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Practice Journal: Intros and Counterpoint (3/6/11)

I write today from Humboldt, California, near the beginning of another tour with the Mike Gordon band. On this tour we are adding some music with particularly challenging keyboard parts to our repertoire, including Mikeʼs tunes ʻGot Awayʼ (from his newest release, Moss) and ʻMoundʼ (from the Phish album Rift ). The midsection of ʻGot Awayʼ requires my left hand to cover some horn parts, composed by Mike and expertly orchestrated by saxophonist Brian McCarthy (who also performed it on the record along with Dave Grippo on baritone sax, Ray Vega on trumpet and Andrew Moroz on trombone), while my right hand plays a solo which Mike composed and performed himself on the record (through a process, he tells me, involving many ProTools punch- ins and edits). The right hand solo is 16th-note-based line over a medium funk groove which for me recalls the lines Frank Zappa wrote for mallet percussionist Ed Mann on tunes like ʻMovinʻ to Montanaʻ (a piece which I performed some years ago in a concert of Ed Palermoʼs big-band arrangements of Zappa tunes). I experimented with using a split keyboard sound to play the horn parts on ʻGot Awayʼ in my left hand with a sampled horn sound, but on Mikeʼs recommendation Iʼve gone with incorporating the horn parts and the single line solo into a two handed piano part. Digital technology gets closer and closer to emulating sounds like drums and piano, but it still doesnʼt come close to the sound of a real horn section.

The ʻMoundʻ midsection is a tour-de-force in the kind of contrapuntal rock ensemble writing which bands like Yes and King Crimson pioneered and which became a cornerstone of Phishʼs style. I began learning this section by transferring the piano part in Mikeʼs handwritten full score into Sibelius, and I continue learning it by taking every chance I can to run it on my own and with the band (either the whole band, or whichever members I can convince to ʻtry it one more timeʼ!) I find the complexity of the interweaving parts in this section to be a great exercise in both concentrating on oneʼs own part (to count out rhythmic details – I often count out loud in this piece) and listening to othersʼ parts (both to check on whether we are together AND to know where to jump to when weʼre not). In addition to being a great exercise, the midsection is also melodic in its own polytonal way, not unlike some Hindemith Iʼve played (one fugue from the Ludus Tonalis, and the piano part to one of the violin sonatas). My practice process for ʻMoundʼ has included studying differences between Mikeʼs score and Page McConnellʼs performance on the recording (at a couple points where Mike wrote some right hand chords as upbeats, Page plays them as downbeats, and the change is a very helpful contrast to the relentlessly over-the-barline rhythms of the left hand), practicing my part with only one of the other parts, and playing along with the Phish recording, to fit the complexities into the overall groove of the tune. Recently, Mike mentioned that the bass is a lead part in much of the midsection. This woke me up to the fact that I have been exhibiting a typical human tendency to play difficult passages loudly, regardless of whether they are meant as foreground parts or not. Now that Iʼm becoming more familiar with the challenges of my own part, I face a new challenge: executing the finger acrobatics of my part as an accompaniment.

originally posted 3/18/10

My experiences of the last three weeks have brought to mind the wonderful Anthony Burgess novel ‘The Piano Players’, in which a pianist gives a marathon concert, something like two or three days, during which he sends assistants out to music stores for more scores with which he can maintain the marathon.  I began rehearsing with the Mike Gordon band on February 18th, as the UVM Theater production of Godspell, for which I served as musical director, was opening at the Royall Tyler Theater.   So I had about a week of rock band rehearsals overlapping with musical theater performances and my usual routine of jazz piano lessons and classes at UVM.  This was followed by a week and a half of my usual UVM schedule (with the inclusion of some more Godspell performances), which was followed immediately by the beginning of the Mike Gordon tour, for which the bus left on March 5th.  Other than the irreplaceable help of my wife Amber deLaurentis, and the tireless work of Mike’s ‘tech’ person Rachel Bischoff, I had no assistants, and I wasn’t ever seated at a piano for more than a five hour period, but other than that it felt like a marathon.  But it is a marathon I happily chose, and I am even happier now that there is an end in sight.

