A necessarily succinct survey of jazz styles, with guest, Bob Levey.

We'll listen to and put a little context to the following styles of jazz:

• Blues (call and response)
• • Mississippi Fred McDowell; "Soon ONe Mornin'"
• Traditional Jazz (Hot Jazz)
• • Louis Armstrong; "West End Blues"
• Swing
• • Duke Ellington; "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Don't Have That Swing"
  • Coleman Hawkins; "Body And Soul"
• Bebop
• • Bob Levey; Stories about Stan Levey, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, etc.
  • Bebop; Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Levey, Stan Getz, etc
  • Charlie Parker; Just Friends
• Hard Bop
• • Doodlin'; Horace Silver & The Jazz Messengers
  • Joy Spring; Clifford Brown - performed by Bob and Tim
  • Giant Steps; John Coltrane
• Modal Jazz
• • So What; Miles Davis
• Avant Gaurd/Free Jazz
• • Acknowledgment; John Coltrane
• Jazz Fusion
• • Birdland; Weather Report
• Some of today's artists and their "amalgamated" music
• • Joe Lovano
  • Tim Hagans
  • Kenny Werner

I use Dropbox for a bunch of stuff. I can:

• put a file (e.g. a pdf) from my computer in to Dropbox, and read it later on my iPhone
• put a pdf of sheet music in to Dropbox, and play from it on an iPad
  
• do an "offsite" backup of important files
  
• share files that are too big to share as email attachments
• share file systems with other Dropbox users

Download it and install it from here: http://db.tt/yrF28xq

Last night we dove in to a couple of the less used keys, and practiced the Dominant 7th bebop scale starting on the 2nd scale degree. We explored ways of getting to a chord tone, delaying the deed until the descending portion of the exercise, then using the "enclosure" technique (enclosing the 3rd) to "resolve" the scale/chord. Here's an example of an idea that we played with:

We took that idea through all the keys, then through several keys of blues. In our exploration, we relied on our musical ears to confirm the "rightness" of a particular solution. There's certainly mathematics that would back up our appropriate solutions, I believe, but we'll leave that to all those civic music engineers out there.

Thanks to Terry Bannon for helping out with his beautiful bass line/chordal accompaniments.

Finally, the attendees agreed that having participated, they were less "square". Those who weren't there remain square. ;-)

"networking is different in the musician business than it is in something such as selling medical supplies. You really need to be friends with people genuinely. You can’t fake the friendship. You have to be a good person and a good hang for people to hire you."

Bebop scale examples

We then took each small phrase, and played with the phrase through the Bb blues. Here's an example (starting on the 4th, and enclosing the 3rd):

Blues bebop example

• playing the non-chord tone as a quarter note, then going up or down to a chord tone on the next beat.
• using a chromatic "passing tone" (where a full step is required to get to a chord tone... e.g. from the 6th to the 5th).
• "enclosing" the chord tone... e.g. 6th to b5th to 5th (similar to a "neighbor tone group" or "changing tone")

And, of course, the ever popular Melodica demo: