By David Carlos Valdez Jazz Harmony for Improvisation- chord/scales
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- Navigate this page:
- More Slonimsky questions
- Where do the dominants move to
- Relatively Perfect Pitch
- Alan Jones Randy Porters workshop
- George Russells Lydian Chromatic Concept
- Textural variety for improvisation
- The function of the Jazz musician
- The life of a NYC Jazz musician
- Virtual Practicing-desert island practice tips
- What my students are working on
- Yogic breathing for musicians
- Pythagoras- Music of the Spheres
- Jam session experiment- the mad scientist at the threshold
| Part of the usefulness of exotic scales is that they sound so different from the scales we normally use. Usually we want to create a contrast to standard diatonic chord/scale harmony when we break out an exotic scale, so it's ok to sound contrived at first. Listen to Yusef Lateef to hear someone who uses a lot of exotic scales and uses them well.
The Bi-tonal Arpeggios section of TSMP is a topic that has already been thoroughly fleshed out in Gary Campbell's Triad Pairs book. These pairs of triads offer a gold mine for the Jazz musician. For more on this topic see my Triad Pairs articles. For me TSMP offers an entire new world of 'directional ideas'. The lines in TSMP snake, interweave, spiral, converge & diverge, jump, lurch, and infra-interpolate. Practicing this book will break you free of overly simplistic vertical/horizontal concepts of linear thinking. TSMP has been without a doubt one of the main modes of transmission of contemporary classical ideas to the Jazz world. There is still much in TSMP that has been untapped. Can you imagine what would Jazz sound like in thirty years if young players worked out of TSMP instead of David Baker's Bebop books??? More Slonimsky questions Q: Carlos, Hey, can you elaborate more on this idea of "resolving" your harmonic lines? Obviously things like taking the leading tone of a dominant to the tonic make sense to me, but in your last email regarding Slonimsky you said the following.... "Just make sure you resolve them strongly, you'd be amazed what you can actually get away with and still sound good." and .. "Tonal harmony is after all mainly about forward motion, so the lines found in TSMP offer away to still retain forward motion while playing outside. It just becomes a matter of being able to resolve these lines in a logical way...." A: Charles McPherson has an exercise that he makes his students do. He has them play totally outside over dominants and then land on a strong chord-tone on beat one of the next resolving bar. He says if you resolve on the downbeat with a strong chord tone you can play anything and it will sound like Bebop. This is just about true, even though it does sound quite extreme. Q: Related question. Do you use diminished stuff freely against dominants resolving to both Major and minor, or just for dominants resolving to major? I've heard both suggested and can you specifically tell me how you resolve a diminished scale, like do you actually try to resolve each dissonance (flat 9, sharp 9, sharp 11....) or just go to the Lydian mode/melodic minor of the tonic and leave it at that? A: I do use diminished modes when resolving to major or minor chords. To determine what chord-scales are available I only look at the root motion of the chord that the dominant resolves to. If the root motion is going down a fifth (up a fourth) then anything is fair game, no matter what chord quality the resolution is. Yes, there are scale choices that are smoother as far as voice leading when resolving to a minor chord, like a harmonic minor scale from the fourth and/or and altered dominant scale. Remember that if the dominant chord is moving down a half step in root motion you only should play a Lydian dominant (even if the #11 isn't notated) because it is functioning as a tri-tone! Berklee teaches that certain tensions are available for each of the secondary dominant chords: V7/II b9, 9,#9, b13 V7/III b9,#9, b13 V7/IV 9, 13 V7/V b9, 9,#9, 13 V7/VI b9, #9, b13 The most important thing is to watch for root motion! Where do the dominants move to? Don't worry about resolving individual tensions, this will drive you nuts and slow you down. Some people would argue with me, remember I consider myself a post-bop player, which to me is like an abstract expressionist painter. The rules are a bit more relaxed and I'm looking to use a more 'painterly technique', I don't want photo-realism in my playing. So what if a few lines bleed over or if some canvas shows? You could follow stricter rules than I do as far as finding scales for chords, but mine keep you out of trouble and you can always break them if they get too constraining. Promoting your gigs To be a working Jazz musician requires one to constantly be booking and promoting gigs. It's getting less and less common to have steady gigs anymore. The player is usually responsible for doing much of the promotion that the club owner used to do. The club may have an ad in a weekly paper or a listing in the entertainment section, but many times this isn't enough to ensure a decent crowd. When I was younger I didn't take promoting my gigs very seriously. I just cared about making the music good and pinning down the next gig. If you don't draw many listeners to your gig it doesn't really matter how good you play. You probably won't get many more gigs there in the future. Besides, how much fun is it to play to an empty house? I've found that posters are not always the best way to advertise your gigs. Postering is expensive and time consuming. If it's a big show that needs promotion, consider having a professional postering company put up 100 or 150 posters. These companies usually charge around 50-60 cents per poster. They have well-established routes and know where all the high traffic spots are. They blanket the city in a way that is impossible for an individual to do. If you are going to take the trouble to do this, make sure you have a great eye-catching poster. You should be able to find an inexpensive struggling professional graphic artist at a reasonable price (try Craig's list) if you aren't artistically inclined. Mass media is the musician's best friend. Make sure you send out your press releases for your gigs about two weeks before they happen. Don't send out promo for a few days before your gig and expect to get media coverage. Make an effort to put together email AND fax lists for every paper and radio station in town. Get promo material to all of them. Make sure your press releases are interesting and short enough so they can be printed or read without needing any editing. Take the time and read some good press releases to learn how to write a good one. * Make sure you send a note to the music calendar editors. These are usually different folks than the journalists. * You should try to develop personal relationships with the writers and DJs that cover Jazz. Call the papers or radio stations and find out who they are and get their contact information if you can. Don't just send them CDs and promo material randomly. Call them where they're working or write them and let them know that you'll be sending them