Interview with James Murrell by Shelley Simone 1.       What do you “do” in music? You teach, you compose, you play...? I perform and teach music in the Dayton, Ohio area, I have also taught in the Columbus, Ohio area and I have performed in Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio. I also have several recordings of my music that I have composed over the years that I have put online through ReverbNation.com ( http://www.reverbnation.com/jamesmurrell ) and on many …

Biography: James Murrell James Murrell is a guitarist, composer, and singer from the Dayton, Ohio area. He plays Jazz, Rock, Pop, and other styles of American music. James grew up in Mt.Orab, Ohio about 40 miles east of Cincinnati. Most of the music that he was exposed to in his youth was Classic Rock, Country, Gospel, and Bluegrass. James started playing guitar when I was 10 years old in 1979. James had a teacher named Lloyd Hazelbaker when he was 13 who had been a western swing steel guitarist that had …

I started on “The Source” in the early fall of 2009. I wanted to record the album with a full band and talked to many of my friends about playing on the album but they were not available at the time. Another opinion was for me to hire a band to play the music but at the time I could not afford it. So I decided to start working on the album by myself. The original idea was to record the album on acoustic guitar, bass, & mandolin using overdubs and that the album was going to be all …

Winter Nights I wrote Winter Nights the winter of 2003 during the holiday season. I was thinking about the soldiers in Iraq and what their families might be going through. I teach in a area where there are a lot of military families and a lot of my students have parents that have done tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. It is very hard on these kids. I pray for them and hope that their family members will return safely. I wrote the introduction, then the melody and chords just poured out of me instantly. …

     I wrote the song Alive & Kickin’ in the spring of 2006. I keep a folder of music ideas that come to me. I was going through the folder and found the basic motif that makes up the beginning of the melody. I then developed the rest of the first 8 measures (A section) based on some chromatic ideas that I was working on at that time. The song is in AABA form (A=basic melody, A=same basic melody, B=different melody, & then A=basic melody from the beginning). Then I wrote …

    I wrote Blues For T. the summer of 2006. The T. stands for Thelonious as in Thelonious Sphere Monk who was one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. Thelonious’ friends called him T. I was told this by the greatest jazz musician that I ever met - Lester Bass.     I met Lester Bass at Central State University when he was playing bass at my friend Brian Winguard’s senior recital. I had heard of Lester before then. He was a legend in my eyes. I had heard …

    I wrote The Island Song as an assignment for a jazz composition class with my teacher James E. Smith in 1999. The song's chord structure is based on George Gershwin’s "I Got Rhythm" which is in a rounded binary form (AABA) and is 32 measures long (without the verse). My assignment was to write a bebop/hard-bop melody based on Gershwin's tune. I made the song twice as long (64 measures) so that the chords would last twice as long also. I then wrote the melody. The melody …

    I wrote the song "Look For Hope" the summer of 2004. It is a song that is hard to describe or even explain. I was thinking about the events that took place after September 11, 2001. I remember that day so clearly. I lived in Hilliard just outside of Columbus, OH at that time. I was driving up Broad St. and the news of the first airplane hitting the Trade Center in New York came on the radio. They thought that maybe it was an accident. I went home and turned on my television. …

I wrote "Urban Skies" in early 2006. I live in a part of Dayton, OH that is near a hospital and at night you can hear helicopters and sirens. I was lying in bed one night and the noise was especially loud outside of my home so I looked outside my window at the urban skies and then I wrote this song. Originally I recorded the song as a Bossa Nova with cello and a jazz band but, last summer I recorded it the way I heard it in my head when I wrote it, with crazy electric guitars and a strong back-beat. Both recordings are great and the fact that the song works both ways shows that it's a great tune!

I'm going to write a tune based on this poem that I wrote a few year ago.