You make several good points, but I'm going to suggest that in some cases, the kind of music you perform and for whom, can dictate what kind of conversation occurs.

There's some great jazz players on the SZ. Dave M., Russ, etc. The kind of music you do Diki, I also thinks lends itself to a lot of quality and spontaneous creativity. Of course there's a lot of nuance stuff going on that differs from night to night. As much as I love my T2, and think I'm pretty proficient at playing it, there's NO WAY I can pull that off. The water's way too deep for me and I'd drown quickly.

With regard to my personal situation, my band is not a jazz band. We are a dance band playing for a crowd of dancers typically 70 years old and up on most nights. My goal and our job isn't to be fundamentally "creative and spontaneous" for the kind of jobs we're hired to play at. Our job is to provide well played, consistent, traditional dance beats to the kind of tunes these folks like.

I suppose I could insert some exotic twists and turns into our songs but by and large, its not appropriate. They get twitchy if we even modulate, you know?

They want predictable, straightforward music. My rhythm section provides a very solid foundation for them to dance to and for my sax player to play off of. There's another dance band in the area who have been criticized because they hired a great jazz bass player. Are they more interesting now? Maybe. More spontaneous? Perhaps. But they're losing gigs because the dancers who followed them claim the beats all wrong now and its too hard to follow. If they're heading in a jazz direction then they may be prepared to replace some old clients with new ones, but I don't think that's their plan, lol...

My point is that just because you play with live musicians, its not always desired to have a lot of spontaneous creativity in the context of a traditional dance band. In other musical styles, yes...

Bringing this back full circle to arrangers. I have found that the vast majority of my clients that have switched from the quartet to my duo or solo work are no less happy with the quality of my music. Neither are the dancers. I play very differently when in arranger mode than I do when with the guys, but my goals and the end results are just as good.

Good conversation!

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Bill in Dayton