I recorded this gig with my Zoom H4. All the tunes are Matt Otto's originals.
All of the MP3s are compressed into one large zip file. Once you click the link it will automatically start downloading.
Personnel:
David Valdez- alto saxophone
Matt Otto- tenor saxophone
John Stowell- guitar
Chris Higgins- bass
Todd Strait- drums
Matt Otto came to PDX from Kansas City this month and I had the great pleasure of being able to do a lot of playing with him, and I helped him set up an improvisation workshop. I can honestly say that the experience had a profound impact on my musical concept. Matt's clinic was about the most profoundly interesting clinic that I have been to in years and I know that the students who were there felt the same way about it.
Otto's teaching concepts are influenced by his studies at several great Jazz schools. He began his studies with David Baker at Indiana, followed by studies at Berklee, The New School and Cal Arts. After being in NYC for a few years Matt started suffering from severe bouts of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which forced him to develop ways to practice without his instrument. He began singing with pedal drones in order to help him develop his ear. This seemingly simple exercise began to shape his entire approach to improvisation.
There is quite a bit of singing in this recording of Otto's clinic and I would strongly encourage you to sing along with the exercises. If you follow along through the the entire clinic I am sure that you'll find great value in Otto's unusual approach. Matt's approach helps the improvisor to make the ear the driving force in the process of improvisation, rather than having the mind choose your notes according to theoretical rules. Matt Otto Clinic- part 1 Matt Otto Clinic- part 2
I remember the first time that I ran across Sigurd Rascher's Top-Tones book. I was in seventh grade and there was an older saxophonist that lived right across the street from me that used to turn me on to different books. He also got me started working out of Coker's Patterns for Jazz. This guy showed me how overtones worked and, after much squawking, I was eventually able to get the first couple of overtones.
Rascher's Top-Tones is a book that many saxophonists own. I would guess that most of these players even believe that practicing overtones is quite important to gaining control of sound, pitch and the altissimo range. I would also venture to guess that only a small percentage of these players can play any more than just the first page (see below) of overtone exercises from Top-Tones.
(click above for larger version)
The way to play the overtones is to make changes in the shape of the mouth cavity, tongue position, lower jaw placement, and airstream direction. I was watching a YouTube video on overtone production and it was talking about how overtones are produced with the voice box mechanism, total bullshit. In fact, there is a lot of B.S. online being passed off as expert saxophone instruction. Before you listen to someone teach you about overtones listen to see if they can actually play overtones up past the second octave.
For years I used to think that in order to play the higher overtones well you had to develop a titanium embouchure, which only came from practicing overtones for insane amounts of time. I think that many saxophonists have this same misconception, but this is not the truth. It does take a little time, but only until you figure out exactly what you need to change in order to play higher overtones, not to build chops like a grizzly bear trap. Once you realize how easy it is to change your airstream, mostly by changing the shape of your tongue, then you will be able to hit even the highest overtones with minimal effort.
Joe Viola used to have me to pitch and timbre match exercises with overtones. For example, he would have me play a middle Bb or F and then without stopping the note change to a low Bb fingering. The goal of the exercise was to have the normal fingered note and the overtone finger sound the same in timbre and pitch. You do need to move your fingers pretty quickly and evenly in order to do the exercise well. You can also use this same technique to get beginning students to play the overtones if they are having difficulties with the overtone fingerings. When they play the normal fingering notes their oral tract will already be in the correct position to get the overtone. If they move their fingers to the low overtone fingering fast and even enough then there is more of a chance that the higher overtone will pop out. This just jump starts the process and is very helpful if a student is really struggling to get the overtone to pop out .
There are often problems when trying to teach this important exercise to younger beginning students. The first is that many rental saxophones have a lot of leaks, especially on the bell keys. Since leaks are cumulative down the horn, by the time you get to low B or Bb there is a lot of resistance, making overtones problematic. The second problem is that some elementary school kids have very short fingers and it is hard for them to play low Bs or Bbs for any length of time, these kids I will start on overtone exercises from low C.
