-
Charlie Parker tunes are classics in the jazz repertoire and just about everybody takes a shot at Donna Lee or Confirmation...but its pretty hard to get those tunes up to tempo, isn't it?
here lately, I've had a special request from my bass player for us to play more Parker tunes in our trio. So I have to shed some Parker tunes, too. but I'm not going to just dust off some tunes I used to play, I'm learning a couple new ones this time around and this is what got me thinking about this
Bebop tunes are a lot like Irish tunes and Appalachian tunes in that they are wall to wall eights notes and you have to have the tune down cold to play it at tempo, because the tempos are going to be cutting the rug
the suggestion I'm going to make is listen to a lot of bop tunes. No really, the first thing to remember with these sort of tunes is that the easiest bop tune to learn is the one that is stuck in your head. So get a Parker CD and just listen to it a few times through. If there is any tune that stuck in your head...learn THAT one first.
One of the things that makes Donna Lee difficult is that if you can't sing that head then you don't have it in your ears. You're lost right rom the start.
so that is secret #2...I don't even pick up my instrument to learn a new bop tune unless I can sing it through
so to that end I set up a play list of 5 tunes that I'm working on and I listen to those 5 tunes, over and over, all flipping day at work Monday through Friday. Immerse yourself. Repetition is a fantastic teacher. If you can sing the head, then it is in your mind. Your mind is where music is born, not your hands.
So you need to get your mind right
Learn the bop tunes that stick in your head first, not the tunes you think you need to learn.
and when you work on them, make the first step just listening to them over and over. Listen to them with a lead sheet in front of you if you want. But get the tune in your head before you even pick up the axe to start working on it.
good luck and good bopping
-
02-17-2016 11:36 AM
-
Tip #2 .. you are probably learning them on Guitar.. not saxophone.
Sometimes you have to learn what notes to pick and what notes not to.
Some notes should be dropped completely.
Take this with a grain of salt .. I am been practicing Donna Lee for a little over a year now and am still only at about 70% of the original tempo.
-
you don't have to drop the notes, but you are right that they aren't all picked. you just slur them together like how a sax player operates the keys without articulating with the tongue. Or think of how Diz played
Originally Posted by SamBooka
but that's probably good to mention that you don't pick each note in strict meter. But if you listen to a lot of Bird, you'd never be doing that anyway.
that's why if you start by listening to the tune and getting it stuck in your head, this stuff generally takes care of itself.
-
I feel it is especially important to learn bop heads by ear and shed them through a few keys. I've shedded a bunch through all keys and positions, and I'm no great player. People will phrase and/or play bop heads a bit differently and if you don't REALLY know them, you can get thrown off, more importantly, be left unable to jump back in unless you really know them cold.
-
It's easier to learn bop by ear. At least for me.
-
Originally Posted by christianm77
so Chris, out of curiosity, do you listen to the tune a lot before you start actually picking it out on the axe?
or do you just do it all in one go?
-
Good advice, Nate. Like Christian, I always learn bop heads by ear and that's partly because I don't trust the accuracy of transcriptions. For instance, many recorded versions of Donna Lee seem to follow the original real book chart and it's full of little errors (the Omnibook is mostly faithful to the original recording). I tend to jump around a lot on the neck as well to preserve the sense of the line and occasionally use non-standard fingerings if the tempo is up there.
-
Figuring out heads by ear vs reading them depends on what you are working on. If you're working on reading read them, if your workibg on your ear, transcribe them
-
Some great advice here. I'll add...
- some heads are a lot easier than others, start with the easier ones
- play at a tempo that is comfortable for your hands and ears and mind - we don't live in an amphetamine charged 40's 52nd St 7*24 world these days (well I don't anyway, sadly) and we don't need to play it that way - I actually prefer a lot of the bop classics taken at a lazy lope, and they swing just as hard that way
- check out the original songs, most of them are based on classic songs (Donna Lee/Indiana etc)
- get the Parker Omnibook and work on the solos, for my money it's one of the best jazz learning resources full-stop (period), they have the logical beauty and the beautiful logic of Bach.Last edited by sunnysideup; 02-18-2016 at 05:44 AM.
-
Depends. I've certainly done the singing all the way through thing in the past. Originally Posted by Nate Miller
Sometimes I'll sing a phrase, then play it in a few places on the instrument. After a couple of years of singing though Lester solos that I never actually learned to play I've gone back to that, but it all depends what you are working towards. At the moment I am interested in being able to pre hear phrases and put them on the instrument, so I tend to do this more.
If you learn a piece all the way through, you are working on your ability to memorise and hold longer pieces of music in your head.
It all has its place, I think.
From my experience, the most important thing is that whatever the length of the thing you are learning you must absolutely not play the instrument until you can sing the whole thing through correctly without the aid of the record. If you pick up the instrument earlier than that you will just make mistakes that you will then learn.
Incidentally, I'm finding a lot of mistakes now in the heads I learned from the realbook when I was getting started - heads like Scrapple and so on. So I have to relearn those by ear.
-
BTW - there is a potentially interesting discussion to be had about how much of learning bop heads is mechanical/technical and how much of it is linguistic/musical. I went through a period of playing my heads in different positions and keys to try and internalise the lines (by ear, but also analysing them sometimes with respect to a key centre) but I found a hard ceiling as to how fast I could play them.
If you want to play Donna Lee, for example, I feel you kind of need one good fingering and then practice it until it becomes muscle memory. I'd like it to be otherwise, but that's what I have to do to play it on the stand.
-
singing seems to be the best way to internalize music, if you play through it you might remember it, if you sing along with it, get it inside it'll be apart of you
-
Omnibook is better - but they often leave out the twiddles. If you learn Confirmation from Bird - so many twiddles! Originally Posted by PMB
-
Singing is a great thing to do (I do it) but I think there is also a lot to be said for sub vocalising the line... Or singing it really loud in your head. Also if you focus on the rhythm, that really helps me. The notes fall into place then. Originally Posted by nick1994
Also listen out for ghost notes - the ones that could be any pitch and just act as rhythmic 'filler'...
-
I agree about the rhythm. some people just assume parker plays streams of quavers, clearly they aren't hearing his phrases properly. lots of stuff going on with his rhythm and phrasing.
sometimes he just plays these lines that are too quiet for me to distinguish, they're not really ghost notes but I just treat them like that...it's easier for me!
-
If you have a lot of experience of bop, as a player and a listener, then I think it's possible to work out the heads by ear in most cases. But this thread is in the beginner's sub-forum, and I think it would be wrong to give beginners the idea that they should be able to work out heads 100% accurately by ear. If they can, great, if they can't - that's normal. Originally Posted by christianm77
I would seriously question anyone's belief that they can work out Parker's improvisations by ear with anything like 100% accuracy, unkess they dedicate a huge amount of time to it (years), or unless they are bop masters who have played bop for years - maybe Louis Stewart can. Please prove me wrong by posting mp3s or youtubes ;-)
I spent 2 years with the Omnibook to support what I was hearing, and it was invaluable. By the way I am a self-taught poor reader, not a music school boy. If there are errors in the Omnibook they are less than 1%, and I personally didn't find any - of course you have to make sure you're listening to the recording that's actually in the book, as Parker made more than one recording of most of the tunes!
I take it for granted that (most) people experience music by listening to it rather than reading it, so I'm sure anyone interested enough in Charlie's music will know what it sounds like before they resort to paper (unless they're doing a master's degree or something lol). Obviously the music needs to be "internalised", but I don't believe it's necessary at all to sing the songs, this is a myth that's growing in popularity. Personally I used to whistle them when I walked down the street.
vive le Parker , vive le bop
-
yea, Sunnyside, you're right about this being in the beginner's part. The reason I put this here is because I remember being young and trying to learn Donna Lee. The way I went about it was I opened the Real book and started slogging through the dots. Nothing but doom and despair lay ahead.
a lot of times when guys start out learning jazz and learning bop, they will either struggle with the music in the Omnibook or try and pick out a hard bop tune and try and transcribe it 100% accurate and its tough to do.
When I was talking about singing, I mean half-assed scat singing. Enough to give the impression of the tune. Its enough to get the tune "into your head" before you start actually working on it.
