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Coltrane, on the other hand, plays a lot of notes in solos.
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04-27-2022 12:43 AM
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Relaxed, melodic and full of poise
Originally Posted by grahambop
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I have to say that I'm constantly in awe of Mr. grahambop. I don't know how familiar he was with this tune before he began but he appears to have memorised the head + chord punches and the whole progression in an impressively short space of time. He said he had to look at it 'for a while' which is consistently modest of him.
Then, having also internalised the very complex changes, he played several choruses (at 230) without any bum notes. I couldn't detect any, anyway. Some hesitations, which don't matter, but certainly no glaring clams.
Quite a tour de force, if you ask me. So much kudos to him.
(Secretly, I want to know what he did as a job before he stopped but I don't think he'll tell us. Hell of a brain in there)
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Grahambop showed that Coltrane 'Moments Notice' can be played knowing the jazz language well.
He doesn't get lost - he just plays.
He is very good at controlling music and hearing.
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Grahambop- you should be the leader of jam sessions.
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Thanks guys, it’s much appreciated!
I may have looked quite relaxed in that video but in reality I was clinging on for dear life, at least that’s what it felt like! What I do find is that if I can get 100% focussed on the playing and stay there, it sort of goes past in a blur and just seems to come out ok. If one little distracting thought creeps in, then things go wrong, at least on a difficult tune like this. In fact this happened on the first take, so I just stopped and went straight into the second take, which is the one you hear. I even tried a 3rd take, but it was rubbish! This is often the way it goes, I find.
For the record, I know the sound of the tune well, have listened to it for years, but I have never seriously tackled it before, so I was not really familiar with the changes.
The thing that took longest was memorising the head arrangement (I did it with some chords incorporated, a bit like Alter did). I didn’t find the chord changes too bad, once I’d gone through them slowly several times. I think it’s because actually it’s mainly a bunch of ii-Vs with some chromatic shifts, after a while I could recognise the patterns and hear the important chord tones. I’ve got some video lessons from people like Bruce Forman and they keep stressing the importance of detecting and hearing the common patterns in all the tunes, it makes everything a lot easier, so this is definitely something I have tried to work on.
I do use shapes/patterns on the fingerboard a lot on a tricky tune like this, to get my bearings and hit the right ‘targets’ during a solo. For example in this one, a key thing was to always start with an Em phrase on the first section, then it repeats 4 bars later but starting on Dm. So I could see those shapes on the fretboard at both of those points, and go from there. Also the little shift (bar 13 etc) where it goes from Gm to Abm (to land on Gb), that was a key target, but so as long as I could see a Gm shape there each time, I could handle it properly.
After all these years I think I have developed the ability (once I have ‘internalised’ the changes) to hear the changes and just know when these ‘targets’ arrive, without thinking about it much. I don’t entirely understand this process, but I imagine it’s something really good players can do 100 times better than me.
It also helps that now I’m retired, I can play and think about music more of the time. As to my former occupation, I think I’ve mentioned it before, I worked in systems for a financial company, working on complex projects for very large external clients (big names!). So it was all about logic, problem-solving, delivering often to a tight deadline, so quite stressful sometimes. You had to stay very calm and ensure that despite the deadlines, everything was properly tested before it ‘went out of the door’, otherwise one tiny mistake could potentially cost the company millions of pounds (this did happen, but fortunately never on my projects!). You also had to be able to face very senior people at the client end and explain technical issues to them in as few words as possible. For whatever reason, I seemed to be good at all this stuff (and I worked there for decades, so I was one of the most experienced people in the team), in fact they were quite upset when I announced my retirement!
Anyway maybe some of these skills are also useful in dealing with the problems of jazz improvisation, who knows!
One final thing to mention, is that I am eternally grateful that I was able to start with classical guitar lessons from a very good visiting guitar teacher when I was at school (from age 12 to 18), looking back I think this gave me good technique and musical awareness early on. I’ve occasionally met amateur guitarists who have significant technical issues (so it seemed to me), or just very awkward ways of playing, which must hamper their ability, and I wonder if I might have been in the same position without those early lessons.
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nah, I don’t like taking responsibility! Even at work they sometimes pestered me to move into a management position but I refused, I was much happier working with the team ‘in the trenches’ and I stayed there, and gave up the extra salary. Originally Posted by kris
Grahambop- you should be the leader of jam sessions.
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I don't think there is any tremendous responsibility here. Originally Posted by grahambop
This is more fun - I think.
That's just what I thought, because I think you have a lot of knowledge, you have a great sense of humor, you are conflict-free and, above all, you play very well.