Often the main motivation for students to work on overtones is just to get better at altissimo, which is something that overtone work will definitely improve. I personally feel that a more important reason to practice overtones is that you will get more control of subtle timbre shading. All of the overtones are present in each and every note you play on the saxophone. When we master overtones we will be able to change the overtone spectrum in any given note, thus effectively controlling the timbre. We will be able to easily make any note warm and dark or bright and buzzy.
(The graphic above shows a spectrum analysis a low A on an alto saxophone, note the overtone peaks).
Last January I went down to the NAMM show and saw a lot of interesting new products, but by far the coolest thing I saw there was the Hollywood Winds' Keyless saxophone. I had seen the pictures of Rascher with the keyless sax that Buscher had made for him, but I had never played one. Hollywood Winds had both a keyless alto and a keyless alto at their booth and I was able to play tested the alto. The first thing you notice is how light they are. A saxophone without any keys weighs about half as much as a normal saxophone with keys. The second thing you notice is just how easily they blow. The low Bb is obviously the lowest note that the horn plays and it comes out effortlessly. You can really feel the whole tube vibrate under your fingers in a way that doesn't happen with a normal saxophone. If you run your fingers carefully down the body of the horn while blowing a loud low Bb you can actually feel the vibrating nodes at certain points on the tube.
I was shocked at how easily the overtones popped out on the keyless sax, which is of course exactly what Rascher had in mind when he designed it. There are several reasons that make it much easier to play overtones on the keyless sax.
1. Because there are absolutely no leaks.
2. There are no tone holes to cause turbulence.
3. There are no posts or key guards attached to the body of the horn to dampen the vibrational nodes.
4. Since you don't need to press down on any keys your hands can remain totally relaxed. When playing overtones on a normal sax you can tend to press pretty hard on the keys, especially the left pinky, just to seal all of the leaks.
5. The keyless horn is so light, so it takes very little effort to hold it. I even found myself using the computer while practicing.
6. There is really nothing else you can practice on the keyless sax, other than long tones on a low Bb, so you end up practicing overtones much longer than you normally would on a normal saxophone.
I played the keyless sax for a few weeks after I got it and had several major breakthroughs with my overtone practice. Suddenly I was able to play all the overtones up to about the 12th overtone. In a short amount of time I was able to flit between all of the overtones quickly and cleanly with very little effort. Before the keyless sax I could probably only play up third above the double octave with any amount of control. Some of the higher overtones would pop out sometimes, but I certainly didn't have much control. I think that my breakthroughs were not all due to reasons #1-3 that I listed above, because after working with the keyless sax I could go back to my Selmer VI and my new range was still there, though a little less easy to get.
Over the first few weeks that I had the keyless alto I wrote some exercises for it and had all of my alto students play it in their lessons. A few of the students were able to hit overtones that they had never been able to play before. As I said before, it can be quite difficult for young students with leaky horns and small fingers to play overtones at all, and the keyless sax was a big help for these kids.
After about a month of working with the keyless alto I went to a jam session (after a keyless practice session) and noticed a huge difference in my playing. It seemed like I had much more control of my airstream and like I could put much more air into my horn without the tone breaking up. Everything about my control was better. I noticed more control of my pitch and I could also shade each note the way I wanted to. It was a pretty drastic difference and that night I finally understood the true value of overtone practice. Of course I had always believed before then that overtones were the most important thing a student can practice to gain more control of the saxophone, but I never realized just how big the payoff was for a small amount of practicing was. I always felt a bit bad for torturing my students (and their parents) when I would ask them to practice overtones, but now I could really see the value in it.
After coming home from NAMM I contacted Hollywood Winds and started bugging them about giving me a keyless alto. I had decided that I had to have one and if they wouldn't give one to me in exchange for banner advertising I would have to pay out of pocket and buy one. Luckily Hollywood Winds went for my offer to put a permanent banner ad on this blog in exchange for a keyless alto. The altos run at $450 and the tenors are around $600. The real question is really going to be if it's worth that kind of bread for something you can't even play on a gig. I would say that for someone like me who is a full-time player and teacher it is definitely worth the money to have such a strong practice and teaching tool like the keyless sax in your arsenal. It might not be worth it for a weekend warrior or a young music student, when they could always just practice overtones the same way saxophonists have done for decades. On the other hand, if you a serious saxophone student that plans on making a career out of music then you would probably get enough benefit from working with a keyless horn to make it worth purchasing one.
