I was forwarded a YouTube link yesterday of a young musician playing John Coltrane’s solo from Giant Steps note for note. He was a technically proficient player who obviously had worked hard to get each of Trane’s difficult phrases under his fingers. But after watching it and thinking of the many similar online imitations of…
I received an email this morning from an enthusiastic sax player struggling to get better at playing jazz. He has started working with my book Jazz Patterns for Ear and wrote, “After playing the exercises in the book, I played a standard tune and immediately felt closer to the things I was playing”. He said…
The world was shocked on February 9th, when we lost Chick Corea. I was on a couple of email threads the next day from reading some remembrances of Chick from people who knew him. With their permission, I will share a few. From Monika Herzig, author of the book Experiencing Chick Corea: A Listener’s Companion…
It was February 3 of last year that 9,800 people had the virus and 200 had died worldwide. Then on March 11 the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a Pandemic, with WHO Director-General declaring at a briefing in Geneva that the agency is “deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity” of…
Here’s an experiment for you. Take a look at the following chord chart. Does it look inviting and pleasant to improvise over? Probably not, and that’s because you are evaluating it through your eyes and analytical brain. The message most likely is THIS LOOKS HARD. If you were to improvise over these changes, what notes…
I couldn’t take it any longer. Richie Beirach’s broken-down website built sometime late in the Bronz Age was begging to be taken out of its misery. Broken links, decades-old news, and the original “Under Construction” header message were not doing him any favors. Like a lot of musicians, Richie didn’t think it mattered. After all,…
As an experiment about two months ago, I recorded my reading of the book Richie Beirach and I produced called the Lineage of Modern Jazz Piano. I then made it into an audiobook. The audiobook market is growing by about 25% over the past couple years, so that must mean that people are becoming more…
You show up at a jam session and Autumn Leaves, All the Things You Are, and Bye Bye Blackbird are called in their standard keys. You know the melody for each of those tunes and make your way pretty well through your soloing. Looking back, however, how well did you know those tunes? For most…
Last week I sent out a video lesson from my course Improvisation Savvy. The lesson took players through the process of playing on their instrument the music that lives and is often trapped within their musical imagination. A few people completed it but not nearly as many as I had hoped for. In thinking about…
I put out a challenge last week that was tied to a new lesson for my online course Improvisation Savvy. It involves singing an 8-bar improvisation over a provided rhythm track and then playing on one’s instrument a transcription of what was sung. The point is to hear your authentic music coming from your instrument.…