Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Keezer Confusion

Finding Geoffrey Keezer on Rhapsody is a challenge because of a couple variations in spelling.   Geoff, Geoffrey, Geoffery  are all used and will narrow your search if you use any of those.   If you just search for "Keezer" you will circumvent the confusion.  By the way - he is on the top of the list of pianists to listen to... in my opinion.   Creative, eclectic, fresh and  dazzlingly proficient ---- a must hear jazz pianist.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Tetrachord Theory Trivia

A TETRACHORD is a group of 4 notes spanning the interval of a 4th.    Two Tetrachords stacked make a scale.  It turns out that 4 important scales in Jazz consist of  the SAME tetrachord played twice- first starting from the Root, and the second tetrachord starting from the 5th.     None of the other Jazz Modes and commonly played scales have this feature.  They are : MAJOR, DORIAN,  PHRYGIAN,  and ARABIC MINOR. Notice that the pattern of half-steps and whole-steps are the repeated for the upper half of each scale. 

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

How to Learn to Play Jazz? - Part I

People are always asking me that question.  They take lessons, they buy books, they study scales and theory and beat themselves over the head a lot. They look for the series of tasks that they should do that will get them there, not knowing exactly where "there" is.   They work through all manner of methods and pattern books. They look everywhere to become energized and driven to create.     But the question remains.     .....I suspect that the answers lie in another place.  And things are much easier in there, but it's a little hard to describe where that is  --- it's a place where things tend to take care of themselves and the process is natural and painless .....

Sound. You must play for how it sounds. Improvise or compose anything that sounds good, BECAUSE it sounds good. Play for the beauty of the music.  Observe the forces that make you want to play music for other reasons and watch them as they try to do their work.     Engagement. People. Projects. Listening. Inspiration. Play. Experimentation.  Emotional connection. Perform.  Listen for the love of it, practice for what it sounds like.  Discover and explore to inspire. Look outside yourself - forget yourself - create a science experiment to understand and be surprised by the results.
Play music but not from discipline, will-power, or perseverance , not to impress, not to succeed, not even to express, not to impress yourself. 
Be a musicologist, an historian and a scientist yet remain a child at play -- always explore and be curious about what's right there in front of you.  Investigate both to understand and to experience.
Connect with other musicians and play music - pick up the phone and make a call to make it happen  .  Be completely in the moment - observe thoughts that come and go as you go back to the moment.  Listen. Listen intently and listen a lot. Listen on a great sound system in a quiet environment and listen to observe, not to like or dislike, but just to hear. Explore and explore some more. Explore to discover and to be surprised and to understand more.  Listen to all kinds of music from all over the world.  Listen to singers and more singers. Create a tangible project - a recital, a house concert, a gig, a recording, a research paper, a youtube video, a composition, an arrangement. Create a project for the 21st century.   
Embrace positive psychology-  positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement  and find your state of musical well-being. Play with, but don't fight, your limitations; observe what you do well and watch it evolve as you do more. Experiment with your strengths. 
Work to make your instrument sound great - touch, pedaling, balance, tone,  and do everything possible to make your instrument sound its best - tuning, voicing, regulating, climate control, room acoustics or just buying a new instrument.  When all is in place, playing music and growing musically takes care of itself.  Eliminate the word "practice" and replace it with "explore" and explore things that fascinate you.  Explore to find what fascinates you - search for and feed your inspiration - inspiration comes from outside ourselves not from within. Observe the styles and techniques that make the instrument sound great. Escape the printed page - play from minds ear, play in all keys.   Always find the groove, the feel, and dig down deep to find that, as it is elusive and deceptive.   Find something new, find something old. Always differentiate styles in a big way.  Create a new style.    Sound. You must play for how it sounds.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Jazz Arranging Part I: FSM

  Believe it or not this post is about music and arranging jazz. For me it is a way to think about solo jazz piano. Read on:

              I do fruit smoothies...pretty much everyday and even more often than that.  OK, I'm obsessed, I admit it.    The concoctions are always improvised and are almost always successful, always a surprise, always a science experiment...but I  always discover something radically new when the drink is NOT particularly successful.  Mistakes are really successes.   I don't like to follow recipes though I will look at recipes to trigger ideas and to kick myself into different ways of thinking.  At first, I would go down to Costco and pick up a bulk container of everything they had to offer.... well, I still do that.  The first smoothies contained a representation of all of those different fruits and they were good, but every batch ended up tasting more or less the same, and would all have the same color ( the color of blackberries) and virtually the same texture.  The results from one batch to the next were not easily differentiated.   I realized that to achieve some flavor differentiation I would have to narrow down the number of ingredients.  And deep down I just know that differentiation is the goal in the art of FSM ( fruit smoothie making).  Having all of those beautiful Costco fresh fruits sitting there, I would have to make  painful decisions on what to leave out.  Simplifying the ingredient list in each batch empowered each batch to have a much more distinctive and memorable character.  This allowed the unique flavors to come to the surface and it became much more important to use fresh, robust, flavorful individual ingredients, never old tasteless, bland, characterless fruit, because now,  the fruit variety, ripeness, texture, is allowed to shine through in a way that was completely obscured before.
             The choices made in combining fruits became the primary decision to be made. I started with unexpected combinations - I would typically combine a couple different fruits like raspberries and oranges and add some white grape juice ( because I had a bunch of it sitting around)  to provide a liquid base and soon realized that all of the drinks were starting to taste like Grape Nehi.  The juice base was an overpowering flavor that wiped out all of the advantages of simplifying the ingredient list.  It became necessary to pay attention ( there's a recurrent phrase! ) to ingredients can hijack the flavor - certainly grape juice is one, bananas, lemons, cranberries, nutmeg.  Combining ingredient that are similar,  turns out to be remarkable effective when you pay attention to leaving out ingredients.  Simply orange juice, tangerines, and carrot juice make an amazing smoothie in color, taste and texture.
            As summer approaches, ice becomes an obvious choice, but has a couple effects on the drink.  First, of course, it makes it colder, which dulls the tastes senses and demands that we use stronger flavors to compensate for the conditions. Secondly, it dilutes the taste because effectively watering down the taste. Thirdly, it adds a gritty texture.  These should all be factored in when choosing ingredients - the concentration of flavor in each taste, or the flavor-density is important to consider while packing ingredients into the blender.
             Sometimes, an ingredient added in extremely small amounts can make a huge difference - salt for example if added on the level of just a few grains can completely change the flavor effect. Or, for special occasions, vodka. At other times, adding an ingredient may not actually affect the taste, but knowing that it's there can trick you into thinking that it does.  This self-deception is an easy trap to fall in, especially if the ingredient is expensive or exotic where you could easily convince yourself how great it is. 
            Certain ingredients function to add an "edge" to the drink, maybe it's acidity as from vitamin C ( ascorbic acid) , lime juice, lemon juice or cider. In moderation this will add a layer of interest without masking the basic flavor combination. A range of spices like cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, citrus rind or ginger used judiciously, usually just one at a time can create a new layer. One consideration is the concentration of this added layer - sometimes it is very effective to just keep it extremely subtle to the point where it is not actually identifiable, other times you can lay it on thick - as long as the foundation flavors remain intact.  Ultimately, if the foundation-flavor combination is weak, the whole drink is weak.
          The effects of textural combinations are important to the final product. Overuse of a texture can thicken the drink to the point that the taste becomes secondary.  Grapes and melon together, for example, can really produce an overly slimy thick concoction that is not pleasant at all.  A little slime goes a long way.  But every drink can still have it's own distinctive texture created by paying attention to choices. 
           In the end, a fruit smoothie is here today and gone tomorrow. It is just a science experiment preceded by one and followed by another.  Nobody cares about your fruit smoothie as much as you do but that doesn't take the art out of it - it just makes it more important to do it well, for the moment, for it's own sake, for the taste of it, to nourish your body and for the lessons to be learned.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

The Two most important Musical Numbers

No, they are not "Happy Birthday" and "New York, New York".
  The first number is 1.059463. If you take the frequency of any note and multiply it by this number, you will get the frequency of the next note a 1/2 step up. The entire equal tempered scale is based on this number which happens to be the 12th root of 2 - that number which when multiplied by itself 12 times, equals 2. This frequency progression is known as a geometric series.

The second most important number is 1.000577789. If you take the frequency of any note and multiply it by this number you will get the frequency of the the pitch that is 1 cent sharper. There are 100 cents in a half-step, therefore 1200 cents in an octave and this number is simply the 1200th root of 2, the number that when multiplied by itself 1200 times equals 2.  This frequency progression is also a geometric series.