This week-long tour began in Troy, New York.  On the first leg of the bus ride, I needed a way of transitioning from the world of jazz and musical theater, where most pieces are over in 5 to 7 minutes, to the jam-band world, where songs frequently last much longer.  To help with the transition I listened to the Keith Jarrett Trio’s version of ‘Autumn Leaves’ from their recording Live at the Blue Note on my ipod.  This is a fantastic version where Keith begins with about a four minute improvisation based completely on measures 17-24 of the original tune. He takes this simple phrase through a series of wonderfully surreal melodic and harmonic transformations that always sound a bit like Hindemith to me.  After this intro, the trio launches into a traditional performance of the tune, with a head statement followed by piano and bass solos on the form and concluding with a restatement of the head.  In more traditional versions of the tune, such as the one on ‘Portrait in Jazz’ by the Bill Evans Trio (another great version), the restatement of the head (or ‘head out’) is the end of the performance.  The Jarrett trio version, however, follows the head out statement with an extended coda based on a modal vamp, much like  the Miles Davis ‘Second Quintet’ did on their version of ‘All of You’ from ‘Miles Davis in Europe’.  This type of coda allows an improviser to leave the harmonic progression behind and explore the very different challenge of improvising over a static harmony.  In the case of the Jarrett ‘Autumn Leaves’ the trio moves away from the finality of the tonic chord which ends the tune (G minor) and settles into a groove on a dominant chord built on the fourth step of the tonic minor scale (C7).  In the context of a minor key this chord has enough stability to be the basis of an extended improvisation, but having been preceded by the Gm chord, also maintains a certain instability.  Keith’s playing in this section shifts focus from melodic invention to a more rhythmically based improvising.  We often add this kind of section to tunes that we play in the Mike band, but hearing a ‘jam’ section of a Keith Jarrett arrangement made me aware that these kinds of sections are often most successful when the static harmonic space they create contrasts with a more harmonically active tune.   In our versions of Mike’s tunes ‘Sugar Shack’ and ‘Fire From A Stick’, for example, we add extended solo vamps, for guitar and keyboard solos respectively, which contrast with the more complex progressions that accompany the vocal melodies in each tune.

(Although Miles Davis’ studio albums have been part of my listening diet for a long time, it was thanks to James Harvey that I started checking out the live Miles albums My Funny Valentine and Miles Davis in Europe.  (I had the pleasure of playing piano in James’ early-twentieth-century ensemble Garuda, in which James, a brilliant multi-instrumentalist and composer who happens to come from Vermont, was the drummer and wrote most of the charts.)  In addition to listening to those recordings and checking out Bill Dobbins’ transcriptions of Herbie Hancock’s solos on them, it was reading an article by Luca Bragliani that woke me up to the way in which the Second Quintet’s approach to standards formed a bridge to the more open, vamp-based music of ‘In a Silent Way’ and ‘Bitches Brew’.)

After a sold-out show in Troy with a wonderfully responsive audience, the Mike band moved on to New Haven, Connecticut, where we played at a club called ‘Toad’s Place’ which is right in the middle of the Yale campus.  Having twice done a Cole Porter revue (‘Cole!’) which follows the outline of his biography, including his years as a Yale student, I was thinking a lot about him when we were in this campus.  This may have had something to do with my decision later in the week to transcribe the Jarrett solo on Porter’s tune ‘All of You’.  From New Haven we moved on to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Baltimore, MD.  In other musical side stories, I visited the Eubie Blake Center in Baltimore (http://www.eubieblake.org/index.php). It was closed the day I visited, but after visiting a few of Baltimore’s many war monuments I was glad to be able to visit a monument to a composer and pianist.  Among Eubie Blake’s many great tunes is ‘Memories of You’, which I often play on solo gigs and which has been a staple of my Group Jazz Piano class for a while.

At one point on the fall ‘09 tour we learned an Allman Brothers tune called ‘Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More’.  As with a number of our cover tunes, we learned it as a tune we could play with the opening act, which at that point was the singer/songwriter/guitarist Reid Genauer, currently with the band Assembly of Dust but formerly of the band Strangefolk, another jam band with roots at UVM.  We only played this tune once on the tour, but it stuck in my head, and I began to think of recasting a tune of my own, ‘Be Good And You’ll Be Lonely’, in the style of the Allman Brothers tune.  The lyrics of the tune, although they’re written in the voice of an early twentieth-century outlaw, could be described as an extended reflection on the quote often attributed to Stravinsky: ‘immature artists borrow, mature artists steal’.

I didn’t think much more about the idea until the first day of rehearsals, which Mike decided to run as a creative day rather than a day of performance-centered rehearsing.  In addition to doing a number of the listening exercises which Phish often uses in their rehearsals, Mike had us sit down on the floor and do a guided meditation exercise.  During this he had us take a minute to become aware of our breathing, and then asked us to imagine beginning a performance in a great venue with a supportive crowd.  We were asked to imagine playing music that we felt fulfilled the potential of the band and really connected to the audience.  After this came a big challenge: Mike asked us to lead the band and create something like the music we had heard in our minds.  One of the jams resulting from this exercise, led by Craig Myers, was later titled ‘Birth of the Universe’ and was posted on Mike’s website.

I was particularly struck by the jam that was led by Scott Murawski, which was based on a 7/4 groove in a ballad feel.  As we played this, and later listened back to a recording of it, it occurred to me that it might be a worthwhile experiment to try fit the lyrics of ‘Be Good And You’ll Be Lonely’ to this new time signature.  We experimented with this fusion of Scott’s groove and my lyrics a bit more during the week of rehearsing.  Although it was actually one of the last tunes we rehearsed, we were not finished learning it when we left rehearsal.  As is often the case in the environment Mike fosters, I was more aware of the potential of the unfinished work, rather than being discouraged that it wasn’t finished.  Mike suggested that we try adding  a section to the song where a line from the song other than the title would get repeated and turned into a round.  (This kind of section has showed up in a number of Phish tunes, including ‘Bouncing Round the Room’ and ‘Backwards Down the Number Line’.)   We experimented a bit with this in rehearsal, but I continued the experimenting on a demo that I recorded of the song on my own after the rehearsal week.

On the demo, I added the round, based on the last lyric of the song (‘it sure pays good to be a little bad sometimes’).  I also added an intro with an instrumental melodic ‘hook’ and a line that leads from the solo/jam section back into the bridge, in both cases using the bebop concept of placing non-chord tones on upbeats.  (The concept of non-chord tones on upbeats, which I associate with bebop and Barry Harris, can also be heard in the melodic ‘hook’ of Mike’s song ‘Sugar Shack’, from the current Phish album Joy.)  The line leading back into the bridge was based on a lick I learned from an organ part on Mike’s tune ‘Voices’, and which I’ve come to think of as the ‘Page McConnell lick’ (after the Phish keyboardist who played it on Mike’s album ‘The Green Sparrow’).  The McConnell lick is a good example of a line that does a good job of making a repeated section different on its later appearances, and of a line that effectively overlaps and connects two sections (in the case of Mike’s tune, the McConnell lick connects the verse and the chorus).  The idea of using a line like this to transition from a solo section back into a bridge comes from a lick Scott Murawski and I play in unison at the end of his solo on Mike’s tune ‘Pretend’, and which I’ll call the ‘Murawski lick’.  (My habit of naming licks after players, by the way, is not at all meant to suggest that their style can be boiled down into a few notes.  When I play with or listen to someone for long enough, I always end up studying their melodic vocabulary, consciously or unconsciously, and sometimes this process results in one of their licks making its way into my own improvising vocabulary.   Although this may seem like heavy intellectual activity, it is really no different than the process by which catch phrases ‘ ‘where’s the beef’ in the 80’s, ‘don’t go there’ in the 90’s, etc. ‘ make their way into the speech of everyday people.)

When I was initially getting ready to play with Mike, I spent some time studying the playing of players such as Professor Longhair,
Chuck Leavell,  Bill Payne of Little Feat, and Mark Mercier of Max Creek; however, having primarily a jazz player for so long, I naturally gravitate back toward jazz in the search for new inspiration in my playing.  This tour I have been practicing the Monk tune ‘Epistrophy’, which for me right now is more of an etude than a vehicle for improvising.  While it has the traditional 32 bar length, the phrase structure can be thought of as A(m 1-4), B (m 5-8), B (m. 9-12), A (m. 13-16), followed by an eight bar bridge and a repetition of the B and A sections.  Having played so many AABA tunes where the A sections are almost identical, I begin to think of it as an AABA form where the second A reverses the two phrases of the first A.  In any case, just playing the 32 bar head is a useful concentration exercise, as is improvising over the form.

The first five notes in the bridge of ‘Epistrophy’ employ a scale which is very useful for a number of purposes but which (like the diminished/octatonic/symmetric scale) has more than one name.  Before I get into its various titles, here is the scale as used in the Monk bridge: C#,D#,F#,G#,A.  This can be thought of as the so-called ‘blues scale’ minus one note, but it is also identified in Mark Levine’s Jazz Piano Book as both the ‘in-sen scale’ (as it is named in Japanese music) and the ‘minor 6th scale’.  This scale also turns up in a Keith Jarrett solo on the Cole Porter tune ‘All of You’ (from a 1985 live trio recording) which I have been transcribing as part of my practice on the tour.

Keith Jarrett Trio – All of You

This solo (which follows a head statement and one-chorus bass solo by Gary Peacock) brings to mind the Schoenberg quote that ‘there is still plenty of good music to be written in the key of C major’, as it makes a beautiful opening statement out of nothing more than an E flat harmonic minor scale.  Jarrett stretches the scale over the first eight measures of the form.  This is followed by eight measures of descending, but less scalar motion.  In m. 17-24 are a model of effective, indeed gorgeous, use of repetition; Jarrett decorates a repeated Bb by approaching it with both ascending and descending phrases and ‘surrounding’ it with its upper and lower neighbors.   (If I knew all my neighbors in Essex Junction as well as Jarrett knows the neighbors of this B flat, I’d feel a lot safer.)