Jazzingly
Kris
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Graham -
Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Quite interesting, the skills needed for that sort of job as against the mindset of a jazz guitarist. The musical mindset is something else entirely. There's a correlation with organisational skills but nevertheless it would seem you're almost certainly a polymath.
Incidentally, many of the cleverest people I've known have opted out of higher positions to stay in the trenches. Very wise :-)
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Yes I've often thought about the connections between them. I think I've always liked the logical aspect of playing jazz, e.g. constructing melodic lines that will fit the chords, there's a sort of logical puzzle and architecture there that really appeals to me. Same reason I like Bach I guess - when I had classical guitar lessons, I remember getting really into it when I reached a level where I could start playing pieces by Bach. Originally Posted by ragman1
Another thing in my job was that I always took an 'occam's razor' approach, i.e. the simplest solution is the best. Some people seemed to like complex solutions for their own sake, and they were the ones that usually came a cropper later on! So I think I've always looked at jazz like that, i.e. try and simplify things, see the simpler patterns in the chord changes and the lines, get the changes internalised and use my ears as soon as I can.
Also to be honest I am probably a bit lazy, I don't really practise all that much and I like quick results! So I've kind of worked out ways of doing that over the years. Plus to be fair, all the years I was working and raising a family, I had very little time for playing, so I had to find ways of getting results quickly.
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I don't know if you remember Paul Kirk (pkirk) who used to post here. He was a good player, very modern. He was a professor of Topology, a rather complex branch of pure mathematics. There's probably a connection between a clear, precise mind and this kind of music.
There are some links here.
July 2014 - Georgia On My Mind
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I know a lot of musicians who also work in IT (especially software development and systems architecture/integration, as opposed to hardware). My own day job has at times been a literal IT role, and at times been something nominally managerial/analytic/administrative/financial connected to IT (sorry to be so vague about, but I'd rather not be entirely explicit about what I do for a living). That happened through doing work that needed systems, but which did not have them, so I built them. I know a lot of musicians who've gone through some variant of this path, especially jazz musicians (who are in essence real-time composers). Originally Posted by ragman1
Systems analysis and programming involve a kind of moving between levels of abstraction, formal reasoning, puzzle solving, and aesthetics/elegance that is similar to the process of constructing music. It's hard to put this exactly into words, but figuring out an IT problem and figuring out a musical problem feel very similar to me, in an almost physical way. It's almost as if I can feel the same regions of the brain being triggered. This is something I've talked about with other people who music both music and technology, and it's a common experience. I've even met IT people who make it point to hire musicians. This commonality with music also applies to other fields that involve formal and/or algorithmic reasoning processes. Mathematics and hard sciences being the obvious examples (lots of mathematicians and scientists are also musicians).
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QED, then
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Interesting hearing about everyone’s connection to logic, mathematics, IT and jazz. I’m a mathematics graduate who was the IT specialist for an acute rehab hospital and now the facility director, which unfortunately is why I don’t have time anymore to play. When I was just the IT guy I was always able to get away and play music in the mechanical room!
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It's a pity strumming the geetar doesn't make people good at math :-)
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Nothing tops off a wonderful dinner with the woman you love like the JGBE Virtual Jam! I've now played Moments Notice several times since my first pass at it early in the thread, sticking to my goal of looking only at the music. It's clear to me that the Grahambop closed eye approach is the only way to truly know a tune and play it without looking at the fingerboard. I'm working toward that now, although it's a hard habit to break. GB's a great role model, for sure!
As tomorrow's the start of another tune, here's the second pass I promised at this one. I didn't peek, but boy did I ever want to!
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Just wanted to try and make these changes at a slow tempo—no heroes!—without completely driving off the cliff. Quick and dirty tonight.
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Personally I liked that, some nice lines in there
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That’s very much how I had to practise it initially. Actually I think it works quite well at that sort of tempo. Originally Posted by wzpgsr
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Haha, you’re not the first person to think that. In fact I don’t play with my eyes shut, I guess I have droopy eyelids or something, and the angle at which I’m looking down makes it look that way. Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
So a confession, I do in fact look at the fingerboard a lot of the time! But I probably could get away without doing it so much, in fact I’ve heard of people practising in the dark etc. to achieve this. It is probably a good thing to do.
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Generally blind musicians have much better hearing. Originally Posted by grahambop
I had experience with such a jazz musician - he had a brilliant hearing and memory.
He listened to every bad note in the solos.You had to be very careful not to make a mistake.
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Saved (twice) Originally Posted by grahambop
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Late to the party, but here you go....
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Nice relaxed easy swing - that’s how ya do it! Originally Posted by CliffR
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Thanks! I really appreciate it
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