action"), at the end of last summer, I was fortunate that a friend of a friend happened to be in the country for only a few days, and she was able to record both lead vocals plus three-part backing vocals, again in a single day with one rehearsal. I propose to record several numbers with vocals in due course, perhaps with alternative instrumental-only versions also.

Overdubbing, Part-by-Part

Probably the principal reason for choosing this step-by-step approach to recording was the problem of getting seventeen suitable musicians in the same place at the same time! I have had some experience of overdubbing tracks in various contexts, so already knew how readily this could work. All my music is composed using Sibelius score-writing software, which has a built-in comprehensive library of instrumental sounds, and enables a digital demo version of the composition to be automatically generated. It is even possible to export each instrument in the arrangement as a separate audio file, which can then be imported as a multi-track digital recording into the studio's own software: which is what I did, so at all times musicians recording their own live part could opt to hear other parts of the arrangement that had not yet been recorded with live instruments. Over time, one by one,  all of the digital instruments were replaced with real instruments.

​Overdubbing also allows one player to play music intended for more than one, so for example we recorded the four-part trumpet sections with only two, sometimes three trumpeters. Therefore, not only were the entire seventeen players not required to be present at the same time, but we needed fewer than seventeen players in total. Nonetheless, in truth, even co-ordinating small numbers of musicians with studio availability ate up a lot of elapsed time, so the recording, rather than the few weeks I had initially expected, has taken a more than a year to complete!

"Small-Band" (Re-)Arrangements

A short way into the recording process in early summer 2025, I had the idea of making arrangements of the big band scores for a smaller band of six players, with the sort of instrumental lineup of a jazz fusion band in mind. I thought, this might make live performance of the material easier to achieve. As a former software engineer, I was motivated to explore some of the more obscure functionality of Sibelius and was able to develop a set of templates which made it easier for me to create these cut-down arrangements, working directly from my original score. I decided that the bass and drum parts would be exactly the same in both seventeen- and six-part arrangements; this was at least partly decided by wanting to re-use the bass and drums tracks already recorded. I realised however that two horns could not do all of the heavy lifting which thirteen horns could do, so I made both guitar and keyboard parts more complex and more prominent than in the big-band arrangements.

TOTR 26: Recording the Small-Band Arrangements

Project TOTR 26 came into being as an extension of Tales Of The Riverbank '25 into extra time, as it were. Using the existing bass and drum tracks, then, I invited saxophone players back to the studio to record different parts than those of the original arrangement, and later, similarly, the keyboard player and a different guitarist (the original guitarist was out of the country). Note that the overdubbing process, with digital versions of all parts available to accompany the players as they recorded, made it possible for the sax solos to be recorded before the live rhythm section was completely recorded!

Tales Of The Riverbank '25 / TOTR 26 Post-Production