I will be posting my original overtone exercises for keyless or keyed saxophones soon!
Matt Otto is Kansas City based saxophonist, educator and blogger who has been featured many times on this blog. I've known Matt for over twenty years and we still play together on occasion. In August Matt will be coming out to Portland to do a few gigs with me at the Camellia Lounge and the Blue Monk. He will also be doing a master class on August 5th. Email me if you are interested in registering. I will be posting more information about that class soon.
Matt has been releasing his recent CDs exclusively on his blog, which happens also to be one of the best Jazz educational sites on the internet. Otto is asking his blog readers to send him a donation for any amount, in return he will send a link to download MP3 or FLAC files along with Concert PDF charts for all 10 tunes! The recording is beautiful, the playing is killing and the tunes are really interesting. I am really looking forward to playing some of these compositions when Otto comes to town.
Otto is one of the leading tenor saxophonists of his generation and if you haven't checked out his educational website you should see all of the great free lessons he has posted.
Matt Otto will be performing at:
Camellia Lounge
(510 Northwest 11th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209)
Saturday, Aug. 4th
8pm-11pm
w/David Valdez, George Colligan, Chris Higgin and Todd Strait
Last weekend I played a gig with a group called The Lawrence Williams Project, which I have co-lead with pianist Dan Gaynor for almost ten years. Lawrence Williams was a close friend of ours who passed away about six years ago. He was an incredible drummer and an equally great Jazz composer. We try to keep his music alive by performing it once or twice each year, but I also thought I would post some of the charts here on this blog so more musicians around the world could have the experience of playing these beautiful tunes.
I have posted audio files for many of these tunes along with the PDF parts on my Posterous media server blog. Below are links to each tune:
Tonight I listened to David Demsey describe Joe Allard's teaching method in great detail. This was one of the Bulletproof Saxophone Method lessons and I have never heard anyone relate Allard's concepts so well. I have posted several articles about Allard's system on this blog (Allard Unveiled, Allard Overtone Exercises, Allard videos) and I think that any saxophonist would be making a big mistake to overlook the ideas of this master teacher.
Allard really stressed overtone work and Demsey describes why this sort of work is so important. I recently got a keyless saxophone and have been working with it for a few months. I always knew that overtone work was critical and I always teach overtone exercises to my students, but I never really spent a ton of time working on overtones until I started working with the keyless sax. I noticed a huge change in my control and quality of my sound in just a few weeks of regular overtone work. I wrote a bunch of overtone exercises and will post them soon.
(Yes, Bulletproof Sax Method is one of the banner ads on this blog, but I do not accept advertising for any products that I do not fully endorse and recommend to my own students. You will not see ads for Cannonball saxes on this blog!!)
When I was just sixteen years old a bassist named Ted Wald moved to Santa Cruz (were I grew up) from New York City. Ted had been in the trenches of the NYC Bop scene for 40 years before leaving the city to follow a young girlfriend out west, and to seek a healthier lifestyle. Ted was a true old school Be-Bopper who had played with a who's who list of Jazz greats, including Bird himself. I felt a little closer to the smokey clubs of NYC when ever I played with Ted. Ted always had a million stories of about all the cats he had played with. He was one of the few white musicians in the circle of players that he ran in. Ted was also the first white Muslims, maybe even the first Muslim, that I had ever met. Ted never really spoke much about his faith and I didn't really know what to ask him since I hadn't been exposed to that culture, having been raised in a lilly white California beach town. Ted was also the first bassist I'd played with that refused to use an amplifier, which for him was also sort of a religious belief. Ted knew a ton of standards and he never cared what key anything was played in. He didn't read music and every solo he took was a walking solo, old school all the way.
photo by Otto Flückiger
One name that constantly came up in Ted's stories was Clarence Sharpe, who he usually just referred to as "C" Sharpe. Ted had played with Sharpe for years and had the highest respect for him. He would always say that Sharpe was the baddest Bebop saxophonist in NYC, despite that fact that he had no teeth and played wildly out of tune. I could never fathom how a guy with no teeth could ever play the saxophone at a high level, let alone be the baddest cat on the scene. I guess I figured that Ted was exaggerating a bit, turns out that he wasn't. I had always asked Ted if there were any recordings of Sharpe and he had lost the only bootleg that he had. Sharpe had recorded on a Lee Morgan record called Indeed, but that apparently wasn't a good representation of his playing. Sharpe had struggle with heroin addiction for many years and that may have been a factor in his failure to get a recording career off the ground. Of course the fact that Sharpe had wildly erratic intonation, because of his lack of teeth, couldn't have helped his mainstream marketability either.
