About Neil Boumpani

I have been writing and arranging music for over 40 years. During that time I have grown as a musician and a writer.

My love for arranging started in college back in the 1970’s. I founded the TSC jazz quintet, a jazz ensemble that performed on and off campus in the greater Trenton, NJ, area. One night while performing at the school rathskeller, a singer joined us and sang a moving rendition of “My Funny Valentine, which the crowd loved. Our percussion and jazz instructor, Tony DeNicola, was in the audience that night, and I asked him if the singer could sing the song with our big band. Tony said, “sure, why don’t you write an arrangement?” With only my college orchestration course under my belt, I went back to my apartment, laid out 20 pieces of manuscript on the floor, and wrote the arrangement. I did not even know enough to write the score first! Still, my arrangement became one of the band’s standard works for many years, but, more importantly, it opened the door for me to study arranging with Mr. Frank Hunter. Frank was a nationally-known arranger who had recently become part of the school’s adjunct faculty. I studied with Frank for several years (and wished I had continued many more) to gain the skills needed to arrange music professionally. Besides teaching me arranging, Frank gave me one of the most important lessons of my life when he told me to “take the job nobody else wants, do your 100% best to succeed, and you will begin to make a name for yourself!”

My understanding of arranging came in handy when I took my first teaching job in the small, one-square-mile town of Dunellen, NJ. This was a job nobody wanted, but I needed a job and school was starting in 3 days! My first band had 40 students, grades 7-12, with at least 4 who could not play anything. The feeder program was sending me students, many of which struggled with simple rhythm reading. At my first rehearsal, I handed out an Andrew Balant, grade 2 work that began with quarter notes in the flute part. As I raised my hands to begin to conduct, the first flute player asked me “how does this go?” That year was challenging; however, my arranging skills allowed me to successfully get through that year. Over my 4-year tenure, I was able to build up the band program. By my last year there, I had a marching band of 100 students, a 7-8 grade band, a high school concert band, and a select wind ensemble that rehearsed 45 minutes before classes began. When I left Dunellen, there was a stack of applications on the principal’s desk for the position of band director!

After moving to North Carolina in 1986, I became the marching and pep band director for Duke University, mainly because of the success I had in Dunellen. I remained at Duke for the next 19 years, witnessing some of the nation’s best NCAA basketball, and worst NCAA football! During that time, every piece performed on the field was written or arranged by me, as well as most of the basketball pep band arrangements Some of my arrangements are still being performed today. I also began writing shows for marching bands around the country, specializing in writing for small bands, often with an imbalanced instrumentation. Some of the bands for which I wrote achieved awards. For the first 11 years I spent at Duke, I continued to work in the public schools as an instrumental music teacher. I also wrote many works for my middle school bands.

After earning my Ph.D. in Music Education at UNCG in 2005, I took a job at a small college in Georgia where I continued to write works for the school’s ensembles. I scaled back my marching band arranging work for the first few years before the recession of 2008 hurt the small schools for which I wrote. This halted my marching band arranging for a few years; however, I continued to write for the ensembles at the school. During my last few years in Georgia, I played drums for an Atlanta-based big band, for which I wrote a number of arrangements.

Upon retiring in 2022 and moving back to North Carolina, I again began writing marching band shows and continued to write arrangements and transcriptions for big bands throughout the country. I also began taking many of the original works and arrangements that I had written over the years, and published them through Hal Leonard. These works can be found at any Hal Leonard store, as well as online at SheetMusicPlus.com, SheetMusicDirect.com, and Noteflight.com. I will be adding works to this site as time allows.

My works over the years include the following:

1. Big Band charts (including vocal charts)
2. Small jazz ensemble charts
3. Small brass and woodwind works
4. Percussion solos, duets and ensembles
5. Film scoring