something. Always follow up after sending promo material. Say that you're calling just to see if they received your package/CD/press release. Make friends with these people, they are invaluable! Send them free tickets to your shows, flowers, and chocolate. Try inviting them to recording sessions or rehearsals. * Try to get on the radio as a guest before your gig. People's memories are short so do this right before your gig. Many radio stations have web sites and live music listings. If there is a Jazz society in your town, they usually have some kind of newsletter or calendar you can submit to. Craig's List is also free and has high traffic. * Get your demo CDs to the DJs to play on their shows. Again, follow up. CDs are expensive. * Find out when the outdoor fairs and festivals happen and start working on them six months before they happen. Many times these will be booked by a professional booking agency. * Contact every booking agency, caterer, and party planner in the phone book. These are the real money gigs. * Work on an email list. Bring a notebook to every gig and make sure to ask the audience to put their email info in it. Trade email lists with other similar bands to expand your contacts. Remember to always put your addresses in the Bcc: section when you do your mailings. This way other people can't get your addresses without your permission. In the past, bands sent out postcards to fans about their upcoming gigs, emails are FREE. Take advantage of this technology. You also may want to upload your high quality music mp3s to a free streaming server like Music for Dozens.com. Then put a link to the site in your e-mail gig announcements. * Get on the phone and personally invite people to your gig. This is much more effective than any other promotion method. People will respond to a call much more to a call than an email. * Talk the club owner into offering some kind of food or drink special just for your gig. Use this as a draw in your promo materials. * Save every review, blurb and ad about your band for your promo package. If no one is writing about you, ask some established musicians to write a few sentences about your music. * People are always more interested in musicians and bands from out of town. Bring in a player from out of town for a few gigs to generate more buzz. You'll be more likely to get more media coverage this way. Set up some private students or a master class to make it worthwhile for them to travel to your town. Many great players are looking to get out of the big cities and have their expenses covered. If you become a good promoter you can make decent money playing even door gigs. Always give yourself plenty of time to promote gigs. No musician can afford to ignore this important element of the music business. As you start putting some effort into promotion it will get easier. Your mailing list will grow, your relationships with the media will develop and you will begin to draw the types of crowds to your gigs that want to hear what YOU are going to play. Relatively Perfect Pitch Perfect pitch is a great asset for a Jazz musician. Unfortunately it's extremely uncommon. If you don't develop it at a young age, you probably never will. Relative pitch is being able to figure out pitches after you have a reference pitch given to you. I was able to teach myself what I call 'relatively perfect pitch'. This is something that is somewhere between perfect and relative pitch. If I'm listening to notes played on my main axe, the alto saxophone, I can tell what pitches they are. I've been able to do this since I was in high school. You might call this something like 'perfect alto sax pitch'. I learned 'relatively perfect pitch' years later. The way I did this was by choosing a few pitches at a time (these might be from the melody of a favorite tune) and singing them over and over in a very loud voice. I'd sing these four to six notes very slowly and just notice what my body felt like as it vibrated these notes. If you sing loud enough you can learn to remember what your body feels like with these notes rather than just what they sound like. It becomes a physical sensation that is very hard to forget. Eventually you will ingrain several of these note combinations into your aural & body memory. You will then be able to relate any pitch you hear to these memorized tones. I tell my students that each note is like someone you know. There is just one guy named A natural and he has a unique personality. You don't recognize him just by the facts that he has brown hair, green eyes, wears glasses, and is stocky. If this were how you defined him you'd be calling all kinds of guys by his name. There is only one guy named A natural. Musicians don't know each note personally but they will get very close, without ever really locking the notes in. They may know A natural as somewhere between 438 bps and 444bps, but they have never really sat down with 440 bps and gotten to know it personally. Once you sit down with someone and get to know him (find out where he grew up, what his parents were like, what motivates him) and find out what you have in common with him (how your head, throat, chest feels when you sing the note for periods of time), then you will probably never forget him when you pass him on the street. You won't say," That dude looks really familiar, is it because he looks kind of like my other friend G#?” You will know this old friend immediately and say," A440! Whasup! Haven't seen you since the bridge." This is not some magical process. It is just a matter of taking time to sit down with these notes and spending some quality time with them. After you work on your note combinations during your practice time, remember to sing them occasionally during the rest of the day. This will help solidify your personal knowledge of these notes. First try to sing them in your mind. Then check them by singing them in your full chest voice. If you're patient and diligent you will be guaranteed results. Alan Jones & Randy Porter's workshop A while back I attended a Jazz combo workshop with two of my favorite players, pianist Randy Porter and drummer Alan Jones. The class consisted of two sets of rhythm section players and me. I've played many gigs with these two guys over the years and have always wanted to get a better idea about what they're thinking about when they play. Both these guys are true masters of their instruments and they both are able to weave in and out of the rhythmic structure in a way that is smooth yet complex. Randy has an incredible ability to create new harmony that doesn't interfere with the soloist or the spirit of the tune. When we play duo gigs together I always want to stop him say," What was that right there?" This was my chance to do just that. They talked about their ideas of rhythmic feel and harmony and had us play as we thought about different ideas. As I soloed Randy comped for me and really started to take it out there with different time feels. He asked me to try to lock up with him in the different time feels that he was superimposing. Usually when we play together and he starts to take it out there like that I tend to emphasize the original time feel over what he's doing, otherwise