I ran into a post on Face Book the other morning by saxophonist Alex Hoffman about Sharpe. Alex had posted a link to a blog called Crown Propeller that posted a bootlegged recording of Sharpe playing with Ted Wald, Walter David Jr., Lonnie Hillyar, and Jimmy Lovelace at a club called the Tin Palace. The recording is a bit rough and you can hear some clear conversations while the music is playing, which is actually quite interesting. The band is burning, but Sharpe stands out, despite the expect intonation issues he is a monster. I finally understand what Ted was raving about.
I sent Ted a link to the recording and he was very happy to finally hear this band that he he spent so much time time playing with. Here is is reply to me:
"Salaam Aqui, First thank you, thank you, thank you. I miss those guys. I am the only one left. Maybe Sharpe didn't know anybody was recording us because for a long time people were begging us to record and Sharp was not about doing it because he didn't have any teeth. (He had portable ones which used to come flying past me in the second tune whenever we played.) I spoke to a piano player, Tardo Hammer, who said to me, "Man, Bird Lore, (the C-Sharpe Qunitet) was bad. Maybe the baddest in New York at the time." I saw some blurb on the tube about some critic named Parsells who made it his business to hear that band in '79 or '80. I do have a tape somewhere in my belongings. I had others but someone swung with a tape of Sharpe, Walter Davis, Jimmy Lovelace and myself playing "Pennies from Heaven". I do appreciate what you sent.
Peaceful, peaceful. Blessings, thank you for living, Ted (Said Khalid)
P.S. Also Thanks to Stanley Crouch for ever booking us. Sharpe was mostly surviving tutoring and teaching at the University of the Streets. Mostly he was a living legend and my friend."
We've been dealing with chromatic approaches here lately and I ran across an interesting book on the topic a few weeks ago. The book is called Targeting and was written by a Denver trumpet player named Jason Klobnak. Jason uses the term targeting rather than approaches or enclosures because he takes a broader view of the concept. Jason defines targeting as aiming and moving at a goal note with purpose.
In the beginning of his book Jason covers the more conventional chromatic approaches in the same way that I usually present the material to my own students. He explains the ten different ways that one can chromatically approach any given note- from a half-step to a minor third.
(click the graphic above for larger version)
I usually have my students practice approaching every chord tone (including #11, b9, #9, 13 and b13) using each one of these ten different chromatic approaches. I can't stress how important this one technique is. Once you really get these approaches under your fingers you can use them to create, not only great Bop lines, but you can also combine these approaches to create ultra-modern, super-hip, knock-grandma-off-her-rocker, snaky chromatic-banana lines. As long as you keep the forward motion going then your target can keep moving and your destination never has to come, like an acid trip that never seems to end...but enough of my wasted youth, let's get back to Jason's book.
Jason goes on to deal with using targeting to create longer flowing lines, like in the example below:
(click the graphic above for larger version)
Next Jason branches out a bit to talk about Pentatonic, Blues and Digital Pattern Targeting:
(click the graphic above for larger version)
The next chapter deals with Diminished and Altered Dominant Targeting:
(click the graphic above for larger version)
The final chapter puts everything together with some nice etudes. I am quite impressed with this book, such a crucial technique for Jazz students deserves a thorough and complete book like this one.
You download Targeting (in English or Spanish) for $12 or get a hard copy for $16.50 at Jason Klobnak Music
Doron Orenstein over at Best.Saxophone.Website.Ever. has put together a package of six different lessons with some of the top saxophone teachers in the country. What Doron did was to set up Skype lessons with these teachers and then record them, probably with something like Audio Hijack Pro. There are roughly six hours of lessons and two PDF supplements in which Doron has done an excellent job of summarizing the concepts and exercises from the lessons.
