Happy New Year!

Farewell 2010...hail and well met to 2011! I spent the last hour of 2010 listening to this. I'm rather embarrassed to say that, while I've know about the Bill Evans episode of Piano Jazz for quite a while, I hadn't heard it prior to this evening. What a great conversation. The playing is absolultly beautiful and hearing Bill talk about his processes is a treat. His thoughts on structure should be required listening for all musicians.

Here's an excerpt from The Universal Mind of Bill Evans where he discusses and demonstrates more of the same.

Music Other Than Jazz

I have A LOT of unread stuff in my RSS reader.

One of the subscriptions I try to read regularly is The Atlanic's culture feed, on which I found this this morning. I had not heard of John Vanderslice previous to today and I have full intentions of making Pixel Revolt my next iTunes purchase. It did get me to thinking, though...how much music do I miss by being SO focused on jazz all of the time. I understand the current trend of jazz musicians taking current material as their source material, but most of my listening remains focused on the perfecters of the art, i.e. Joe Henderson, Trane, Wayne, and Sonny. Additionally, most of the "modern" folks I listen to are steeped in that language as well. The modern guy I'm listening to most these days is Rich Perry.

But, the purpose of this post is not to debate the artistic merit of old vs. new or jazz vs. everything else. My discovery of John Vanderslice today was a joyful one to be sure. It reminded me of how much other music is out there that I love. For instance, REM and U2. I have some stuff from these folks on my workout playlists and every time they come up I remember how much I love that music. The Decemberists are another example.

How about it: what music other than your "favorite" inspires you?

I should read the stuff in my RSS reader more often...

Happy and Merry...

Jazz Advice

Jazz Advice is the kind of website that I think the internet was made for. A wealth of good information from folks who know and it is interactive. You can pose questions to the hosts and they will address them with an article. I've just begun to dig into some of the stuff on the site and it is just great information. A most helpful tool.

I came across this website through Eddie Rich's blog. Eddie is a great saxophone player and you should really seek out some of his stuff. Thanks Eddie, for turning us on to this great site!

Surface Structure vs. Deep Structure Part III

Back to the discussion of Surface vs. Deep Structure in improvisation...

In the last entry, I discussed distilling a transcribed line down to its essential construction. Shown below are the original line and one solution for its "Deep Structure".

Original:




Deep Structure:

Using this raw material one can quickly see that the Deep Structure for this line involves using an Eb Major triad over the Fmin7 chord and an E9 chord over the Bb7. Both of these are quite standard superimpositions, the Eb Major outlining the upper structure of the Fmin7 and the E7 being a tri-tone substitution for the Bb7. Using this schema as our roadmap, the next step is to compose our own lines based on Warne's Deep Structure.

Some solutions follow:

As we develop more material from Warne's Deep Structure, each of the lines developed should be taken through the transformative processes discussed in the previous post.

For a very comprehensive discussion of the pedagogical value and use of transcription as well as a recommended list of solos to transcribe, I recommend this article from Dave Liebman's website as well as his video: "An Improviser's Guide to Transcription" (available through Caris Music Services). Both of these references, as well as my experiences studying with Dave have helped to solidify my thoughts on transcription and informed many of the processes described here.

All praise Mulgrew!

Haven't been around much lately...school's back in session. I came across the video below and had to share it. Such sage advice. More deep structure coming...I promise!

Sunday Video

Here is a link to a great link to an interview with saxophonist Walt Weiskopf. Walt is a great modern player whose ideas about hexatonics/triad pairs are very well known in the Jazz Education world.

Here's a video of Walt's sextet: