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Another month, another composition. This time a 16 bar blues. Why? One reason is that I wanted evoke the spirit of the kind of music in British new wave ('kitchen sink') movies. That gave me a brief, and therefore required a discipline that has been absent until now. Much though I might enjoy being a free-spirit at play, maybe it is important to learn something of the discipline of a well-established structure - and then play around with it. I have been encouraged by contributors to this forum to make use of structure and to be more disciplined, so here is a piece in which I have tried to do that. I began with the 16 bar chord sequence (from which I did not deviate) on the treble clef stave of the piano. I added the double bass, using this as my almost unwavering timing. I could have used drums, but that seemed too run-of-the-mill. However, I still wanted a percussive contrast to the double bass both in timbre, and to find off-beats, which is where the brushed cymbal came in. To provide a centre of attention I required an instrument that would reach into the upper registers, and whilst a tenor saxophone would have been the obvious, more lyrical choice, a B flat clarinet seemed less ostentatious, and fitted better with the kitchen sink movie idea. The line I wrote last was that on the bass clef stave for the piano. These last two parts (clarinet and bass hand on the piano) were undoubtedly the most demanding and most interesting: bending the beat and trying to challenge the chords. These are where my interest currently lies, and about which I have most to learn. Is this the type of thinking in which other people engage when starting on a new composition? I made the conscious choice to repeat the 16 bars using each of the different chord inversions for the F7 chord, trying to 'bring out' something distinctive about that inversion. Do you consider that the idea worked? If not, what would you have done differently? One of the things about which I am unsure is whether it worked where I used the clarinet almost as a percussive instrument. I like the sound of it, but I am worried that it sounds silly. Was I right to use the double bass, instead of drums, as the steady pulse throughout the piece? (I learned from my previous piece (Latin Jazz) that double basses do neither really short notes nor fine precision rests.) I greatly value constructive feedback as it may be the only way I can become more skilled at composition.