The lessons focus mostly on saxophone specific issues like breathing, embouchure, throat position, tonguing, articulation, intonation, and technique. I haven't listened to all of the lessons, but those I did check out were very good. A couple of my students bought the package and they both had major breakthroughs, one in regards to pitch and the other had a major improvement in sound. Despite Doron's penchant for hyperbole there is a lot of really great information in these lessons. I can't remember seeing anything that focused as much on just the mechanics of playing the horn.
I would have to say it's a great deal to get six hours of recorded lessons for less than the price of one with a live teacher. The cost of BPSP is $44.95 for all the audio and the PDF book, $34.95 for just the audio, and $14.95 for just the PDF book. Doron also offers a 100% money back, no questions asked guarantee. You really have nothing to lose except bad saxophone playing.
At jazzbarisax.com you can download 45 free bari transcriptions by players like Mulligan, Adams, Smulyan, Cuber and Brignola. Makes me want to find myself another bari.
Jody Jazz released a two DVD package on George Garzone's Triadic Chromatic Approach a while back, which I did an extensive review of on this blog. The DVDs covered two main concepts, the Triadic Chromatic Approach and the Random Chromatic Approach. The first, the TCA, is a way to created 12-tone lines on the fly. I wrote a few TCA etudes to illustrate this concept, see links below: Etude 1 Etude 2 Etude 3
The other main concept is the the Random Chromatic Approach, something I did not write much about and I think it is worth considering. The RCA can be thought of as a Post-Bop chromatic approach (as opposed to a Bebop chromatic approach). The Bebop chromatic approach, or 'enclosure' as some educators like to call it, is a way to link ideas together, add interesting directional elements and to give more forward motion to a line. Below are a few examples of Bebop approaches from Steve Neff's Approach Note Velocity book:
Bebop lines just would not sound like Bebop without this essential element and every student of Bop would do well to spend plenty of time working this. First start out with the simplest approaches and work on approaching any given chord tone with every type of approach. One could even argue that armed with only a knowledge of chords and Bop approaches a player could create a compelling Bebop solo without ever learning chord/scales.
Garzone has an interesting take on the chromatic approach, and it is quite an easy, especially compared to the difficulty of his Triadic Chromatic Approach. Below are a few pages from Garzone's ebook that comes with the TCA DVD.
(click the above graphics for a larger version)
If you follow Garzone's guidelines you will end up with very modern sounding chromatic lines that have a lot of forward motion. These random chromatic lines serve to same purpose that traditional Bebop chromatic approaches: they give lines interesting direction, they link ideas together and they add forward motion to the line.
In the TCA DVD Garzone has several play-along tracks where he trades fours, giving the student a chance to respond to his phrases. A former student of mine in Japan transcribed George's fours from the DVD and it is quite interesting to see exactly how he constructs his chromatic lines. George doesn't strictly follows his own rules (also the case when it comes to his TCA), so do not be surprised if you do not see the concepts from the PDFs above strictly applied.
I highly recommend both of the Garzone/Jody Jazz DVDs to any student looking to add more modern concepts to their playing. Also worth noting is the fact that Jody has drastically cut the price of the TCA DVD since it was first released.
First off I want to apologize for slacking off on posting here. I was out with a cold for a while and then taxes have been looming. Most of all I've just been very lazy. I do have a lot of things in the pipeline, so please bear with me here while I struggle to get my ass in gear.
There have been a ton on new multimedia Jazz educational products coming out lately. It seems that the Jazz world is really starting to take full advantage of the digital age, better late than never I guess. Some of these products are online video lessons, some are play-along CDs, and some are full interactive multimedia DVDs.
One of my teachers when I was at Berklee who was a big influence on me was Fred Lipsius. I posted an interview with Lipsius a while back. I took several ensembles with Fred, so I didn't get a lot of material directly from him other than getting to listen to him play, which was inspiring in itself. I really got to understand his concepts through studying his books. In 1986 Warner Brother's published an incredible book that Lipsius wrote called The Complete Book on Creative Improvisation. That book was a goldmine of material for me and shaped the way I thought about Jazz improvisation to this date. It was was worthy of being called 'the Complete book' because is covered so much ground. It had a ton of great musical phrase and licks in every key and for chord type and then it went in to great depth on how to manipulate, develop, and apply these licks to all different types of musical situations. Lipsius really presented a high flexible and creative alternative to the typical rote memorization approach that is too common in Jazz education. The licks in the book were all super hip, but the important thing was to see how to take any existing musical idea and apply it in numerous ways over different harmonic situations.
Lipsius' Complete Book on Creative Improvisation went out of print shortly after it was first published and after loaning my copy out I was never able to get my hands on another one, though I saw a few on Amazon for upwards of $100. I was quite excited to hear that Fred had released it again himself, this time is in full multimedia format. There are hundreds of videos online on 3 DVDs that feature Lipsius playing individual musical ideas, talking about what he was thinking about when he came up with them and how to apply each one. You can also now buy a hard copy of Lipsius' book for $19.95.
Below are a few pages from the book to give you some idea of the kind of material it offers. One of the most interesting things about the book in my opinion is how much Lipsius focuses on motivic development, a topic that is usually under emphasised. You can click on any of the pages below to get a larger version.
Fred also deals a lot with how to apply the same musical idea to many different harmonic situations. Here are a few pages dealing with Blues scale applications:
Here is a chapter dealing with Tri-tone subs:
Here is the official press release for Freddy's Guide to Creative Improvisation : Music Students and Professional Musicians Get More Creative And Learn How To Be A Great Improviser With Online Video Training for the PC, Mac, and iPad at Freddy’s Guide To Creative Improvisation: www.FreddysGuide.com
Freddy’s Guide To Creative Improvisation features Berklee College of Music professor Fred Lipsius who is a two-time Grammy Award-winning musician and original band member of Blood, Sweat & Tears with 9 Gold Records. The training is available now at FreddysGuide.com for the introductory price of $49 (price will change to $99 on Jan. 22nd) and provides one whole year of 24/7 access to over 300 video clips of Fred Lipsius teaching from his book on Creative Improvisation.
For music students and professional musicians eager to become great improvisers, online training has finally arrived via Broadband Internet for the PC, Mac, and iPad. Educational multimedia publisher, ETERNAL WAYS, has partnered with Berklee College of Music professor, Fred Lipsius, to help musicians on any instrument unlock their creative potential for improvisation: online music instruction with hundreds of licks, scales, techniques, exercises, and solos to teach anyone how to be a great improviser. Playable 24/7, this online portal at http://www.FreddysGuide.com allows students and professionals to learn what they want, when they want, and at their own pace for a full 365 days. All that is required is Internet access and a basic knowledge of chords and scales.
“Our goal was to create a low-cost, simple and friendly online learning experience that allows any musician, from any place in the world, to access Fred’s interactive video instruction for an entire year. Becoming a great improviser takes a lot of time and practice which is why the training is available for 365 days. It is like having your own private instructor on-demand.” says John Pritchard, Founder and Creative Director of ETERNAL WAYS. “In addition to being one of the world’s greatest improvisers, Fred is an outstanding instructor who has been teaching at Berklee for over 25 years. His book on Creative Improvisation is second to none.”
Here is what legendary musician, Randy Brecker, has to say about Fred’s book: “This is one of, if not, the most comprehensive book on improvisation that I have yet encountered. The student (or professional) is led systematically into getting beyond the rote learning of patterns and cliches, into understanding the spontaneity and creativity that is true jazz improvisation.” Randy has played trumpet with The Brecker Brothers, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Steely Dan, Charles Mingus, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Zappa and many more.
Eddie Gomez, bassist for Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Herbie Hancock says, “Fred Lipsius has written a clear and comprehensive study on the art of improvisation.”
Paul Shaffer, Musical Director of the Late Show with David Letterman, calls Freddy’s Guide to Creative Improvisation “An eminently usable reference from a brilliant cat!”
Adam Holzman, keyboardist for Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Grover Washington and Faculty member of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, NYC says, “Freddy's Guide To Creative Improvisation is an original and exciting method for teaching what is almost unteachable: the art of improvisation. A well thought-out and balanced approach.”
The online training is designed for all instruments and works on any computer with a broadband connection. It plays especially well on the iPad and the video looks and sounds great, even on the iPhone.
Price: $99/yr Special discounts are available for music teachers/instructors/schools with 10 or more students.
The 188 page book is included as an eBook (PDF format for high resolution screen magnification and printing) and is also available separately in print for $29.99. A 3 Disc DVD Series of the training features licks, techniques, and solos for $99.
If you are a musician who wants to learn from a pro, Freddy's Guide To Creative Improvisation contains everything you need to know about improvisation! Freddy unveils the mystery of creative improvisation to help you become the great improviser you can be.
Chris Potter offers lessons through the ArtistShare web site. If you can't afford to fly to NYC to study with Potter in person it's a nice alternative. Saxophonist/educator Adam Roberts has transcribed Potter's solo on Confirmation from the ArtistShare lessons. The solo is nine choruses long and must have been a bitch to transcribe. Adam also gives a short chorus by chorus analysis of the solo.
The PDX Jazz festival is happening this month here in Portland. It seems the number of national acts was significantly scaled back this year, probably a common trend these days. Don Lucoff recently took over as the director of the festival and seems to be running things a bit differently. Don seems to think that every performance should have a theme. Maybe it's from his years of doing promo work, or maybe it's just that he wants to feel like he's actively 'artistically directing' the musicians. For example he asked George Colligan to make the theme of his performance 'the music of Andrew Hill'. This was George's first big show after moving to town and I would guess that, although George enjoys Andrew Hill's music, he wouldn't consider Hill to be an influence on his playing.
Was Lucoff thinking that Portland listeners would be more likely to come to see George play if they thought there would be some Andrew Hill music involved? Colligan is a prolific composer in his own right and I'm sure he would have much preferred to play his own composition (which he ultimately ended up doing), rather than Hill's music. Don suggested themes to many of this year's festival performers. Some of this year's themes were: 'The Lure of the Jazz Lyric', 'Classically Carmen', 'For Portland Only', and 'PDX Afro-beat Breakdown'. It whole idea just seemed pretty forced to me. When you let marketing considerations dictate the choice of material the musicians play on the shows that you book then you are limiting the freedom of the musicians to choose what kind of material they play, and ultimately the degrading the quality of the performances. Let the musicians dictate the material that they feel will be the strongest representation of what they do. They know what kinds of tunes they sound best playing. Let the theme of the festival and of each performance just be 'The best possible music that each performer can present'. Why try to shoehorn players into the shoes of the Jazz masters? I do however think that bringing in a seasoned Jazz PR pro managing the PDX Jazz Festival was a smart move. Enough with the themes though.
The performance I was looking forward to the most was Charles McPherson's 'Tribute to Prez (the show was on President's day after all) and Bird'. Isn't every one of Charles' shows a tribute to Bird really? It wasn't a stretch, but why ask Charles to limit his choice of material to tunes that Bird or Prez played? The house was packed, but they were there to hear Charles, not because they were hoping to hear Lester Leaps in or Star Eyes.
If I had to choose one favorite living Jazz saxophonist it would be Charles McPherson, no contest. I first heard him when I was still a teen and I remember being totally floored by his playing. First of all Charles has and incredibly beautiful and huge alto sound, with the best qualities of Bird's tone. The next thing you notice is his malleable time feel. He just floats on top of the time, constantly shifting between different metric modulations and then occasionally drops into to some extremely hard swinging 8th note lines. Actually, 'metric modulations' isn't even the best way to describe what Charles does because it sounds so much more organic than that. A more accurate way to describe what Charles does with time would simply be bad-ass. I don't know of anyone else who does what he does with time.
Charles doesn't leave a lot of space, and I mean that in a good way. Let's just say that if he were paid by the note he'd be a very wealthy musician by now. His concept is kind of like a Bebop version of Trane's 'sheets of sound'. Charles is constantly coming at resolutions from different directions, circling around changes like a swarm of angry hornets. From what I can tell, he seems to be using some of Barry Harris' harmonic concepts, including lots of diminished substitutions (like Trane did in his Sheets of Sound period). He has a classically Bebop vocabulary, but he is definitely applying a lot post-bop harmonic innovations and chord substitutions in his approach. I even heard some lines from Slonimski's book sever times during the evening. One thing about Charles' approach is that he doesn't hold back, he goes for it all the way. I love when players are like this. I want to hear someone really go for the gusto, balls out. Forget sounding clean and controlled. I want careening and out of control. I want to hear some carnage, some cracked altissimo notes, some collateral damage! Charles is raw, but he certainly still sounds polished. The beauty of his sound seems to allow him to get away with the wildly aggressive and dense playing he puts out.
I had a chance to talk to McPherson before his set at Jimmy Mak's. He told me that he was playing on a modern hard rubber Meyer 6. Nothing special really. I've heard that Charles is always experimenting with different pieces. Last time he was playing in Portland I think he was playing on an older Meyer, maybe a Meyer Brothers or a NY Meyer. He was still using a Vandoren Optima ligature this time. When I heard him last I was amazed at how big his sound was. I just couldn't see how he could be getting such a huge sound playing a Meyer 5 or 6, so I had to try the ligature that he was using. What else could it be? He isn't a really big guy, so how did he do it?! I ordered myself an Optima ligature as soon as I got home....and...what do you know, it sucked. Didn't make my sound any bigger, just a little brighter.
Before the PDX show Randy sat with Charles and had a 'conversation' (thanks to Don and actually a good idea). Charles talked about the fact that he thinks of time not as something to 'play with', rather as something to 'play against'. This idea isn't as common among players and educators as you might think. Many teachers try hard to impress on students the need to always 'lock in' to the time. McPherson creates a high degree of rhythmic tension by floating out of time, but he always comes back 'inside' and swings his ass off just long enough for his listeners to catch their breaths. Then he's off like a Bebop banshee again. The late Jimmy Mosher, one of my first teachers, was one of the few saxophonists that had a time feels as elastic as McPherson. That is not surprising because McPherson was one of Mosher's biggest influences, another was Charlie Mariano, who also had a loose time feel. I posted some great bootlegs of Jimmy Mosher's live shows a while back.
I bootlegged McPherson's set with my Zoom digital recorder. I was sitting at a table that was basically right in front of the stage, so the recording came out pretty well. Charles played six tunes, which were all crushing. I asked him for his permission to post the recording here and he suggested that I post a few tunes, rather than the entire set. I choose his renditions of I'll Remember April, Embraceable You, and Cherokee. I also recorded McPherson's conversation with Randy Porter, which is quite interesting. The local rhythm section Charles used is Randy Porter on piano, Tom Wakeling on bass and Alan Jones on drums.
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Joe Viola used to have me to pitch and timbre match exercises with overtones. For example, he would have me play a middle Bb or F and then without stopping the note change to a low Bb fingering. The goal of the exercise was to have the normal fingered note and the overtone finger sound the same in timbre and pitch. You do need to move your fingers pretty quickly and evenly in order to do the exercise well. You can also use this same technique to get beginning students to play the overtones if they are having difficulties with the overtone fingerings. When they play the normal fingering notes their oral tract will already be in the correct position to get the overtone. If they move their fingers to the low overtone fingering fast and even enough then there is more of a chance that the higher overtone will pop out. This just jump starts the process and is very helpful if a student is really struggling to get the overtone to pop out .
Hollywood Winds Keyless Saxophone
One of my teachers when I was at Berklee who was a big influence on me was Fred Lipsius. I posted an interview with Lipsius a while back. I took several ensembles with Fred, so I didn't get a lot of material directly from him other than getting to listen to him play, which was inspiring in itself. I really got to understand his concepts through studying his books. In 1986 Warner Brother's published an incredible book that Lipsius wrote called The Complete Book on Creative Improvisation. That book was a goldmine of material for me and shaped the way I thought about Jazz improvisation to this date. It was was worthy of being called 'the Complete book' because is covered so much ground. It had a ton of great musical phrase and licks in every key and for chord type and then it went in to great depth on how to manipulate, develop, and apply these licks to all different types of musical situations. Lipsius really presented a high flexible and creative alternative to the typical rote memorization approach that is too common in Jazz education. The licks in the book were all super hip, but the important thing was to see how to take any existing musical idea and apply it in numerous ways over different harmonic situations.
On Feb.15th George Colligan and I played a Latin-Jazz gig at Ivories. Here are a few tunes from that gig.