I usually get turned around rhythmically. It was a little easier following him out into the rhythmic wilderness since Alan Jones was locking the time down with his relentless swing. It also helped that we weren't on the bandstand. We also focused on creating extended harmonies while soloing. I had a tendency to play and think modally as I navigated harmonically. I think this is natural for post-Trane saxophonists. Randy asked me to think chordally (like Bird) rather than modally (like Trane). He asked me to think about the exact individual chords that I was superimposing. When I tried playing this way everything seemed to open up. Even if the chord structures I was using were far from the changes of the tune it much easier to fit them over what was happening. Using scales to move outside created a much denser dissonant sound than thinking chordally. I found that I could get away with some pretty outside chords have them sound acceptable because they had a more distinct yet less dense structure than their scale modes did. It was a revelation. One exercise that Randy had us do made us think about playing lyrically. Everyone has a tendency to play too many notes, cluttering our playing and interfering with our natural lyricism. He brought out a story that his kids had written and told us that since lyrically really meant 'with lyrics' we would play as if we were playing lyrics. He had us play over the tune Confirmation at a fairly fast tempo. The idea was to play solos while we were reading the story, every note we played was to be a syllable in the story and every phrase was a sentence. We were supposed to create solos that made sense while playing every word of the story. Of course Randy was the only one who could do this for more than a couple of words. It was an entirely different mode of thinking and it has the effect of making you play very simple and concise musical statements. The melodies that we were forced to create were just complex enough to tell the story. Not an unnecessary syllable/note. We all realized just how much we tended to overplay. It made me think of the old adage that the first twenty years is spent learning to play and the next twenty years is spent not to play. Being lyrical cannot be done with too many notes, that’s a hard fact. Try to make every single note really count and eliminate every unnecessary note. To do this we need a radical exercise like Randy's because most of us have been conditioned into playing too many notes. This is especially true when we’re not sure what to play. Musicians tend to play a surplus of notes when they’re not sure of what’s happening. George Russell's 'Lydian Chromatic Concept' The other day while playing a jam session I noticed that the guitarist had written some key centers on top of all the two-five-ones. So over the D-7/G7/Cmaj7 he had written C major. Many Jazz improvisation teachers start their students out thinking this way. The students at least play in the correct key, right? Ouch! This is a sure fire way to have a major clam festival. There are not many worse clams than the natural 11 on a dominant or major chord, this is called an avoid note because it sounds bad. The great arranger and NEC professor George Russell teaches what he calls the 'Lydian Chromatic Concept for tonal organization ', or just 'the concept' for short. His rationale is that a Major 9th chord with a sharp 11 has more a greater degree of unity than the same chord with a natural 11. * Jason Gross explains the reasoning behind the LCCOTO-"For Russell, the Lydian mode (with, in the key of C, its tonic F and dominant C) was a more logical candidate to become the primary scale because it suggests a greater degree of unity between chords and scales. Russell argues that a major scale, for example C, consists of two tetra-chords that embody two tonalities, not one. But if you adapt the major scale to Lydian mode (in the key of C that would be a C major scale with F-sharp instead of F), it removes the duality of conflicting tonics, and more fully satisfies the tonality of the major chord. With one tonic used for each respective scale, Russell reasoned that a greater variety of chords could be stacked. This offered a new path for adventurous musicians: Standard chord progressions need not dictate the course of an improvisation, as each note is equidistant from a single tonic center. Notes could flow more freely beyond the strictures of a song's chords." From: 'George Russell Goes for the Modes' by Jason Gross, Village Voice, June 4 - 10, 2003 This thinking shows that we should use the Lydian scale as our 'base' scale. Lydian is the new Ionian! For the beginning improviser this is not really such a bad way to think about things. If you always add a sharp 11 to every major and mixolydian scale you avoid the 'avoid' note of the natural 11. You can always add a #11 to these chords without worrying about messing up the harmonic progression. Of course the 'concept' is much, much more involved than this. George Russell has had a major impact on the course of Jazz evolution with this concept. Miles said that George was," the motherfucker who taught me how to write." Miles' classic 'Kind of Blue' album was a result of his contact with George Russell. Dolphy was also influenced by the 'concept', along with many other important figures in Jazz. Here is another way to think of key centers (if you must) using this concept over a ii-7/ V7/ Imaj/ progression. Over a: D-7 / G7 /Cmaj7 / Think: D melodic- / /Gmaj / George teaches how to with navigate outside conventional harmony. He talks about playing 'outward' and inward'. This means moving outside or inside in degrees, not just in or out. For example- Over a C major chord, outward bound playing would be to start playing a C Lydian, then a go to C Mixolydian, then C Phrygian, then C diminished, then D major, then F# Dorian. The general idea is to slowly move to scales that have fewer and fewer notes in common with the chord you are playing over. It's all about what George calls 'Tonal Gravity'. Every note or scale has it's own particular tonal gravity when played over any particular chord. Conventional Jazz harmony doesn't deal with; say how a G minor pentatonic sounds and where it wants to go to when played over an Eb sus4 b9 chord. This is unmapped territory as of yet. You really can't go wrong with Lydian. George Russell even goes so far as calling the chromatic scale a 'Lydian Chromatic Scale'. George's book is very difficult to make sense of. Fuze even told me that the concept is hard to figure out even if you have George there to explain it to you. If you have ever heard George's compositions for his big band you would know that he is on to something really big. Rob Scheps had this to say about the LCCOTO: I took two years of his classes and toured with him. "The Concept" made simpler Some of George's basic ideas: 1. When perfect 5ths are stacked, the #11 occurs before the "Natural 11" (Which he once called, "the most unnatural f%*kin' note in the world!!") 2. Ergo, a C Major 13 ( #11) chord, sits in calm repose, while a C Maj. 13 chord w/ a natural 11 has an unresolved clash (a minor 9th). 3.That C major (Ionian) is really a Mode of F Lydian. George Pepper explains it like this: Actually, this is a concept related to the scale generated by the natural harmonic overtone series, which stacked in thirds creates a dominant seventh with a major ninth and an augmented eleventh. Since a lot of jazz is blues based, and blues uses dominant seventh chords for the IV, V, and I, augmented elevenths are naturally the coin of the realm in that genera. I always start my students out with blues for just that reason: Theoretically, it is the style most in agreement with the natural harmonic overtone series. The so-called Ionian mode, on the other hand, is a scale generated by three major triads each a fifth apart, as in a IV, I, V relationship. In other words, it's actually the harmony that generates the scale, and not the scale that generates the harmony (In both jazz and classical music). Textural variety for improvisation Today I had an advanced student and we were talking about things to be aware of in order to create more interesting textures. Many young players are too focused on playing the right changes and don't focus enough on shaping notes with dynamics and articulations. They may start at mezzo forte or forte and then they stay at that volume for several choruses, maybe slowly getting louder as they play. I try to get my students to be aware of how they are shaping each and every note. * How are they articulating the start of each note? * How are they releasing each note? * Does the volume stay the same or does it change for each note? * What is the timbre of the note? * Are they able to quickly and drastically get much louder or softer? * Are they using the full range of possible articulations? * Are they varying horizontal and vertical playing? * Are they playing varying the note density? * Are they aware enough of creating interesting direction in their lines? * Do they know how to bring a rhythm section to a low simmer from a high burn? * Are they able to consciously layback and play on top of the beat? * How is vibrato used and is it varied without being corny? So often Jazz devolves into a string of connected 8th note lines, with little change in the texture that is being created. If you are always aware of the questions above while improvising then you will create interesting textural soundscapes. Think like a sculptor or a painter instead of a musician once in a while. How important are individual notes when the larger sound sculpture is bland and lame? Hip Be-Bop lines aren't enough to keep things interesting. Go ahead and make subtle shadings to individual notes! (Alternate fingerings and overtones are great for shading pitch and timbre) You want to try to make your solos have a texture at least as complex and interesting as someone speaking a romance language. Don't just focus on one element of texture, like dynamics. Practice being aware of all the different elements that vary texture. Shift your focus consciously to element one after another. Eventually it will become second nature to create interesting textures. The function of the Jazz musician An idea that has intrigued me over the years has been," what is the functional role of a musician in this society?” As musicians we tend to be more aware of the music we create or the environments we find ourselves in than what our essential function is. By function I mean- * What is my role in this social situation that I find myself? * What does the audience expect my music to do for them? * How narrow are the limits on my actions in my role as a musician? * How much can I affect the audience without them playing an active role? * Should I be doing more than just trying to entertain? * How much of my inner self should I reveal through my music, if any? * Will they be aware if I change my function from minstrel to high priest? I believe that a listener can only judge the functional role a musician is playing by the effect that the music has on them directly. The attitude of the musician determines the functional role he/she plays. How the musician sees his own function as a musician can determine how much or how little the ego enters into the music. Function can change in the mind of a musician in an instant, and with it the profundity of the musical expression. A musician who believes their function is to create beauty will create music that is very different from a musician whose function is to pick up chicks. If we look into the musical philosophies of ancient cultures we learn that their musicians were expected to play very different functional roles as modern musicians do. For them the role a musician was closely tied to the roles of the priest, healer, magician and seer. Music was never separated from its related disciplines- astrology, medicine, mathematical cosmology, geometry and ceremonial magic. To the ancient mind you could not understand one of these sciences without understanding all of them. In fact Hippocrates, the father of medicine, once stated that a doctor who didn't thoroughly understand astrology would be unable to do so much as even diagnose a patient. Music was always the thing that tied all the other sciences together and made them relevant to each other. It was the study of the manifested qualities of the whole numbers, in other words it was the foundation of qualitative mathematics. These qualities of the whole numbers, or integers, were the laws of musical harmony, but they were also the very laws of nature operating in the cosmos, on earth and in the psychological realms of the mind. These laws of number/music became expressed in the construction of early alphabets, which were numbering systems as well as symbolic languages capable of expressing abstract musical concepts. For example in the Hebrew alphabet each letter is a whole number and a whole number ratio. The first expresses its relationship to the quality of an overtone, while the second relates the letter to a musical interval. This is jumping ahead quite a bit, the point I'm trying to make is the general disparity in the way ancient civilizations defined the function of the musician compared to the way our society sees our role. Consider the ideas that you were taught about the functional role that musicians play. Did you accept these ideas without first questioning them? Have your ideas about your function as a musician changed over time? How narrow or flexible are your ideas about function? How do you think these ideas influence the way you play music? These ideas that we have about our functional roles can and do affect the music we end up creating, how we feel when we create music, and how people feel when they hear our music. By making positive changes in our belief structures relating to music we can grow more musically than we could by woodshedding for years, and the changes take affect in an instant. These changes affect the very nature of our musical expression by changing whom it is making the music. Is that a ladies man playing Stella or a high priest of the sun? Ok, Ok I'll go back to talking about how to play over two-fives. The life of a NYC Jazz musician Andreas Steffen from Germany asked me to write about what the life of a New York Jazz musician was like. Most people have some glorified idea of what the NYC musician does to make a living. Adreas' idea went like this: sleep until noon, practice, studio job, gig, and jam session, repeat from start. That's pretty much what I expected when I got there with five hundred dollars in my pocket. The economic realities of living in NYC have changed drastically in the last thirty years. Long time resident musicians have told me that back in the 70s you could pay your rent by working one or two gigs a month. Many musicians had large lofts where they jammed till the wee hours of the morning. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world and gigs still pay roughly what they did in the 70s. There are still tons of fifty-dollar gigs all over town. Of course now you could be playing fifty-dollar gigs every night of the week and still be starving. A one bedroom apartment is now $1400 and up in Manhattan. There were many different ways that Jazz musicians scraped by in NYC. Here are some of the ways that I saw when I was living there. * The Trust Fund baby- How do all those Avant-Garde downtown hipsters make ends meet by playing at the Knitting Factory? You'd be surprised how many have trust funds. * The Club Date Band Whore- Club dates are gigs that pay $150-300 where you have to play every shitty popular song from almost eight decades of pop music. Better learn Chatanooga-choo-choo and the horn backgrounds to Boogie-oogie-oogie. * The Weed dealer- Prices are high in NYC and so are the musicians! * The Boston commuter- No kidding, cats commute all the way to Beantown just to teach at a rat infested music school. * The Atlantic City suspender & straw hat wearer- Atlantic City is an abomination and so are the gigs there. * The Black-tie Cater Waiter- Most of the actors and actresses in town work for caterers but quite a few musicians do too. This is actually how I made ends meet. The advantages to this type of job are of course the gourmet food and the fact that you can pick your own hours each week. * The Successful Jazz musician- These are the guys who have record deals and are actually making their money playing Jazz. What folks don't realize is that they are hardly ever in New York at all. They must do road gigs most of the year to meet their NYC expenses. * Husband of a doctor/stock broker/lawyer etc.-This category is probably no surprise to anyone. * Catskills Cats- These guys are gone for months at a time playing Jewish resorts in the Catskills. These gigs are a cross between a Bar Mitzvah and a 40's dance band. * The Broadway show musician- Can you play every woodwind ever invented? I didn't think so. I never met any musicians that made their living doing studio work. The truth is there isn't a ton of studio work anymore and a few cats have locked up the work there is. I would suggest that anyone moving to NYC to play music save at least ten thousand dollars before moving. Also consider living in Jersey City, its closer and cheaper than many parts of Brooklyn or Queens. I do miss living in the Jazz capital of the world at times, but I just remind myself what the weather and the general quality of life is like there. I usually get over it pretty fast. There are many jam sessions at clubs in NYC. When I first got there I attended many of these. I played sessions at clubs like Blue Note, Birdland, Cleopatra's Needle, Smalls, and St. Nick's pub. Some of these sessions were fun, most were a waste of time and money. You can meet some great players there if you're lucky. At worst, you can end up waiting for hours to play two tunes with a random, and often bad, rhythm section. Usually you're not even warmed up. These two tunes can cost you upwards of thirty dollars after you pay for transportation and buy your (two drink minimum) five-dollar beers. If you don't know many already established players you may not have any other choices to get on the scene. I found out, after many five dollars beers, that it is much better to go to a few sessions and find a few players you like and set up sessions at people's houses. You end up getting to play more than two or three tunes and making a better impression because you're playing with a good rhythm section. Let me add a few positive thoughts about living in NYC. I think every Jazz player should have the experience of living in New York. It definitely changes the way you think about music. So many players get to the city thinking they're going to take over. As soon as they're there for a few weeks they usually want to 're-evaluate their sound' or just change some things about their playing. There is so much great music there every night of the week. NYC has basically drained all the brightest Jazz talent from the rest of the entire world. The city itself can be overwhelming but it can also feel like a small town. I found the people there, musicians included, to be some of the most open and friendliest of anywhere I've ever been. This is the exact opposite of the stereotypical NYC resident. They will definitely let you know when they're not happy with you, but they are also extremely helpful. There is work there and you can make a living if you're willing to work hard at it. Don't wait until you feel that you're burning enough to move there. If you want to get better fast it's the best place you can be. Your concept will come together so much faster by being there. It's not the dangerous and scary city that it once was either. I walked all over Manhattan at every hour of the day and night and never once had any problems there. I think it's because the thugs can't afford to live there any more! The music industry doesn't take musicians very seriously if they don't live in New York City. If all the New York musicians just went home to where they came from there would be tons of great players in just about every city again. Virtual Practicing-desert island practice tips Regular reader Roman recently asked a good question that deserves a response. "David - You've offered up so much great practice advice here on your blog. Do you have any tips for practicing away from the horn? I've heard of people closing their eyes and fingering an imaginary horn, and I've tried that but it really hasn't seemed to be very effective for me. Any other ideas? Thanks, Roman." Roman, There are several ways to practice without your horn. Here are a few techniques that I have used over the years: * Bilateral Finger Coordination Exercises- these exercises help to get both hemispheres of your brain working together to control digital dexterity. For the sake of explaining the exercises we'll call the thumb on your right hand R1, right index finger R2 and so on. Your right pinkie of course is R5, left pinkie is L5 and your left thumb is L1. The goal when doing these is to get both hands acting exactly together. Most people have one hand that reacts faster than the other and of course this is not good for saxophone technique. These exercises would of course be helpful any instrument that uses both hands. Start each exercise slow and concentrate on getting your hands working together. Slowly speed up to a blistering speed. Remember to keep your hands and fingers totally relaxed at all times. Set both hands comfortably on a flat surface in