So why care? Well, practically speaking, a musician doesn't need to walk around with a calculator, although its handy to be able to figure out the frequency of hot spots or feedback pitches. With A above middle C being 440 Hz it's fairly simple to figure it out especially when you realize that octaves are also a logarithmic series obtained by multiplying the frequency by 2 :  110, 220, 440, 880 etc. 
    More interesting, though, is one result of the math, which is looking at the relationship between CENTS and HERTZ. Hertz refers to the frequency, or the vibrations per second, sometimes called cycles per second. If you multiply 440 by 1.000577789 4 times, you get the frequency of the tone that is 4 cents above 440. It turns out to be 441.01, or virtually 441. This is very handy - the result being that AT A440, 4 CENTS = 1 HERTZ.    So if your piano is tuned to A442, for example, you can have everyone tune their instruments 8 cents sharp, cents being the most common scale on portable electronic tuners and 440 being standard tuning pitch.  
   They will be able to use any note as a tuning reference as long as it is 8 cents sharp and it wouldn't have to be A4 ( A above middle C).  If they are tuning A5, for example, they would still tune it 8 cents sharp, 8 cents at that frequency now represents  2 Hertz instead of 1, which is really just academic but also interesting.
  So here are some examples

If the piano is
          A444           tune   16 cents sharp
          A435           tune    20 cents flat   ( this used to be standard pitch)
          A442           tune     8 cents sharp    ( this is slowly becoming standard pitch )

So now we have made cents out of hertz.  I know math hertz, but it's fun for us geeks.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Essential Jazz Pianists -- only 154 of them

If you're not familiar with all of these fine pianists, you will want to be.  Quit your day job and get to work.....( use the + to zoom in if font is small )
Essential Jazz Pianists

Friday, May 13, 2011

New Wave of Piano Jazz - a Tsunami of Tsound

Taylor Eigsti
Geoffrey Keezer
Jacky Terrason
Brad Mehldau
Antoine Hervé

  Check out these amazing players.  These are 5 contemporary pianists that are stretching the boundaries of Solo Jazz Piano in a refreshing direction and I think it makes sense to group them together.  Each is unique, of course, but there is something they share.   They are helping to morph jazz away from the traditional improvising over existing tunes into an art form that is difficult to distinguish from formal 20th century more formal composition.  They do it in a way that is elegant and controlled, yet heavily improvised and often heavily rhythmic, heavily influence by classical music and their solid classical training.  These pianists are all fully competent at traditional jazz styles but have evolved from that foundation to  spearhead a new and fresh approach to jazz.  It is not free-jazz, it is not traditional, it is not swing, it is not latin.  It is not atonal but the tonality is not transparent most of the time.  It is certainly eclectic, complex, and energetic but remains accessible in the same way that any abstract art is accessible. The approach is full of surprises, harmonic and rhythmic twists and turns and grooves that defy description, with stylistic influences from around the globe.   They are all consummate musicians, highly trained, technical wizards and able to play the piano with a classical touch, sensibility and control.   Most are young, with the exception of Hervé who is 50 something, but young at heart.
  It is risky putting any of these players in a category of any kind as they all do so many different things.  Suffice it to say that it's all worth good time spent researching and listening to their music.  All have a presence on Rhapsody and iTunes.

Monday, May 9, 2011

All The Things You Are - melodic variations?

BRIDGE TO "ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE"
ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE        Having heard, over the years,  a plethora of melodic variations on the bridge ( B section ) to Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are", probably the most played jazz standard of all time, other than"All Blues",  I decided to research the archives to see what the melody REALLY is  on this tune.   It turns out, to my surprise, there is almost no argument what the melody is.  After finding the tune in a substantial number of fake books and listening to a bunch of old recordings,  I only found one variation where, in bar 7 above, the 2nd and 3rd notes were up a half-step.  I have, however,  heard people sing and play this bridge 5 or 6 different ways but the literature is in agreement that the tune is as you see above.  I think respecting the original melody, in this case, is important  because it is a very clever sequence of tension-release lower neighbor tones is lost when the melody is changed - most of the variations I've heard just simplify the melody to the point that it is no longer interesting.   It's maybe not as important as, say, ...world peace.    So, case closed.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Nyckelharpa - an amazing Swedish thing

Today I attended a workshop put on by Salt Lake Scandinavian that included a demo-lecture about the instrument you see pictured,  the  Nyckelharpa.  Check out SLS out at
    http://saltlakescandidance.shutterfly.com/
They do bi-monthly Scandinavian dancing in Salt Lake City,  for all levels, and other special events and are a very friendly group of folks. 
    The nyckelharpa is basically a "keyed violin" found extensively in traditional Swedish folk dance music.   I have heard this instrument for years being used by the Swedish band "Väsen" and have loved the dry vibrato-less quality with it's slightly raw intonation and relatively loud noise and clatter component.  Some of the expert players of the nyckelharpa have absolutely dazzling technique and play very expressively despite the disconnectedness of the left hand from the strings.
  The keys are pushed in toward the string and a small oak peg with a tapered edge ( a tangent, as it's called)  makes contact with the string to create a new speaking length - the string is just touched and not actually pushed against the neck or any kind of fret board - the tangent is rather like a fret itself.  The pitches are all individually tuned by miniscule rotations of the tangent - one for each of the many  notes!  The modern instrument usually has 16 strings, 3 that are directly bowed and keyed, 1 that is a bowed drone, and 12 that vibrate sympathetically to give a full reverberant sound and the keys are laid out chromatically. 
 Check out the American Nyckelharpa Association on the web   www.nyckelharpa.org/  for extensive reading about the instrument, its history and many variations.  It actually predates the violin by several centuries! 
  Also check out Väsen on Rhapsody -- one trick, though - you've got to have the umlaut over the "a" to achieve any search results ---option+u, then type a.   There are 4 CD's that will pop up when you select "albums".  They are a group of 3  - guitar or cittern, fiddle and nyckelharpa.
  Another album of note -  Sweden:The Nyckelharpa  by Daniel Peterson, solo nyckelharpa.   A majority of these Swedish dance pieces are in 3/4 but are often phrased in somewhat obscured long rather complicated phrases of 6, 4+2 or 2+4 depending on the dance style. Sometimes the underlying 3/4 is not at all transparent, which is what makes it most interesting to follow.  There is a distinctive plaintive quality that pervades Scandinavian music that I also really enjoy.

Friday, May 6, 2011

The Hippest Jazz is not Jazz

Federico Mompou (1893-1987) - a Spanish composer of miniature piano, guitar, choral and vocal works had a sense of complex harmony that rivals the most inventive of contemporary Jazz players.  His compositions are reflective, introspective and just plain beautiful.  There are threads of Eric Satie and Gabriel Faure in his music - lots of space, impeccably rational harmonic resolutions that defy description; it is New Age without being insulting, it is Jazz without swing, Impressionism without all the notes.  To study his harmonies and voicings would be a serious education for any Jazz pianist looking to open some new doors.
   There are about 27 CD's of Mompou piano music listed on Rhapsody - my favorites for the rich harmonic stuff are the Piano Music of Mompou performed by Jordi Maso   and the newest release by Jenny Lin  entitled "Silent Music".  Some of his music is more harmonically adventurous than others - I suggest some patient surfing to find the real meaty stuff and enjoy the other stuff along the way.    

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Don't Get Around Much Anymore - the song

   Duke Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" was first recorded by him in 1940 as an instrumental big band version and became a huge hit for him.  Lyrics were added later by Bob Russell and, as is true of almost all of the old standards played today, the original version was a LOT slower.  ( What's with that, anyway?)  The song's long-term popularity is evidenced by the fact that 545 versions pop up on Rhapsody.  ( Still nothing compared with Fly Me To the Moon's 945, Satin Doll at 717, and Girl From Ipanema at 746 ).

  But this blog post is about chord changes.  This tune is another one the standards that is unsettled at the beginning ( see my previous post on "As Time Goes By" ) - the first 4 bars are a guaranteed train wreck - so I went through a bunch of different versions by well-know artists and compiled the variations.  Even Ellington was laying down different versions - it's no wonder that no one really knows what to do on this song as the variations are fairly extreme.  It is also curious, that in bar 5 (not shown on my manuscript below) is sometimes the iim7 and sometimes II7  (Dm7 or D7), but more often the minor 7, which was a real surprise.  Note that Ellington's version #2, below, is also the version used by Louis Armstrong, Milt Jackson, The Inkspots, Ella Fitzgerald and Anne Murray. Here they all are:

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

My, how things change

Chromatic Button Accordion - truly genius!


Chromatic button accordions are used widely throughout Europe and Russia - developed in the mid 1800's, it is a brilliant system that facilitates fast playing, easy reaches of wide intervals and simple transposition.   Notice that the rows are a minor 3rd apart and the left diagonals are a series of descending whole-steps which results in the right diagonals being a series of  ascending half-steps.  No matter where you put your hand down on the keyboard, on any row, the pattern is the same.  Playing in different keys requires no new relationships as it does on the piano keyboard.  Keyboard accordions are just simply, more difficult to play but were developed to satisfy the US market that was more accustomed to the piano keyboard.  Here's a remarkable video of Uwe Steger comparing the traditional reed accordion with the Roland electronic accordion ( both chromatic button accordions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jfJJOdWsAQ