To my ear, Jarrett’s main scale throughout the first chorus is E flat major, with non-scale tones – C flat in particular – being used as passing tones (through their placement on eighth-note upbeats – the ‘ands’ – or quarter note upbeats, i.e. beats two and four.)  In the second chorus Jarrett begins to place the C flat more often on beats one and three, which makes it more prominent and gives it the sound of a scale tone rather than a passing tone.  Sure enough, by the second half of the second chorus, Jarrett is using the in-sen/minor 6th scale.  He uses it only briefly, but repeated listenings to the recording of this passage helped me decipher at least one of his many famous mid-solo vocal noises: after his first descent of the new scale, he can be heard exclaiming ‘oh!’ (with the inflection sounding like ‘aha!’), and immediately after he unleashes a shrewd re-use of the lick, compressing the same lick into half the time, AND making the C flat land on the first beat, sustaining for the moment its status as a scale tone.

This solo is among a number of solos that were crucial to my development as an improviser.  When I first sought out knowledge about how to improvise, through lessons with local keyboardist Chuck Eller, playing in my high school jazz band, and playing in a fledgling small combo, I learned a lot of different chords and scales, and a few licks.  I approached improvising then just as awkwardly and earnestly as I approach cooking now: when it was my turn, I threw in everything I thought was needed and hoped for the best.  As is often the case with beginning improvisers, this resulted in solos that had many notes but no understanding of ‘less is more’.  (As recently as six or seven years ago I can recall one of my frequent collaborators, bassist Ellen Powell – coincidentally someone with whom Mike studied at one point – saying, ‘Tom, if I could only pay you by the note…”) Solos like Jarrett’s on ‘All of You’, which I first learned  about sixteen years ago, were an important reminder that, with musical improvisation as much as with cooking, once you’ve ‘done your shopping’ (or learned your scales, chords, etc.), the creation of a beautiful product has so much to do with restraint.  (Or as my wife said about a recent cooking experiment, ‘sometimes even the simplest combinations can have the most complexity’.)  Some other models of improvisational restraint that have been important to me are Sonny Rollins’ solo on ‘St. Thomas’ from Saxophone Colossus (the beginning of which is based on a two note motive), Thelonious Monk’s solo on ‘Bags Groove’ from Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (another solo built from a two note motive) and Charlie Rouse’s solo on the Monk tune Ugly Beauty from the late sixties album Underground  (in which he takes the concept of recycling a lick further than Jarrett in his All of You solo, returning to the same six-note motive multiple times, each time making it wonderfully different).  Another great use of space is in Eddie Harris’ solo on ‘You Got It In Your Soulness’ from the album Swiss Movement.

All these models remain crucially important to me as I play in this band.  With the instrumentation we have (a percussionist as well as a drummer, and a guitarist and bassist who frequently use electronic processing to expand the tone possibilities of their instruments), it is natural for the texture to get quite ‘busy’, and a lot of rehearsal time is spent trying to pinpoint the places where we need to ‘sparse out’, as Mike says.  Just as the band as a whole has to make a very conscious effort when we want our sound to be sparse, it is a challenge for me as a soloist to avoid responding to the percolating and multi-layered sound of the band with a blast of melodic busy-ness.  Frequently when it’s time for me to improvise a solo, I try to summon the spirit of concision and clarity that I find in solos like those I’ve listed above in hopes I can ‘say what I need to say, say it well, and shut up’ (as my eighth grade English teacher used to put it.)  Every once in a while – if I’m lucky, once or twice in each show –  I feel I’m getting a bit closer to this goal.  One of the places I felt like I managed to sing through the keyboard, rather than letting my fingers do the walking, was in the solo I took on ‘Andelman’s Yard’ at Toad’s Place in New Haven.

The Mike Gordon band has been making its way through the Midwest recently, including shows in Madison, Wisconsin; Cincinnati, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan, and (the city I’m writing from today) Pittsburgh, PA.  We have been alternating between larger venues such as the Barrymore Theater in Madison, and smaller ones, such as the Blind Pig in Madison.  The list of tunes we play has grown to include more of Mike’s tunes as well as songs by Talking Heads, Prince, Gillian Welch and Los Lobos.  I have to admit that practice time has been getting away from me the past two days, as I’ve been writing this most recent blog, but reading the email responses that people have started to send have been inspiring me to head back to the keyboard.

As I mentioned in the last blog, some of the transcribing and playing I’ve been doing while on this tour has gravitated toward a subject that has interested me for a while, the question of ‘how do I get my two hands to interact and cooperate when I’m improvising?’  I have been getting some new ideas on how to answer this question from watching the band that is opening for us on this leg of the tour, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.  The leader of the band, Brian Haas, is a pianist with an interesting background – he pursued classical studies to the point of preparing for the Van Cliburn competition, but now plays Rhodes piano in a group that travels the boundaries between jazz and improvisational rock.  His classical background can be heard in one of the band’s original tunes called ‘Drethoven’ (the title is an amalgamation of Dr. Dre and Beethoven) in which his melodic improvising and comping makes interesting use of low-range left hand chording similar to that which Beethoven so often used in his sonatas.

The following paragraphs outline some of my thoughts about coordinating the hands when improvising.  While this discussion does get a bit lengthy, I hope you will check it out, as it discusses a number of tunes I frequently work on with students, and does eventually relate back to the attached transcriptions.  If you haven’t yet emailed me a response in the form of a journal entry, mp3 or notation file, I hope it might inspire or provoke a response!

The history of jazz improvisation can sometimes appear to be simply a succession of individual players who created unique personal styles through the solos they improvised.  Players such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Miles Davis and John Coltrane can certainly be described as master storytellers, but when we first hear their stories it can often seem as through the players who accompany them are merely providing the energy that moves their story along.  As we listen more closely to the playing of these masters, however, we realize that in addition to being gifted storytellers they are equally gifted conversationalists, and that what initially seems like a story told by a single voice is in fact a story told through dialogue between many voices.   One need only listen to the interplay between Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, or Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro, or John Coltrane and Elvin Jones, to realize that forging of a truly original storytelling voice is so often dependent on the presence of the an interlocutor whose questions or responses help determine the direction and pacing of the story.   In the case of the classic duos cited above, the music they created together is undoubtedly a dialogue between equals, but when one of the pair assumes the role of accompanist and the other the role of soloist, the timing (although not the content) of the give-and-take that results can sometimes remind us of the great comedy teams (Chico and Harpo Marx, Laurel and Hardy, etc.) whose genius was in exaggerating the contrast between introvert and extrovert, leader and follower, aggressive and passive.

All great jazz pianists have had to solve the problem of creating a relationship between a stronger hand and a weaker hand.  While this might seem like a purely technical problem, it is the kind of challenge where a creative mind can see the possibility of a solution which works both technically and artistically.  I would argue that many of the great jazz pianists, in addition to creating a unique melodic voice like any other improvisor, also establish a relationship between their left and right hands which is in its own way as distinctive as any great creative relationship between two individuals.   One example of a distinctive right-left hand relationship is in the playing of Horace Silver.  In the head statements of his tunes ‘Sister Sadie’ and ‘Song for My Father’, Silver uses repeated left-hand rhythmic figures to frame melodic phrases, creating a call-and-response effect, where accompaniment figures sound like answers to the melodic questions posed by the melody (as in ‘Sister Sadie’), or sotto voce comments between melodic statements (as in ‘Song for My Father’).  In the piano solos that follow these head statements, this effective arrangement technique doubles as a useful structure for opening an improvised solo.  As he begins to improvise in both tunes, Silver continues the left hand patterns from the melody and weaves new melodic phrases between them, creating a solo that gradually departs from the melody through the use of right hand variation.  A similar effect occurs in many of the solos of Wynton Kelly (such as those on ‘Freddie Freeloader’ on Kind of Blue and ‘Green Dolphin Street’ on Kelly Blue), where the improvising begins with a polite dialogue between right hand melodic phrases and left hand accompaniment figures, with both sides being careful not to interrupt the other.  Like any unscripted dialogue between two well-acquainted parties, these solos evolve into a looser exchange where questions overlap answers and vice versa.

I often use the solos mentioned above as models for piano students who are new to improvising, because they are great examples of what one might call ‘audible inner dialogue’.   ‘Freddie Freeloader’ is the only track where Wynton Kelly appears on the 1959 Miles Davis album Kind of Blue.  The piano player on the rest of the album is Bill Evans, as one of Miles’ goals on the album was to explore the modal style of improvising that Evans had begun to explore with his solo ‘Peace Piece’ on Everybody Digs Bill Evans.  Miles presumably brought in Wynton Kelly for the tune with the most traditional blues form on the record because he preferred Kelly’s blues playing to Evans’s – and there are some grounds for thinking that Evans would have readily agreed with this decision, judging by how infrequently Evans chose to use tunes with traditional blues forms on his own records.  (There is an Evans version of Freddie Freeloader available, but only as a bonus track on the CD reissue of You Must Believe in Spring).  On an album that sought to demonstrate that breaking free from traditional progressions could liberate an improvisor’s creativity, Kelly, rather like a convivial contrarian, demonstrated with his sole appearance that it was still possible to find flexibility within a traditional form.  In the famous opening bars, he improvises a series of two measure phrases over the first twelve measures of the form, almost all of which have a left hand choral ‘call’ followed by a right hand melodic ‘response’.  The second half of the first chorus begins with a four measure right hand phrase capped off with a left hand ‘response’ in the fourth measure.  So he succinctly reminds us that the twelve bar blues form can be approached melodically as six two bar phrases (as in ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’, or the head of ‘Freddie’) or three four-bar phrases (as in ‘Blues by Five’ or any number of other tunes).  (I don’t have a version of the Wynton Kelly solo posted yet, but an arrangement I made of the tune with melody in the left hand and Kelly’s fills from the head in is here.)