front of you with your fingers spread out slightly. Tap each finger lightly on the flat surface. Bilateral Symmetrical Digital Dexterity Exercises (both hands at the same time): 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2- repeat 1-2-1-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-5-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-3-2-1-2 - repeat 1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1-4-1-3-1-2- repeat This last exercise isn't bilaterally symmetrical. At the same time as you do- L5-L4-L3-L2-L1-L2-L3-L4-L5 Do the right hand- R1-R2-R3-R4-R5-R4-R3-R2-R1 * Perfect pitch exercise- carry a small pitch pipe or tuning fork with you throughout the day. Each day pick a pitch and try to sing it at various times during the day. Use the pitch pipe to check your accuracy. Sing the pitch loud enough to feel the way it makes your throat and chest vibrate. Every note physically feels unique. Over time you will be surprised at how much better you can recognize pitches. It doesn't take long to develop a really perfect A, E or G. From there you can slowly add other notes that are solid inside you. I call this 'Relatively Perfect Pitch' because you start out with only a couple of note that you can recognize. * Sing along to solos! Duh. This seems so obvious but not many players do this regularly. Load your iPod or Diskman with great tunes and try to sing along to every note in the solos. Singing is great for ear training. Don't worry that your tone sounds like crap, just try to sing in tune and in time. This will internalize and solidify your sense of pitch, and time for that matter. * Try to read though solo transcriptions without your horn. Take the Omnibook with you on the subway. You don't even need to sing out loud, just try to hear the lines in your imagination. This is great for sight-reading and ear training (or pitch visualization). * Of course the next step here is scatting. You can do this to music or unaccompanied. If you can clearly hear and sing something then you will be less likely to let your fingers do the walking. Play what you really hear, don't play what you can't hear or sing. What my students are working on Some of the things I've been having my more advanced students do lately are: * Keeping a detailed tune list of all the tunes they know, all the tunes the sort of know and all of the tunes they need to learn. This master list should be in a digital format so it can be constantly updated and organized. This master list will become the index for the student's personal gig book. Students should have enough copies of this book to give a rhythm section at a gig, rehearsal or jam session. If you don't want to bring your whole book to a gig/jam then you can at least bring this master list to show the other players. This ensures that you will be able to find acceptable and interesting tunes with any combination of players. No more,"Duh, what do YOU want to play?" I would stay away from plastic sheet protectors because they're usually more trouble than they're worth, plus they're expensive. * Put together a three ring binder of solo transcriptions. These could be your own, things you've downloaded off the Internet and printed or solos that you've copied out of books. Just use the blog search engine in the upper left hand corner of this page and search for 'transcriptions', you'll find hundreds. Don't practice the same few players all the time. Go for a wide range of cats; especially look at transcriptions of musicians on instruments other than your own. You'd be surprised how many solo transcription books your public library may have. Pack your binder with solos! Keep adding to your collection! Play through them all! * Take a lead sheet for a tune and for each chord change write several pentatonic scales that would work over that chord. A great book to help you figure these out is Pentatonic Scales For Jazz Improvisation by Raymon Ricker. Also take a look at my post called Pentatonic Lines- Navigating outside harmony. Try soloing over the tunes using only these pentatonic scales. Don't forget to do plenty of chromatic sideslipping. * Practice playing some slow ballads and really concentrate on the ends of all the notes. Try to get the vibrato to speed up slightly as you cut off each note. Shape the cut offs; be conscious of the exact shape that you're trying to create on the ends on notes. * I have just gotten my students back into an old stand by called Universal Saxophone Method by Paul Deville. It was written almost a century ago and it still kicks ass. If you want to fix any problem you are having with technique the Universal Method has what you need. The exercises on difficult fingerings and exercises on mechanism can make drastic improvements in a student technique in a short amount of time because they isolate every single problematic fingering combination on the horn. The etudes will whip any sloppy tongue into shape by hammering it with different articulations. * Sing, sing, sing! If you can't sing it then you won't be able to play it in tune. Try singing phrase first, listening for perfect intonation, then play the same phrases. Once you know what a note sounds like intimately, meaning you recognize that note like the face of a friend in a crowd, then your oral tract will be able to position itself automatically as soon as you imagine that note in your mind's ear. You don't need to be born with perfect pitch to recognize pitches in this way! You can introduce yourself to just a few notes at first and become very close friends with them. When you know everything about them (how they feel when you sing them, how they feel when you play them, how the different octaves sound and feel) then they can introduce you to the other notes. This is a learned form of perfect pitch that starts with one or a few notes; I call it relatively perfect pitch. Yogic breathing for musicians Playing a wind instrument requires serious breath control. Anything you can do to help you develop this control is worth investigating. While living in Santa Cruz I spent some time studying Yoga and Vedanta with master Yogi Baba Hari Dass. Hari Dass has been practicing Yoga since he was eight years old and he hasn't spoken a word for fifty-three years. Yoga isn't for everyone, but there are some simple breathing exercises that anyone can benefit from. If you happen to play a wind instrument they can be of immense value. These breathing exercises (or Pranayama) can help increase both control and capacity. They also calm the mind and balance the bodily functions. If you try these four exercises you will immediately notice some positive results. A calm mind is highly desirable for all musicians. So even if you don't play a wind instrument these Pranayam are worth checking out. They are entirely safe. The Four Purifications (from Baba Hari Dass' book the Ashtanga Yoga Primer): 1. Nadishodhana (alternate nostril breathing) - Gently exhale all air. Close the nostril with the thumb of the right hand, and inhale slowly and deeply through the left nostril. Close the left nostril with the ring finger, releasing the thumb, and exhale through the right. Inhale through the right, then close it with the thumb and exhale through the left. This makes one round. Begin with ten rounds and gradually increase to forty. 