My Father’s Horn, Part 3

(Continued from part 2.)

For a couple of years after I graduated from high school, I cast about with no certain direction. I worked a series of odds-and-ends jobs, none with any promise, and lived alternately with my parents, in a tiny shotgun house in Eastown, and in a former chicken coop converted into a rental home out in the countryside of Cascade. (Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it! The place was really nice for that time in my life.)

The one constant in my life was music. But in those days, I had largely set aside my horn in favor of my acoustic guitar, which I had taught myself to play. I was hugely into Jethro Tull and wanted nothing more than to be another Ian Anderson. So I was doing my best to develop as a singer/songwriter.

It was the sax, though, that opened the door to some key musical friendships. In those days, I was hanging with my buddies Perry Werchowsky and Scott Smith. It was these guys who in different ways spurred me on to learn more about what I was doing.

The three of us used to get together frequently at Perry’s house and jam, with Perry playing piano, Scott on the guitar, and, of course, me on the alto sax. Perry was studying with veteran jazz keyboardist Eddie Russ, and Scott had begun to take music classes at Grand Rapids Junior College. Scott was constantly talking about the latest musical concepts he was learning in music theory class. Triads, inversions, augmented chords, secondary dominants, cadences … all fascinating to hear about, and frankly, I was starting to feel a bit jealous. I wanted to know about that stuff!

When I told my parents that I thought I might like to study music, they leaped at my mere mention of the idea. A whirlwind of college visits, applications, and financial aid forms ensued, and when the dust finally settled, I found myself sitting in the afternoon jazz band at Aquinas College under the directorship of Dr. Bruce Early.

Bruce put me in the lead alto chair, but he made it plain to me that the arrangement was only temporary. Someone else would be playing first chair, and once that person arrived in a week or two, I would be demoted.

“Right,” I thought. “Just wait till you hear what I can do!” Rehearsals got underway, me playing with all the gusto and confidence that comes from either great talent or monumental ignorance. From the impression Bruce was doing of being utterly unimpressed, I knew I was secretly blowing him away. He just wasn’t letting on.

Then one afternoon as I was assembling my horn for rehearsal, into the room walked another saxophonist named Dan Bryska. I had heard Dan play before; he had sat in on a few Formal Aires gigs in months past. I felt a bit nervous. Here was my replacement, apparently, and I knew he was good.

Dan put together his horn and began to warm up with a series of bebop licks. In fifteen seconds, the guy blew lines through his sax that I had never dreamed of. And like that, my cocky attitude evaporated. Geeze, Dan wasn’t just better than me, he was a lot better. There weren’t even grounds for comparison.

Until now I had been a small fish in a smaller pond, and I had made the mistake of believing the people who told me what a great player I was. Now here was the truth, staring me in the face. I was a novice, so green that I didn’t even know how badly I sucked. But Dan had just given me a clue. It was a humbling experience, but it was good for me. It suggested that if I wanted to become anywhere near as good a player as Dan and some of the other guys in the band, I was going to have to work at it.

In other words, practice. What a novel concept!

But practice what? I wasn’t sure. I had begun to take jazz improvisation lessons with Bruce Early, but my ears just couldn’t wrap themselves around the complexities of even the simplest jazz harmony. A ninth slapped on top of a minor seventh chord didn’t sound pretty to me; it sounded wrong.

I forget how I stumbled upon Jerry Coker’s renowned book Patterns for Jazz, but I’ll never forget the impact it had on me. By then I was two years into music school, and I was slowly developing, but I think I was mostly just a source of frustration for my saxophone instructor. Then along came Coker’s book. I took it to school with me, hit a practice room, and began to work on a pattern that consisted of major triads ascending and descending chromatically.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “I wonder if I can memorize this.” I took up the challenge, persevered at it, and succeeded. And light began to dawn for me. I could do this stuff! If I practiced, I could become good. Maybe even really good.

I was hammering away on my triads one afternoon when the door to my practice room suddenly flung open and my sax instructor, Fred Bunch, rushed in. “YES!” he yelled. “That’s it! That’s it! Keep doing it!!!”

The man had a wild look in his eyes, and I had left my pepper spray at home. But I felt more inspired than nervous. After all those years of misfiring, it looked like I was finally on the right track.

(To be continued.)

Video Tutorial #1: The Augmented Scale

The time has come for me to kick it up a notch on Stormhorn.com with my first video tutorial on jazz. This one is on the augmented scale, a favorite of mine.

I feel a bit presumptuous taking this step, since I’m putting myself out in front of you, my musical readers, in a new way that suggests a high degree of expertise. The reality is, I’m a mostly self-taught saxophonist who lives in a rural, bedroom community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where you can still drive just a few blocks to find plenty of corn and cows. That said, I know what I know. More important, I’m a perpetual learner, and I like to share what I’ve learned, often as I’m still in the process of learning it. This video tutorial represents my effort to offer you more value by, er, augmenting your learning experience. (Pun intended. Rimshot, please.)

In the Jazz Theory, Technique, and Solo Transcriptions section of my Jazz page, you’ll find a good number of written articles on the augmented scale, complete with exercises, to supplement this video. One thing they can’t do, though, is familiarize you with the sound of the scale. That’s where this tutorial comes in handy. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Altered Dominant with Pentatonic b6 Scale

Lately my practice sessions have involved both the diminished whole tone scale and the pentatonic scale. There’s a reason for this: the two are related, and both scales go well with the V+7#9 chord. My previous post explored how this plays out with a basic major pentatonic scale. I worked with mode 4 of that scale, starting on the b9 of the V+7#9 chord. In root position, the scale would actually begin on the +4 of the chord.

Today during my practice session I focused on another pentatonic scale rooted on the +5 of the V+7#9. It’s a wonderful sound that really brings out both the major third and #9 of the chord as well as the evocative color of the raised fifth. This scale is not your standard-issue pentatonic; its flatted sixth gives it a mysterious augmented quality.

Click on the image to your right to enlarge it. The first thing you’ll see is a D+7#9 chord outlined in whole notes. To its right is an ascending Bb pentatonic scale with a flatted sixth. You’ll see how the scale is entirely consonant with the chord. Moreover, further analysis will reveal that the Bb pent b6 is actually an abbreviated form of the D diminished whole tone scale.

Still more interesting is the fact that the Bb pentatonic scale with a flatted sixth actually is the D+7#9! It’s what you get when you scrunch all the chord tones together linearly (or as near linearly as possible). While I’d love to make myself sound like a master theoretician who has known this fact for most of his musical life, the truth is, I just made the discovery a little while ago. Now I know why this scale sounds so great when played with the altered dominant chord. It is the chord.

Of course the scale has other applications besides the V+7#9, the most obvious being major and dominant chords that share the same root as the scale. I’ll let you work out the various other harmonic possibilities for yourself as they’re not the focus of this post.

Back to the image: The second and third lines introduce you to a basic exercise that will help you start getting your fingers around the pentatonic b6 scale. It would be most helpful if you had some kind of accompaniment sounding the chord when you work on this pattern. You want to internalize the sound of the chord-scale relationship, not just the technique.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Take this exercise through the full range of your instrument and learn it in all twelve keys.

And that’s that. For lots more chops-building exercises, solo transcriptions, and information-packed articles, visit my jazz page.