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Just heard John Stowell live the other night. It was great. I always really liked he's style even though it's quite different from what I usually fall for.
I am having a lot of trouble determining his style though? (not that this is a bad thing). How would you caracterize his playing? The closest I can come would be like "Bach on meth" or something :D (pardon me for quoting myself).
Anyhoo just curious as to what some of you guys would think of his playing/style..
Great player. Very underappreciated.
He has a couple of instructional video courses available through Truefire.com if you wanted to get a handle on his approach.
I love Stowell's playing so inventive and soulful. Guess you could just call him avante garde pushing the envelope of harmony and melody. I love the intervals he pulls out of scales that create his unique sound.
Incredibly deep player, and a helluva nice guy.
I love this video of him.
Great video, thank you.
Great player with an outstanding and individual style. That video is great.
Great player - great guy. I had the pleasure of sitting down and playing with him a few years ago and really enjoyed it.
I remarked to him that I noticed that he and I both have a tendency to gravitate towards the whole-tone part of the melodic minor scale, this can make your lines sound more on the angular side. And since he tends to use MM a lot (he has an application for each mode), his playing has a pretty modern, often angular sound.
John is also a testament to the fact that you don't need large hands to play knuckle-busting chords - his hands are pretty small. As you can see in his videos, he cocks the neck up really high, which facilitates chording.
Definitely a unique voice on the instrument and should be recognized more.
He's got one instructional video where he talks about mixing minor scales. I didn't work through it. Does anybody know what that means? Is that just an eight note scale with a b7 and a 7? I've never heard anybody else talk about "mixing" scales.
John is fantastic a wonderful player and teacher and all around human being. I'm playing a concert with him as part of a visit to where I teach end of November. He's one of the true unsung heros of the music in my opinion. Brilliant player
Good to see some love for John here ;)
Personally I had never heard about him until a year ago when I was checking out some video lessons on youtube. I remember I heard him play a minor blues that really impressed me.
And I always thought he had a very "angular" sound (as Spirit59 mentions) which always made me think of the whole tone scale somehow. I know he uses MM a LOT so it's probably a correct observertion you (Spirit59) made there. I never actually transcribed/analyzed his stuff but I think I will now :)
Anyhoo thanks for the comments and the vids (nice ones).
Good observations on the melodic minor and whole tone connection! The seventh mode, superlocrian or altered, is also known as diminished whole tone because the first part of the scale is from symmetrical diminished and the second part is whole tone.
That's the fun thing about this superimposition business, because you can find these unique interval patterns and superimpose them on different chords according the modal applications to get nice colors. Yeah, lydian augmented - there's a good use of the whole tone part of melodic minor on major chords. The whole tone part functions also as #7 sound(augmented is an usual way to get this) when used on minor chords(regular melodic minor mode 1).
John's a friend. He's probably the most dedicated musician I know and a real inspiration to me to push myself a bit harder and dig a bit deeper.
I love his playing. I think he's one of the "best in the world" players in his modern harmonic concept. I played a clinic with him in Vienna, Austria about 10 years ago. Great musician.
Check out 'The Banff Sessions' and 'Scenes'. Some really tasty playing from Stowell on both of those recordings.
Big plus one to that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jazzpunk
Those new to John this is good CD he's doing a few realbook tunes so you can hear him in context of tunes you're familiar with.
I have known and listened to John for years and love his playing. He is one of the most gracious and unassuming human beings you will ever meet and one lesson will leave you with enough material to work on for a year. He is always pushing the bounds of harmonic knowledge, and knows the guitar and its possibilities cold... open string voicings and melodies, those amazing tight voicings he's so good at... Seems most great players know of him and respect him hugely, but his music isn't as approachable as some, which keeps him out of the limelight. But, he will NEVER compromise. He hears things a certain way, and will simply not "dumb down" his music.
That being said, sometimes you don't appreciate the level he plays at until you hear him on a standard. Amazing comping skills, as well. Just an amazing human being, all around. I wish I could instantly make him famous, he deserves it.
Some great choices for listening to John: the first ''Scenes" album, Banff Sessions, duo album with Frank (?) Haunschild, Resonance, the older stuff with Dave Friesen..... Take any 5 minutes of John's playing and transcribe and analyze it, incorporate it and it will move you ahead musically 10 times faster than most other studies of jazz, I think, even if you never try to sound like him. Try it!
