Blended/Folk (Arrangements)

If you are involved in church music at all, you know there’s a divide among musicians who themselves come from very different places: the “traditional” musicians are classically trained note readers who rarely improvise, and the “contemporary” musicians are more comfortable working from recordings and making music off the page. Part of my mission is to be a bridge between these two worlds. Whenever I find a song from the contemporary world that I think could work in a traditional setting, I make a point of arranging it for non-improvising musicians. This four-part arrangement of Andy Piercy’s “Comfortable Words” is exactly the kind of crossover song I would like to see travel more widely.