Freddie Freeloader audio

I find this solo, and others such as the Silver solo mentioned above, contains a valuable lesson for students who are new to improvising on the piano; just as Kelly uses his left hand chord ‘calls’ to make his phrasing more clear to the listener, a beginning improvisor can use left hand chord ‘calls’ to, as jazz pianist Mike Holaber says, ‘let the left hand feed the right hand’.  In this style, the left hand’s role is something like that of the ‘play-by-play’ commentator in a sports broadcast – stating important events and changes concisely for the listener – while the right hand functions more like the ‘color commentator’, creating a narrative by using the time that elapses between each event to elaborate on the present moment and (if time allows) relating it to the past or anticipating new developments.  The Silver and Kelly solos also demonstrate, however, that while the call and response style is a useful way to open a solo, a soloist needs to use other techniques, such as supporting a right hand melodic line with a simultaneous left hand rhythm, and knowing when to get the comping out of the melody line’s way, in order to have a solo develop effectively.

The inner dialogue in Silver’s and Kelly’s solos reminds me of how often great writers, Bertolt Brecht and Walt Whitman among them, opened poems and essays by asking themselves a question and then answering it, opting to write in two voices rather than one.   Hearing the openings of the Silver and Kelly solos is also a great reminder that real goal of improvising is to create ideas with musical integrity, rather than to put your latest technical work on display.  A student of mine summed up this idea well, talking about one of her tunes in an email response to an earlier blog: “I found that I didn’t really need to run scales for two weeks before trying to improvise, that I was able to make a solo out of just what I already knew about the song, and the solo came out sounding halfway decent.”  Being a jazz improvisor at any level means having to work constantly to further your technique, but it also means putting your ears in charge when you improvise, and letting your hands be guided by the same sensibility that guides your voice when you improvise vocally.

The ‘call and response’ approach to beginning an improvised solo can be contrasted with the approach of Red Garland in his solos on ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ (from Round About Midnight ) and ‘Blues by Five’ (from Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet ).  In these solos the right hand delves more quickly into longer melodic phrases, and is accompanied by a more understated left hand which plays a more continuous rhythmic pattern, often on the ‘ands’ of two and four.   In Garland solos such as the one on ‘Blackbird’, this closer rhythmic alignment between the left and right hands evolves from opening choruses with a more relaxed single note line to more energetic final choruses in which the right hand improvises shouting melodic phrases in octaves while the left hand doubles the rhythms of these phrases with repeated chords.  (Of course, Kelly and Silver’s improvising was never strictly or even primarily hands-separate, as Garland’s was not strictly hands-together, but the different ways these players chose to begin their solos provide us with useful examples of some different approaches.)

There are two important boundaries to this discussion which are worth clarifying.  First, I am primarily discussing piano solos that are played in ensemble situations (rather than solo piano performances).  In these situations a pianist is usually accompanied by the steady timekeeping of the rhythm section, which is liberating to the extent that the pianist does not have to be the only timekeeper, but also challenging in that there is a certain amount of harmonic space occupied by the bass (and sometimes other chord instruments) which the pianist typically avoids while improvising.  I am also discussing solos where the left hand is ‘the chord hand’ and the right hand ‘the melody hand’, however, this is by far not the only two handed approach to improvising used by jazz pianists.  To mention just a few other approaches, George Shearing and Bill Evans both popularized the use of ‘locked hands’ technique (the development of which has been credited to the lesser known Milt Buckner) where an improvised melodic line in octaves is filled in with occasional or constant inner harmony; Ahmad Jamal among others plays left hand lines which rhythmically double the right hand but add harmony; and Lennie Tristano among others pioneered using the left hand to create a melodic line which is contrapuntal  to the right hand line (i.e. rhythmically and melodically independent).  This approach has been developed by a number of more recent players including Billy Taylor and Fred Hersch.

In searching for more modern examples of jazz pianists using the call and response approach, I’ve transcribed solos by Roland Hanna (‘Fingers’) and Hank Jones (‘Sarala’).  The Roland Hanna solo intrigued me because it is a solo that uses call and response style over the rhythm changes progression.  Many of the recorded and live piano solos I’ve heard over this progression take the form of a single note line uninterrupted by left hand chording, and my guess is that the frequency with which chords change in this progression (many chords last only two beats) often leads pianists to focus on elaborating the progression melodically, rather than risk too much chordal intrusion by including the left hand.  Hanna manages to use left hand chording to rhythmically drive a right hand line which alternates between shorter and longer phrases.  He also uses single notes in the left hand as an effective way to signal the end of the form.