2. Kapala Bhati (skull shining) - Exhale and inhale quickly and lightly through both nostrils. Emphasize the exhalation, letting the inhalation come as a natural reflex. After one series of exhalations, which should last no longer than one minute, rest and breathe naturally. Then repeat. Begin with three rounds of thirty exhalations each and gradually increase to ten rounds of sixty exhalations. 3. Agnisara Dhauti (fire wash) -Inhale, then exhale all air. While holding the breath out, pull the diaphragm up and toward the backbone; release it suddenly. Repeat this in-and-out movement rapidly as long as the breath can be held out without strain. Then inhale gently. Start with three rounds and increase gradually to ten, beginning with thirty pulls and increasing to sixty for each breath retention. 4. Ashvini Mudra (horse mudra) - Inhale completely and hold the breath. Contract and release the anal sphincter rapidly and repeatedly. Hold the breath only so long as the following exhalation can be slow and controlled. Begin with three rounds of thirty pulls each, and increase to ten rounds of sixty each. (Note: I call this the 'loaf pinch' mudra. It sounds freaky, but it is very powerful) Pythagoras- Music of the Spheres Sometime during my junior year at Berklee I had a dream that changed the course of my life. I had had many lucid dreams before this one. These were dreams where I woke up during my dream. When I 'woke up' I became fully aware of my conscious self. I knew my name and I was aware that I was dreaming. Usually when this happened the dream would suddenly become more vivid. The colors would get brighter and I would see faces clearly and even highly detailed architecture. The moment I woke up in these dreams I would also gain some amount of control over them. I might be able to fly or move objects around with my thoughts. At the time this particular dream happened I was completely immersed in music. I was playing my horn about eight hours every day and listening to music the rest of the time. When I woke up in this dream I heard something that changed my entire perception of reality. The dream was like this; I was on the moon looking at the earth. The earth was exploding with multiple nuclear explosions and the sky was filled with bright multi-colored lights. These colors looked similar to a puddle of oil, except fully illuminated. I heard the most amazing sound. As low and as high as I could hear there were innumerable voices, rather instruments. In the dream I could hear more than the usual eleven or so octaves that we usually perceive. I heard many more octaves. It was as if there were an infinite number of different instruments. Each and every one of them had it's own unique timbre or tone. Each and every one of them was playing a unique melody. Not one of the voices sounded the same or was playing the same melody! Imagine octaves and octaves of different instruments playing individual melodies. You would reasonably expect that this would be the most chaotic noise possible. It was the exact opposite. It was by far, the greatest and most beautiful music that I had ever heard. The totality of melodies created a piece of music so amazingly perfect that in an instant I knew that there had to be a master musician directing this music. This master musician had the talent to make what by all right should be total chaos into an infinitely beautiful symphony. To me this proved the existence of an infinitely intelligent creator, but more importantly a creator that was a musician, and outside time and space. Every dissonance in the song was balanced and harmonized in some other voices, which might be many octaves apart. It was as if each voice was improvising it's own melody but the rest of the voices were in perfect harmony with these improvisations. I knew that what I was hearing was paradoxical. It seemed to be impossible. But I heard it and, as my mentor Lawrence Williams says, hearing is believing. When I woke up, which was more just like opening my eyes, I was stunned and amazed. What the hell had I just heard? I had never read or heard of anything even remotely like my dream, so I just kept it to myself for a while. About a year later I ran across a book about Pythagoras that described what I had heard exactly! Pythagoras called it the 'Music of the Spheres'. He taught that everything in the universe makes music. The planets all create music as the orbit the sun and every person creates music as they live their life on the earth. All the planetary orbits follow the musical laws of harmony and everything is an expression of number. There are no random events. Every note has a musical purpose. The universe is more like a song than a machine. It moves between consonance and dissonance to ultimately create a supremely beautiful piece of music. This music is alive. Each voice creates it's own song, yet the master musician is always conducting the whole. Pythagoras was scoffed at for centuries because of his 'Music of the Spheres' idea. Scientists were thankful for his other contributions to math and acoustics but they thought he was a fruit-loop because of this. We should also keep in mind that Pythagoras was trained in the initiatory schools in Egypt. His concepts were anything but new inventions. I am relating my personal experience to the best of my ability and also at some risk of sounding like a new age freak. This experience led me to the study of esoteric music, which is sometimes called Pythagorean or neo-platonic philosophy. I had to learn more about what I heard on that fateful night and I would spend the next twenty years trying to figure it out. Jam session experiment- the mad scientist at the threshold I just got back from a bad jam session. I didn't have any gigs this weekend so I wanted to play a little. It was at one of those clubs that is so smoky that you have to leave your clothes on the porch when you get home and run straight to the shower. For some reason I thought that it was going to be good. As I unpacked my horn a saw that there was a conga player sitting in on just about every tune, no matter what style. He had but a single evil conga drum and he knew how to instantly destroy any groove with it. Even without Dr.Chaos on the conga, the band wasn't locking up. I wondered why I torture myself over and over again. Why do I think that it is easier to go out to a shitty session than to call guys over to my house to play? Laziness of course! An evening of Aebersold would have been more productive. I feel so empty after a playing experience like that. I rationalize to myself that jam sessions are a good place to experiment with new concepts. I did plenty of experimenting there tonight. I was working on my chromatic concept all evening. Because in my mind the music was already sucking I went ahead with some major research. Here were the parameters of my experiment: * Don't try to gravitate to any note just because it is consonant * Don't think about what the changes actually are, ignore them as much as possible * Dissonance needs no resolution unless it happens totally by chance * The longer dissonance