First Day on the Job
Although I can hardly believe it, I have finished classes at Catlin Gabel forever. Now I've got a month to prepare this concert. This morning I began work at 8:00 with the Chopin Ballade. For several reasons, classical music will usually start my day during this project. Practicing classical music helps me enormously when playing jazz. It's a chance to work on technique, touch, phrasing and musicality with a very concrete, specific piece of great composed music. Plus, I love this Ballade, and it will be nice to perform it as a tritube to my many years studying classical music with my old teacher Janet Mittelstaedt.
Then I got to transcribing. This morning I figured out "Charlie Brown Theme," (from the Vince Guaraldi trio) and made some progress on "I'm Not So Sure," a Cedar Walton tune, as the Roy Hargrove quintet plays it. I'm learning these at the piano with my iPod and then writing out the charts on the computer, in Sibelius, the music-writing software. For quintet songs like "I'm Not so Sure," it will be very useful to be able to prints parts for everybody. "Charlie Brown" is extremely simple harmonically, so much so that I'm sure Spencer and Duncan will be able to play it upon one or two listenings. But even though they won't need a chart, I transcribed the head quickly on the computer just for completeness' sake. Then this afternoon I worked on my transcription of Herbie Hancock's solo on "Seven Steps to Heaven," and practiced my own solo for "Strike up the Band," which we're playing in Pacific Crest. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHVZC9qo7kI&) At around 3 I went off to P Crest rehearsal.
For anyone reading my blog who's not a jazz musician, perhaps I'll go over a little terminology: the "head" refers to the beginning of a piece, and can also mean the entirety of the arranged part of the piece - the part where there is a written melody, and nobody's soloing yet. When it comes to arrangements of heads, there's usually a fine line between composition and improvisation: sometimes what people play on the head is entirely worked out, or they may decide how they're going to play it on the spot. My project revolves around transcribing arrangements from recordings of greats, playing more or less what's on the record for the head, and then improvising our own solos. Of course, even then, as I may discuss in this blog, the concept of improvisation is very nebulous. What we play is usually derived from what somebody else has played, whether it's swimming around in our head because we heard it on a record or because we purposefully transcribed it, played it in all twelve keys, and got it into our vocabulary. That's another bit of terminology: "vocabulary." Every jazz musician, no matter how great their musicality or how intuitively they improvise, has a language of phrases that they often use in their solos. Sometimes people call these "licks" or "riffs" or "ideas." The reason we often call it "language" or "vocabulary" is because it's a lot like speaking: although you're saying the same words countless people have said before, you can still say something personal. For this reason, when I finish transcribing the arrangements of these songs, I'll starting learning the solos on the records. In doing so, I'll both develop my vocabulary and learn to mimic everything these great players did that goes beyond the notes: their phrasing, tone, and rhythm.