Hank Jones’ solo is a fascinating example of cross-cultural collaboration.  In this tune he is accompanied not by the usual jazz rhythm section but by a group (Cheick Tidiane-Seck and the Mandinkas) that combines Western instruments such as electric guitar with those indigineous to Africa such as the djembe.  He is also not improvising over a typical jazz progression, but rather the open G minor harmony created by this combination of instruments playing in a traditional Malian style.   For a player whose roots include the harmonically dense traditions of bebop and stride piano, this is a serious departure.  (I sought out this recording after joining the Mike Gordon band, to investigate how one of my jazz heroes managed to relate to unfamiliar musical surroundings.)  I admire how Hank manages to reflect the relaxed groove that has been established in the opening section of the tune, and make his solo relate to the harmonic environment he’s in, and yet still make his solo evolve rhythmically (through exploring triplet- and 16th-note based motives) and melodically (through very gradually introducing bop-style chromaticism).  We gave what I think was a particularly effective performance of ‘Sarala’ at our show in Madison, Wisconsin.  Great musical experiences always have an mysterious element to them, so I’d hesitate to try and give a complete explanation of why this performance worked; however, my suspicion is that my studying Hank Jones’ solo further, the band’s decision to change the form of the tune somewhat to smooth out some of its natural asymmetry (while still leaving some of the asymmetry!), and the inclusion of a section on an Indian hand drum called the kanjira by drummer Todd Isler all had something to do with it.

I also found some examples of playing styles that alternate between the hands in the listening I did to get myself ready for playing with Mike Gordon.  In the Allman Brothers’ ‘Jessica’, a rock instrumental that contains many elements such as extended improvising and open harmony that would later figure prominently in jam-rock, there is a piano solo (by keyboardist Chuck Leavell) which begins with four bar phrases divided between right hand melody and left hand chordal response.  I also took my preparation for the Mike Gordon tour as an opportunity to revisit a piano solo that has always fascinated me, the introduction to Professor Longhair’s ‘Hey Now Baby’.  This piece creates an idiosyncratic fusion of Latin and blues styles through combining a syncopated New Orleans-style bassline with a melody that alternates between melodic phrases which match the feel of the bassline and others which in a double time feel.  At certain points the bassline is also in double time which results in some rapid-fire exchanges between the hands.  I had the opportunity to perform this tune at our Chicago show while trading keyboards and phrases with Ivan Neville, a younger member of the New Orleans family that produced the Neville Brothers band.  It was a blast!

Another recent musical discovery for me has been the guitarist Guthrie Trapp who sat in with the band in Nashville and played much of the time in what I’d call a country bebop style, particularly on a version of my tune ‘Crumblin’ Bones’ which we played that night.  I mentioned to him that heard a jazz influence in his playing, and he modestly claimed not to have much knowledge of jazz.  For me this is a great example of how the way that jazz players mix diatonic and chromatic motion in their melodic lines has much in common with the use of chromatic scale in other styles.  It makes me think of the time I saw Chick Corea perform a Mozart concerto which he called the ‘bebop concerto’.

Bluesology (or, ‘the Seventh [Scale] and Sons’) originally posted 9/21/09

Lately the Mike Gordon band has played shows in Atlanta, Jacksonville Beach (Florida), and Birmingham (Alabama), as well as Memphis and Nashville (Tennessee).  We are traveling within what might be called the heartland of the blues; on Sunday I visited Sun Studio in Memphis, where B.B. King and Johnny Cash, among others, made their first recordings.  Being around so much blues history is a good time to talk about the ‘seventh’ scale (aka the Mixolydian scale) and its most closely related harmonic unit, the dominant seventh chord.  In the Mike band we play many tunes with progressions dominated (pun intended) by dominant chords, including  the Phish tune ‘Meat’, and cover tunes such as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Swamp Music’, and Mike’s original tunes ‘Weekly Time’, ‘Sound’ and ‘Soulfood Man’ .  The subject of ‘Soulfood Man’ is the singer, guitarist, and bandleader Colonel Bruce Hampton. Bruce sat in with us at our Atlanta show and sang a tune called ‘Yield Not To Temptation’, a blues classic introduced by the great blues singer Bobby Bland, which has become a cornerstone of Bruce’s repertoire.  The Atlanta show was among our best in terms of the band’s ability to communicate musically; in addition to fusing rhythmically on the more rock-oriented tunes, there were some great moments of playing more responsively and conversationally, particularly on tunes such as Mike’s tune ‘Radar Blip’.  This is one of the tunes where I often use bebop melodic concepts to solo over a funk rock groove.  To give you an idea what I’m talking about, an audience recording of the Atlanta show can be heard at: http://www.sendspace.com/file/8cgl1q

The show downloads as a series of separate songs, so you could listen to just ‘Radar Blip’.  Keep in mind that this not a professional recording but was made by an audience member.

As our road crew is rather small for a tour of this scope (the five band members are accompanied by the tour manager, two sound technicians, a lighting designer and a person who runs the ‘merch’ table where CDs, tshirts, etc. are sold), when we arrive at a new venue, I almost always assist the road crew in setting up my keyboard rig.  My rig consists of a Yamaha Motif SE8 keyboard which provides most of my sounds, a Hammond X2 keyboard, and a separate amp for each keyboard.  One of the advantages of being involved with load-in is that the sooner I can get my equipment set up, the sooner I can practice. Two things I have been doing recently when I practice are what I call the “major-diminished-minor” exercise (included on the intermediate/advanced page).  Practicing this exercise with both hands in unison is a good way to listen to the balance between the dynamic level of your left and right hands.  Recently, to focus on my left hand, I have been running a mirror image version of the exercise in my right hand simultaneously with the left hand.