Well said!Quote:
Originally Posted by yebdox
+1Quote:
Originally Posted by Spirit59
Hey everybody:
I have the good fortune of being able to attend a private (maybe five people) seminar with John Stowell tonight. I think the format is going to be a mixture of performance, lecture, and taking questions. Since I know that this is a rare and unique opportunity in which the seminar may evolve into discussion since there will be so few people, I would be more than willing to relay any questions that you on the forum may have for him. I'm sure that I'll want to discuss this seminar at length in any case, so if you don't have any questions but you're still interested in hearing about how it went and what we discussed, follow this thread, because I'll do follow up posts afterwards.
Although I'll be trying to give all of you an impression of what he was like and the subjects he taught, as well as some of the insights he makes, I want to make it clear that what I bring back will in no way reflect the entirety of the covered topics and that I would encourage all of you to support someone who I consider to be an under-appreciated jazz genius by trying to catch one of his seminars yourselves or looking into his video lessons.
Thanks!
Very generous, my friend!
One thing I would like to hear more about his how his study of Jimmy Wyble's material changed his playing. He has mentioned he really got into Wyble but I'd be curious specifically what he worked on and how it changed his harmonic approach.
Interesting question, I'll make sure to ask him about it. I remember reading something somewhere about Stowell talking about Jimmy Wyble's book on two-line improvisation, so I'll check into it.
I have a request. Please ask him how he approaches and organizes triads and/or hexatonics as a soloing device for his improvisations.
I've learned a lot from his melodic minor approach, but that's scale-centric.
It would be nice to get some insight into other ways he approaches improvisation.
Hey AmundLauritzen, unfortunately your post was after the seminar finished, but! Fortunately he discussed the topic anyways!
Firstly, Jeff, he brought up Jimmy Wyble before I asked him about it! John said "Jimmy Wyble is a guitarist who sounded like an orchestra". I asked him if he would elaborate on how Wyble influenced his harmonic concept, and John's reply was that it changed his harmonic concept less than his rhythmic, melodic, and physical concept. Wyble's approach was to break chords and lines into double stops and do kind of double arpeggios, if that makes sense. Then he would start moving voices, and he was able to make these great voice leading lines because the chord would be broken up, giving him the ability to play normally impossible voicings. That's what Wyble's two line improvisation is about. So rhythmically, Stowell says he sometimes uses this technique to comp, but usually stays away from the high strings because it gets in soloists' ways sometimes. But he said that in his solo stuff, he always drops in double stops that are pieces of chord voicings. He also said that it made him rethink his chord voicings because he started seeing impossible chord voicings that were made possible by breaking them into double stops.
Amund, his chord theory is amazing; every time I've watched any video lessons of his, I've always thought that it was scales first then chords for Stowell, but he sees chord shapes when he improvises more than he sees scale shapes. He just has really intensely unique chord voicings. Anyways, towards the end of the seminar, he started getting into some of his theories about combining scales and working with triads. So for example, on a CMaj7 chord, his base is a C Maj7 arpeggio. But he has three non-major mode scales that he uses for major chords: Lydian #5, Ionian #5, and Lydian #9. Obviously the tensions on those chords make them less than ideal in a lot of practical situations, so he talked about combining Ionian or Lydian with these other scales, making sort of poly-scales, about which he said "As long as there's intention, direction, and motion in your lines then it won't matter" as long as you don't linger on the dissonances.
This is all scale stuff. But then he broke down the three non major modes as being based on triad pairs and/or triads with bass notes. Lydian #9=CMaj+BMaj triads. Lydian and Ionian #5=EMaj triad with C in the bass. He also developed the idea of the upper structure over a bass note implying different scalar harmonies with the example of Eb^7#11/C=C Dorian, Ab^7#11/C=C Aeolian, Db^7#11/C=C Phrygian, Gb^7#11/C=C Locrian, and moving up in fourths this way can modulate modal structure while keeping the same basic "minor" harmonic feel.
Anyways, it was really great. Anyone that's able to see him, take a lesson with him, see a seminar of him, definitely should!
Oh, and also. He is so nice. I had heard that he was before, but he really was quite approachable. I gave him my group's CD, and he said "Great, I'm going to be doing a lot of driving, I'll give it a listen. Is your email address in here?" I stammeringly said something about oh lemme just grab my business card, mumblemumble, and when I gave it to him he said "Excellent. Let's keep in touch."
:eek:
He's also going to send me a 40 page PDF full of material...
Again:
:eek: