originally posted 3\/18\/10<\/p>\n
My experiences of the last three weeks have brought to mind the wonderful Anthony Burgess novel \u2018The Piano Players\u2019, 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Other than the irreplaceable help of my wife Amber deLaurentis, and the tireless work of Mike\u2019s \u2018tech\u2019 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.\u00a0 But it is a marathon I happily chose, and I am even happier now that there is an end in sight.<\/p>\n
This week-long tour began in Troy, New York.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 To help with the transition I listened to the Keith Jarrett Trio\u2019s version<\/a>\u00a0of \u2018Autumn Leaves\u2019 from their recording Live at the Blue Note on my ipod.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In more traditional versions of the tune, such as the one on \u2018Portrait in Jazz\u2019 by the Bill Evans Trio (another great version), the restatement of the head (or \u2018head out\u2019) is the end of the performance.\u00a0 The Jarrett trio version, however, follows the head out statement with an extended coda based on a modal vamp, much like \u00a0the Miles Davis ‘Second Quintet’ did on their version of ‘All of You’ from ‘Miles Davis in Europe’.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the case of the Jarrett \u2018Autumn Leaves\u2019 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Keith\u2019s playing in this section shifts focus from melodic invention to a more rhythmically based improvising.\u00a0 We often add this kind of section to tunes that we play in the Mike band, but hearing a \u2018jam\u2019 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. \u00a0 In our versions of Mike\u2019s tunes \u2018Sugar Shack\u2019 and \u2018Fire From A Stick\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n (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 <\/em>and Miles Davis in Europe.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0(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.) \u00a0In addition to listening to those recordings and checking out Bill Dobbins’ transcriptions of Herbie Hancock’s solos on them, it was reading an article<\/a> 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’.)<\/p>\n 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 \u2018Toad’s Place\u2019 which is right in the middle of the Yale campus.\u00a0 Having twice done a Cole Porter revue (\u2018Cole!\u2019) 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.\u00a0 This may have had something to do with my decision later in the week to transcribe the Jarrett solo on Porter’s tune \u2018All of You\u2019.\u00a0 From New Haven we moved on to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Baltimore, MD.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Among Eubie Blake’s many great tunes is \u2018Memories of You\u2019, which I often play on solo gigs and which has been a staple of my Group Jazz Piano class for a while.<\/p>\n At one point on the fall \u201809 tour we learned an Allman Brothers tune called \u2018Ain\u2019t Wastin\u2019 Time No More\u2019.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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, \u2018Be Good And You’ll Be Lonely\u2019, in the style of the Allman Brothers tune.\u00a0 The lyrics of the tune, although they\u2019re written in the voice of an early twentieth-century outlaw, could be described as an extended reflection on the quote often attributed to Stravinsky: \u2018immature artists borrow, mature artists steal\u2019.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We were asked to imagine playing music that we felt fulfilled the potential of the band and really connected to the audience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One of the jams resulting from this exercise, led by Craig Myers, was later titled \u2018Birth of the Universe\u2019 and was posted on Mike\u2019s website.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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 \u2018Be Good And You\u2019ll Be Lonely\u2019 to this new time signature.\u00a0 We experimented with this fusion of Scott\u2019s groove and my lyrics a bit more during the week of rehearsing.\u00a0 Although it was actually one of the last tunes we rehearsed, we were not finished learning it when we left rehearsal.\u00a0 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\u2019t finished.\u00a0 Mike suggested that we try adding\u00a0 a section to the song where a line from the song other than the title would get repeated and turned into a round.\u00a0 (This kind of section has showed up in a number of Phish tunes, including \u2018Bouncing Round the Room\u2019 and \u2018Backwards Down the Number Line\u2019.) \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n On the demo, I added the round, based on the last lyric of the song (\u2018it sure pays good to be a little bad sometimes\u2019).\u00a0 I also added an intro with an instrumental melodic \u2018hook\u2019 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.\u00a0 (The concept of non-chord tones on upbeats, which I associate with bebop and Barry Harris, can also be heard in the melodic \u2018hook\u2019 of Mike\u2019s song \u2018Sugar Shack\u2019, from the current Phish album Joy.)\u00a0 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\u2019ve come to think of as the \u2018Page McConnell lick\u2019 (after the Phish keyboardist who played it on Mike\u2019s album \u2018The Green Sparrow\u2019).\u00a0 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\u2019s tune, the McConnell lick connects the verse and the chorus).\u00a0 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\u2019s tune \u2018Pretend\u2019, and which I\u2019ll call the \u2018Murawski lick\u2019.\u00a0 (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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 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.)<\/p>\n When I was initially getting ready to play with Mike, I spent some time studying the playing of players such as Professor Longhair, 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.\u00a0 Before I get into its various titles, here is the scale as used in the Monk bridge: C#,D#,F#,G#,A.\u00a0 This can be thought of as the so-called ‘blues scale’ minus one note, but it is also identified in Mark Levine\u2019s Jazz Piano Book as both the ‘in-sen scale’ (as it is named in Japanese music) and the ‘minor 6th scale’.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Keith Jarrett Trio – All of You <\/a><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Jarrett stretches the scale over the first eight measures of the form.\u00a0 This is followed by eight measures of descending, but less scalar motion.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 (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.)<\/p>\n 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.)\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sure enough, by the second half of the second chorus, Jarrett is using the in-sen\/minor 6th scale.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n This solo is among a number of solos that were crucial to my development as an improviser.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As is often the case with beginning improvisers, this resulted in solos that had many notes but no understanding of ‘less is more’.\u00a0 (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\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (Or as my wife said about a recent cooking experiment, \u2018sometimes even the simplest combinations can have the most complexity\u2019.)\u00a0 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\u00a0 (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).\u00a0 Another great use of space is in Eddie Harris’ solo on \u2018You Got It In Your Soulness\u2019 from the album Swiss Movement.<\/p>\n All these models remain crucially important to me as I play in this band.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.)\u00a0 Every once in a while – if I’m lucky, once or twice in each show –\u00a0 I feel I’m getting a bit closer to this goal.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" originally posted 3\/18\/10 My experiences of the last three weeks have brought to mind the wonderful Anthony Burgess novel \u2018The Piano Players\u2019, in which a pianist gives a marathon concert, something like two or three days, during which he sends … Continue reading
\nChuck Leavell, \u00a0Bill 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In any case, just playing the 32 bar head is a useful concentration exercise, as is improvising over the form.<\/p>\n