In rock, blues and jazz groups, keyboard players almost always coexist with guitarists or bassists who, when they are comping (i.e. accompanying), spend much of their time in the range just around or below middle C.  For this reason it’s often typical for the playing of pianists in these styles to be quite heavy on the right hand.  My study of classical music and jazz has taught me about the many ways that labor can be divided more evenly between the hands, and so one of my goals in playing with this band is to continually strive for a more ambidextrous approach to the keyboard in the rock band setting.  To this end I practice Bach keyboard music just about every day on the tour, either the two part inventions (which I play with one hand on each keyboard, to practice my two-manual technique) and/or the Partita in B flat major.  Other ways I have been venturing into more ambidextrous playing have included trying out a Dave Grusin tune called ‘Memphis Stomp’ (brought to my attention by current student Russ McHenry), and transcribing piano solos by jazz and rock players that use a call and response approach to coordinating the hands (more about these in a future blog).  My studies of jazz playing have oriented me towards thinking that playing with both hands means comping or creating a countermelody in the left hand, but practicing pieces like the Allemande of the Bach Partita reminds me that a single line melody can be divided between the hands.

Beginning/Intermediate exercise

I have included an exercise for taking seventh (Mixolydian) scales through the circle of fifths which uses ‘guide tone’ voicings in the left hand (3rds and 7ths) and a scale pattern which moves up and down each scale, stopping just before the starting note of each scale.  One nice feature of this exercise – particularly for those trying to master all twelve major scales – is that this exercise runs the circle of fifths starting in the key of Db so that the various key groups – keys where scales are fingered in identical or similar ways – are grouped together.  The order begins with the black key group (keys of Db, F# and B) where the second and third fingers of both hands are always on the group of two black keys, and the second, third and fourth fingers are always on the group of three.  Then the sharp keys which are all fingered identically (E,A,D,G,C), the key of F which has only one fingering exception to C, and finally the keys where the fingering of the black keys does not always follow the rules of the black key group (Bb,Eb, and Ab).  People preparing for piano proficiency should practice the scale exercise with the RH alone and using the major scale instead of the 7th scale.  You could also double the the right hand pattern with the left hand (fingerings for both hands are shown).  This creates the fingering where both hands start on the thumb in B,E,A,D,G and C.

Advanced exercise

One musical theme I have noticed running through some of Mike’s original tunes is the alternation between parallel major and minor keys.  In the tune ‘Traveled Too Far’ (from Mike’s CD ‘The Green Sparrow’), the vocal verse as well as the guitar solo section is based on a four bar progression which moves between F major and F minor.   I solo over a section of the tune ‘Andelman’s Yard’ that begins in A major and works its way to A minor.  Mike uses a melodic major-minor shift in the tune ‘Suskind Hotel’, which begins with a unison lick moving from the major third to the minor third.  Mike says this motion interested him because it is so often avoided by blues and rock players.  (Examples of melodies starting on the minor third and moving to the major are much more plentiful – among them the second strain of the ‘Saint Louis Blues’ by W.C. Handy, another famous Memphis resident).    One reason these major-minor concepts may have caught my attention is they remind me of the ancient and endless conversation among jazz players and educators about how to play the blues.  Some texts and teachers refer to a ‘blues scale’ (the root, flatted third, fourth, sharp fourth, fifth and flatted seventh of any major scale) which is really a kind of minor pentatonic scale that, contrary to its inclusive name, only represents one of many pitch collections that get used by great blues players.  This is sometimes paired with a ‘major blues scale’ (the root, the second, the minor AND major third, fifth and sixth of any major scale).  In improvisation class at UVM I teach an approach, derived from Barry Harris’ teaching method, which begins with scales based off the three main chords and gradually adds half-steps according to certain rules.  One of the many reasons I like this approach is that I think some of the most flavorful blues lines are those that use half-steps, particularly the motion from minor to major third.  I found an example of such a lick in a live recording of a tune called ‘Columbus Stockade’ by Scott Murawski’s band Max Creek.  The lick occurs in a piano intro by Max Creek’s keyboard player, Mark Mercier.  In the ‘Columbus Stockade exercise’ I take Mark’s phrase, which deftly moves from major to minor and back to major, and transpose it through the circle of fifths.   I have also included licks from Milt Jackson’s intro to ‘Bags’ Groove’ and the intro to ‘Swamp Music’ that use melodic motion from minor to major third.  (Notice that the ‘Swamp Music’ lick follows the bebop approach of placing the dissonant minor third on the upbeat.)  Pick one you like and learn it in all twelve keys! Columbus Stockade lick (and more)

Sincerely,

TC