Has anyone ever played in a jazz group on French horn? I was at the Reno Jazz Festival last year and I saw one group that had a horn soloist. It was pretty cool to listen to.
Or even in a solo piece?
In brass ensemble at my school, we're playing "Basin Street Blues," which has a pretty cool horn part in it.

I regularly attend the Jim Knapp orchestra, a jazz orchestra with a virtuoso horn player, Tom Varner. I enjoy the orchestra and the French horn. But, I have to say that the Horn does more for jazz than jazz does for the horn. In other words: the horn adds a beautiful warm sound to jazz, but the jazz horn solos aren't as enjoyable to me as traditional horn solos. Jazz just doesn't bring out the best in a horn, in my opinion. HOWEVER, there's a CD out called THE LONDON HORN SOUND that has a couple of absolutely beautiful jazz horn choir numbers on it. If you ever get a chance to hear or purchase this CD you'll never regret it. It's about the most amazing horn playing I've ever heard.
Valerie in Tacoma BTW, Mormhorn, I've gotten a couple of notices that you are trying to contact me privately, but for some technical reason, the messages aren't coming through.

I play in my school's Jazz Combo C and Jazz Ensemble on french horn. :] It's super fun... I've heard a beautiful recording of a jazz brass ensemble's version of "Over The Rainbow"... Look up Dallas Brass on MySpace. Over The Rainbow by them has a BEAUTIFUL french horn solo at the beginning, and an amazing jazz swing solo at the end. Very breath taking.

Granny is right about the london sound, awesome disk.

I played with my university's Big Band on a latin tune. It was some of the most intense practicing I ever did. The parts were fast and it took some time to get used to the scales used, but it was a lot of fun. I also rehearsed an arrangement of Star Dust for solo horn with a brass ensemble, but never performed it.

Varner has some CDs, I think. Tom Bacon also has a jazz albumn called 'flipside' pretty good.

There are several Jazz suites/arrangements for brass quintet, some are good, some are cheese.

Well.... old dogs CAN learn new tricks. I loved the American Horn Quartet CD so much I decided to order some of those jazzy pieces from Lowel Shaw, the NYC horn player who has written so many wonderful things for horn ensembles including a lot of the stuff on the American Horn Quartet CD. His duets are called "Bipperies"; his trios are called "Tripperies"; and his quartets are called "Fripperies." [I don't know if he has Quipperies or not.] Anyway, the first time I tried to play them with my more experienced horn playing friends, they just left me sitting in the dust. I couldn't read a note. They were SO hard at first. But, after taking a long time to work on them very slowly with a metronome, I finally started to get the hang of it. Now when I get together with my horn playing friends to play Bipperies & Tripperies, I do pretty well keeping up. They are really fun. If you want to look into some of these, Google "Lowell Shaw." You'll find his website. His books are very reasonably priced & the music is GREAT!
Valerie, come back horn plahing granny