That was my main point...to listen to the tune enough that you got it in your head before you start actually working on it
glad you pointed out the direction we were running there.
-
Nate, could you just clarify something for me. It's of a personal nature so I was going to send a PM, but it's not that personal - if you know what I mean!
Donna Lee was "written" in 1947; the first Real Books were published in the 1970s.
You are on the record here as saying you were around in the 1940s.
So you were "young" in the 40s, 70s, or 2010s?
-
no, no...I'm sorry Sunny...I was young in the late 70s and 80s. I started playing gigs in 1979 at age 14. that makes me 50 right now.
Its my playing style that is from the 40s. That's because I learned how to play jazz from the old guys I played with.
I'm old fashioned enough that I might as well have been from the 1940s
but no, I was not alive in the 40s. I was a young lion back in the 80s. Of course I was a lot older back then than I am now
-
If they can't hear bop heads - and that does mean learning them by ear - they won't be able to play them right. I don't think jazz beginners should play that stuff even if they have the technical facility from other music. Unless they can hear it right away, of course. Originally Posted by sunnysideup
A simple head like Scrapple should be doable after a short while, though.
They should probably start with something simpler. Lester Leaps in maybe, or maybe some of the Charlie Christian stuff.
That's why I think people should learn swing & standards before trying bop.
And no, I wouldn't have listened to that either. And I learned how to play bop all backwards.
*shrugs* I used to think that swing music & standards were corny. Which is precisely why you need the old guys to tell the younger ones what they should be doing not what they want to do.
EDIT - I would probably allow someone to read the head from the Omnibook if they could sing the melody all the way through, or each phrase in isolation, but TBH, I would be on at them big time to practice getting phrases down by ear.
And to be honest, once you can really sing something and nail all the rhythms and the important pitches (which can be very challenging with something like the middle 8 of Confirmation) actually putting it on your instrument, at least slowly, is the easy step.Last edited by christianm77; 02-18-2016 at 11:17 AM.
-
I've enjoyed learning tunes from the Parker Omnibook. I studied lots of classical piano, so learning a tune with the help of the written music is a familiar & comfortable process. When I started my first Charlie Parker tune (Blues for Alice), I was very very slow at connecting the written note to the fretboard. I still am weak in this area, but much better!
My typical process is to listen to a few versions of the tune on you-tube, and then dig in with the written notation. Finding good fingerings and a proper position on the fretboard can be a struggle for me. Scrapple From The Apple for example -- I can play the head in a couple of positions, but neither seems ideal.
I can get this material memorized relatively quickly, but I never really get the tempo "up to speed". I like to play them at a relaxed pace too -- I think they sound great that way.
-
one thing I like about having a CD is that I can listen throughout the day when I'm not in front of a computer. In the car, while I'm working at the office, while I'm doing household chores...but either way. You Tube is free and on demand, and like you said, you get multiple versions of the tune that way
so would you say that you listen to the tune enough to have it stuck in your head before you start actually working on a tune? or do you listen enough to get the feel of the tune but you can read well enough to start working from there?
with the background in classical piano, you probably read really well for a guitar strummer, so I'm just curious
-
Anyone who wants to play bop heads can hear them. Why else would they want to play them?
I agree this is not a topic for the beginner's forum.
-
well, my intention was to help people who are starting to learn bop
what I've seen is a lot of folks just go diving right into Donna Lee and Confirmation and struggle for years
that's why I said things like "learn the tune that is stuck in your head, not the tune you think you need to learn" in the OP
and my whole point is that I advise listening to the tune until its stuck in your head
and that's the kind of advice I give to beginners, so there you go
-
I usually just listen for a short bit, mainly to see if I like the tune well enough to put in the time to learn it. Originally Posted by Nate Miller
I tend to absorb tunes in small chunks, so as I'm progressing, I'll go back & listen hard to parts that don't make sense to me. Also, in the early stages, I find it very useful to look at the music while listening through the tune so that I can begin to connect the sound with the notation.
BTW, I'm terrible at transcribing just from listening -- I get bogged down and discouraged in that process very easily. The written note makes it much easier for me.
Reply With Quote
Ibanez archtop with 0.010 Thomastik strings and...
Today, 05:27 AM in The Builder's Bench