Busting a myth about note-selection in real-time...

[brwnhornet59]

One leads to the other. When you practice targeting notes, after awhile you hear them intuitively. That is what we strive for.

Our ears are the most important tool that we have. Ear training is a life long journey.

[JakeAcci]

Originally Posted by brwnhornet59

One leads to the other. When you practice targeting notes, after awhile you hear them intuitively. That is what we strive for.

Our ears are the most important tool that we have. Ear training is a life long journey.

yeah!

[mattymel]

im starting to think that thinking in terms of a "one note at a time" context is a big part of the problem for me and one i am trying to get out of. the more i listen and transcribe to/from the masters the more apparent it becomes that single notes are COMPLETELY unimportant. just as many "wrong" notes as right. more "right" notes that are WRONG.

what is important is the logical starting/conclusion of AN IDEA. lee konitz will play an idea and follow it regardless as to whether it fits the changes at all. he never fails to resolve it masterfully.

i recently found this:
Lee Konitz 10-Step Method

really cool. check it out. not sure if that lee's actual stuff, but who cares. its good. of greatest importance to this way of thinking is that there is an actual melody you are STARTING with. not a chord. how easy is it to just start running your fingers and hope that you are landing on the right notes? not hard if you know the notes. still, this is the hardest way to actually come up with music, is by thinking about chords and scales to go with them. do the greats play by stumbling onto it? i think not.

i also transcribed lee's solo on ATTYA (another thread) if anyone is interested.

[cosmic gumbo]

Some folks like to play music, some folks get obsessed with studying about playing music. In the end, I know some certified "doctors" of music (PhD) who actually can't play their way out of a paper bag, but they are human music technique and theory encyclopedias. So what. The ones that can't play seem to be the ones that do the most talking about it. There's always one more book they have to buy....

[JonnyPac]

Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo

Some folks like to play music, some folks get obsessed with studying about playing music. In the end, I know some certified "doctors" of music (PhD) who actually can't play their way out of a paper bag, but they are human music technique and theory encyclopedias. So what. The ones that can't play seem to be the ones that do the most talking about it. There's always one more book they have to buy....

Hal Galper and Bert Ligon are both great players who teach a solid no-BS approach to jazz improvisation; you can't knock that. They are not these straw-man "can't play so they teach" types. Find their recordings, listen, you will agree... and you may even buy their books!

[JonnyPac]

Originally Posted by BigDaddyLoveHandles

I agree. I think of landing on a chord tone on beats 1 & 3 as "stage 1". As a starting off phase -- something to play off. Then you can do things like:

1. Anticipate the chord change and emphasize a chord tone just before the chord change: like on the & of 4 and starting the new measure with some rests.

2. Syncopating -- then the emphasis is off the beat anyway.

That's for stating it clearly. I tried to stress that here:

Creative control, and clear vision and intention are should be some goals for a great artist (or musician) to be. Only once you can fully control the basic lining-up of these elements can you successfully syncopate, displace, superimpose, anticipate, delay the resolution successfully, IMHO.

And this from Bako rings true:

On the idea of chord tones on downbeats I often wonder what is the difference between a downbeat and a beat that you put emphasis on which can fall anywhere you choose. To me to "syncopate, displace, superimpose, anticipate, delay the resolution successfully" are basic building blocks of making a motif and a phrase. I probably listen to too much highly syncopated music and wouldn't recognize a downbeat if it hit me over the head.

From the textbook Jazz Styles on Bill Evans:

His work was rhythmically very involved. He frequently constructed phrases without starting or stopping them on main beats. He did not necessarily accent beats that indicate the meter of the piece- the first of every four beats, in meter of four, for example. Though his melodic ideas are very rhythmic, many are not obvious in terms of the beat. Evans may, for instance, stagger a melodic figure across several measures, always accenting the upbeats, never squarely accenting a downbeat. He may float past it instead. Evans conceived his improvisations in reference to the meter and tempo of the piece. Yet listeners often could not gain a clear indication of this unless they also heard walking bass or ride rhythms as a reference. Unlike most hard bop pianists, Evans evolved away from playing long strings of bouncing eighth notes that explicitly delineated each beat that evenly rose and fell. The architecture of his lines was more complex, and tension was resolved less often.

I posted the above except to Hal on FB and he kindly replied to me with this:

Dizzy told me the more upbeats in your playing the more it swings. Certainly FM accounts for a large part of the "floating" effect but Bill is well known for his ability to displace a line using the technique of Harmonic FM. This is the ability to spell out the changes ahead (or behind) of where the changes would be written. Bergonzi has a new instructional DVD coming out and I have an advanced copy. In it he explains how you spell changes out ahead of time. You have to think in two bars phrases. If you have a ll-V, a bar per chord, you can spell a change out one beat ahead by thinking of the two bars as one bar of 3 beats for the II chord then the second bar as five beats of the V. Or, 2 beats for the II chord and six beats for the V, or one beat for the II and seven beats for the V chord. Jerry quotes Bill as saying he was working on how to spell them out FOUR BARS AHEAD of the changes! Deep! There is also an often misunderstood aspect to this. Most of the great improvisers made up their own changes over the original set, using the original set as a place-keeping guide. This has often led to misconceptions in transcriptional analysis when the analysis is done according the the written chord as opposed to what the line itself spells out. Hope this helps.

The idea of tension and release beats meets metric superimposition is a can of worms... A very good can! This stuff really inspires me.

[brwnhornet59]

Originally Posted by JonnyPac

Hal Galper and Bert Ligon are both great players who teach a solid no-BS approach to jazz improvisation; you can't knock that. They are not these straw-man "can't play so they teach" types. Find their recordings, listen, you will agree... and you may even buy their books!

I have read Bert's book, it is excellent, as is his playing. I am enjoying the hell out of Hal's book as well.

Joe Locke just sent me a killer recording of Hal with the Brecker Bros circa 76 I believe. Very cool!

[JonnyPac]

You can stream Galper's album Ivory Forest with the young John Scofield here:

Grooveshark - Free Music Streaming, Online Music

Bert Ligon's music and compositions:

Original Compositions

[brwnhornet59]

Thanx Jonny. Going to check it out.

[JonnyPac]

Cool beans.

[jckoto3]

Originally Posted by JonnyPac

[SNIP]...

Bert Ligon's music and compositions:

Original Compositions

Beware, every single tune on that page started playing simultaneously in Google Chrome.

[JonnyPac]

Wow... Linear harmony overload! I'm on Firefox- no problems.