can be maintained the better * Odd groupings of notes should be used to destroy a sense of bar lines * Strange shapes should be the rule * Try to hear the next note, it can be anything Hey, Call Steve Colman I just discovered M-Base! If you don't make a point to practice giving up rational control and turning it over to your ears then it will never happen on it's own. Don't wait for a modern modal tune to practice navigating in the ozone, do it on a Blues or Stella. It takes a conscious decision let the reigns go. It is a different mode of thinking altogether and a very definite shift needs to happen when the rational mind takes a holiday and the reactive ears dictate. Of course you can't give a shit what other people are thinking of your playing if you want to do this. Usually we only go out to the outer realms when we go all the way 'outside'. It's rare for a player to be able to drift back and forth between these two modes, from the dream state to waking consciousness and back. Think about that time when you are on the sofa fighting off a full nap while watching TV. First the words coming from the TV are making sense, then all of a sudden the words do not have a strict meaning, they are only tones carrying emotion. These tones may also connect with images or the may bring images into being. Even the images that start to form in your mind do not have a particular meaning. They may have emotional content but they are not related to anything solid. Then all of a sudden you wake up a little and the words lose their abstract quality. Now they are talking about beauty pageants for young girls or how to fry a turkey. The words were so much more artistic and beautiful when they were drawing images out of the unseen and across the threshold of your consciousness. Music can drift across this threshold of abstraction too. First every note is related in some way to the chords, and then each note may or may not have direct relation to the harmony. It is a shift into an abstract realm that is like the moment when you drift off to sleep. You can of course wake yourself up at anytime and enter back into to chord/scale universe, but isn't it nice just to drift off a little. If I were going to totally take it totally outside I'd just go to bed and take a full siesta and dream about Albert Ayler or Archie Schepp. Instead, I'll just recline here on the couch with the TV on and pretend that I'm awake, sliding effortlessly between Bebop and clouds that look like farm animals. Relatively Perfect Pitch True perfect pitch is a great asset for a Jazz musician. Unfortunately it's extremely uncommon. If you don't develop it at a young age, you probably never will. Relative pitch is being able to figure out pitches after you have a reference pitch given to you. I was able to teach myself what I call 'relatively perfect pitch'. This is something that is somewhere between perfect and relative pitch. If I'm listening to notes played on my main axe, the alto saxophone, I can tell what pitches they are. I've been able to do this since I was in high school. You might call this something like 'perfect alto sax pitch'. I learned 'relatively perfect pitch' years later. The way I did this was by choosing a few pitches at a time (these might be from the melody of a favorite tune) and singing them over and over in a very loud voice. I'd sing these four to six notes very slowly and just notice what my body felt like as it vibrated these notes. If you sing loud enough you can learn to remember what your body feels like with these notes rather than just what they sound like. It becomes a physical sensation that is very hard to forget. Eventually you will ingrain several of these note combinations into your aural & body memory. You will then be able to relate any pitch you hear to these memorized tones. I tell my students that each note is like someone you know. There is just one guy named A natural and he has a unique personality. You don't recognize him just by the facts that he has brown hair, green eyes, wears glasses, and is stocky. If this were how you defined him you'd be calling all kinds of guys by his name. There is only one guy named A natural. Musicians don't know each note personally but they will get very close, without ever really locking the notes in. They may know A natural as somewhere between 438 bps and 444bps, but they have never really sat down with 440 bps and gotten to know it personally. Once you sit down with someone and get to know him (find out where he grew up, what his parents were like, what motivates him) and find out what you have in common with him (how your head, throat, chest feels when you sing the note for periods of time), then you will probably never forget him when you pass him on the street. You won't say," That dude looks really familiar, is it because he looks kind of like my other friend G#?” You will know this old friend immediately and say," A440! Whasup! Haven't seen you since the bridge." This is not some magical process. It is just a matter of taking time to sit down with these notes and spending some quality time with them. After you work on your note combinations during your practice time, remember to sing them occasionally during the rest of the day. This will help solidify your personal knowledge of these notes. First try to sing them in your mind. Then check them by singing them in your full chest voice. If you're patient and diligent you will be guaranteed results. Melodic Minor Scales There are four different possible melodic minor scales that can be played over a dominant seventh chord. You can organize them in terms of the number of alterations. For example over a C7 chord you can play: * G melodic minor- one tension (#11) * F melodic minor- one tension (b13) * Bb melodic minor- two tensions (b9, #9) * Eb melodic minor- three tensions (#9, #11, b13) * C# melodic minor- four tensions (b9, #9, #11, b13) Brian Berge said... Hey, are you guys forced to refer to the modes of the Melodic Minor the way you do because not all of them have standardized names? Or is that the way you guys actually prefer it (always referring to what would be the root of the 1st mode)? David Valdez said... For practical application in improvisation it's an easy way to calculate the correct chord scale quickly. The modes of the Melodic Minor scale also do not have the same type of key relationship as the modes of the Major Scale do. For example a B7 altered dominant scale is more related to the key of E Major than C Melodic Minor. If we relate everything we can back to the Melodic Minor then we can use take advantage of our familiarity with this simple scale. At Berklee they don't even bother to tell you that the altered dominant scale is a mode of the melodic minor. This is because they don't want you thinking in terms of another key. They would rather have you learn alt dominant scales as: root, b9, #9, 3, #11, b13, b7. It is much easier to think in terms of melodic minor, but the downside is that sometimes you lose track of how each note is actually functioning in relation to the chord that the scale is being played over. Download 1.04 Mb. Share with your friends:
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