I just can’t help but find this video amusing. [SORRY–the video is no longer available.] Listen to the conversation. Besides a rich, totally un-self-conscious belch (it sounded so satisfying, I felt jealous!) courtesy of the videographer, you’ll hear the following:

Friend: I’ll feel bad if it”s already gone by. [Pause] Do you see anything rotating?

Videographer: Yeah, I know…that’s what I’ve been looking for.

How could he miss it? There’s a large, beautifully defined cone tornado plainly visible in the distance, in the bottom left of the frame just to the left of the small, leafy tree and barn–right where you’d expect it to be in what appears to be a classic supercell. If the cameraman had known what he was looking for, or where to look, he’d have seen the funnel right away. Instead, he’s focusing on the front end of the storm, looking for rotation, and the fact that he actually did manage to capture the tornado appears to have been sheer luck.

I first came across the term contrafact back in my college music days in one of jazz educator David Baker’s books. In that instant, I gained a word for a practice which, until then, I had been only dimly aware of. Good thing I found out when I did instead of laboring any longer in ignorance, unaware of how much easier life could be.

A contrafact is a new musical composition built out of an already existing one, most often a new melody overlaid on a familiar harmonic structure. As a compositional device, [the contrafact] was of particular importance in the 1930s/1940s development of bop, since it allowed jazz musicians to create new pieces for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be).–From the Wikipedia article

Nice, eh? What this means for the jazz musician is, learn the changes to one tune and chances are you’ve learned the changes to several others as well. Here is a list of just a few common tunes, and of jazz contrafacts that have been derived from them:

• Blues–only a zillion heads exist for the blues.
• I”ve Got Rhythm–Anthropology, Oleo, Who’s Got Rhythm?, Moose the Mooch, Altoitis
• Cherokee–Ko Ko
• What Is This Thing Called Love?–Hot House
• Back Home Again in Indiana–Donna Lee
• How High the Moon–Ornithology

With the exception of the blues, the changes to “I’ve Got Rhythm” are easily the most contrafacted in jazz. That’s one reason why it behooves you to spend time mastering “Rhythm changes.” Learn them and you’ve instantly added scores of tunes to your repertoire–you just have to learn the melodies to them!

(Continued from previous post) Seventy-eight miles lie between the Mississippi River crossover at Louisiana, Missouri, and Springfield, Illinois. That’s as the supercell flies, according to my DeLorme Street Atlas. The shortest route by road tacks on another ten miles–a trip of maybe an hour-and-a quarter, provided Bill’s doing the driving.

During that time, we worked our way northeast to the northern edge of the storm, then caught I-72 east for another rendezvous. As we neared Springfield, I could see a pronounced area of rotation just to our south on the radar. We were tracking with it as it moved gradually toward the Interstate. That kind of arrangement could have been delightful during the daytime, with good visibility. In the blackness of the night, however, it was a bit unsettling. Looking out the window, I could see the moon shining through a rift in the clouds. Just exactly what was this storm doing, and where were we, really, in relation to its action area?

With the rotation closing in on the radar for an apparent crossing just up ahead, Bill and I finally concluded it would be wise for us to pull off at the next exit and conduct as good a visual assessment of the storm as we could. That decision proved to be our smartest move of the day.*

Stepping outside our vehicle and scanning the sky, I could see jumbled clouds and large patches of clear air. But to the east, that lowering…was that a wall cloud? Maybe. So hard to tell.

I headed back toward the vehicle, turning my back just long enough to miss what came next. I heard Bill yell, “Whoa! Power flash!” He had seen a funnel illuminated by arcing transformers in the act of crossing the highway a mile or two ahead.

We hopped back into the Suburban and blasted east. Maybe a mile down the road, we saw signs blown down, several trucks overturned in the median, definite indications that a big wind had blown through just a minute or two prior.

“Bill, if we hadn’t stopped, we would have been in that,” I said. “Yeah, we would have,” he replied. Sobering thought. Backlit by lightning, a large, low wall cloud hovered over Springfield. From what I could see, it looked plenty robust, nothing I’d ever have wanted to find myself under. I breathed an earnest prayer for the safety of the residents of Springfield.

As we arrived in the town proper, tornado warnings yammered about more touchdowns toward the east. Opting instead for I-55, we punched north through a blinding and seemingly interminable rain core. Eventually we made our way back into clear air. To our southeast, the storm was still putting down tornadoes, but who wants to chase such a beast in the night?

My chase partner, for one. When we got up to Chenoa, Bill hopped off of I-55 and headed east down US 24. “It’ll keep us out of Chicago,” was his rationale, but I knew what he was up to. There are times when I’m not quite sure whether to admire Bill’s tenacity or chloroform him and stuff him in the trunk. One thing’s for sure: he brings color, interest, and value to a chase, and he knows large chunks of territory across the US very well. We’ve chased together for twelve years now. Our partnership is at times a study in opposites, but it’s worked pretty well. We’ve traveled thousands of miles, endured plenty of busts, and wound up in a few situations that scared the crap out of me. We”ve also seen our share of tornadoes, and we do better and learn more each year.

Anyway, off we headed to the east for yet another encounter with the supercell as it approached Indiana. We caught up with it right at the border. Just east of the town of Sheldon, Illinois, pea-sized hail began to pelt our vehicle. It grew rapidly into hard, quarter-sized stones. “I hate hail,” said Bill. I felt much the same way, particularly with rotation showing directly overhead on the radar.

Thankfully, nothing worse than the hail and driving rain materialized. As the cell moved off to the northeast, we made our way through Kentland and Goodland, then caught I-65 north. Passing by Renselaar, we caught up with the tail end of the storm and pulled aside to watch a large lowering move over the town. But the storm”s tornadic activity had ended back in central Illinois. Renselaar dodged the bullet.

As Bill and I crossed the border into Michigan near New Buffalo, we could see our storm still spitting out lightning to the southeast. It was now just an hour or two from its last gasp near Jackson, Michigan, nearly 800 miles from where it had first muscled up through the troposphere in northeast Oklahoma. During its seventeen-and-a-half-hour lifespan, it had established itself as the baddest of the bad. In an outbreak that produced 140 tornadoes, it had contributed more than twenty, two of which wrought F2 damage in the capital city of Illinois. Traversing an unprecedented six states, it had set a record for distance, traveling farther and lasting longer than the parent supercell of the 1925 Tri-State Tornado and other historic, long-distance storms.

The Six State Supercell had enjoyed an illustrious career. But it was winding down, and so were we. About the time its last lightning bolt lit the sky in southeast Michigan, Bill was back home in bed with his wife, and I myself was laying my head on my pillow. For storm and chasers alike, it had been one heck of a day.

——————————————-

* Addendum: Subsequent to making this post, I checked my Street Atlas and determined that Bill and I got off at exit 91, Old Route 54/Wabash Avenue. The Lincoln WFO report shows that the first tornado crossed just a mile farther up the road, at mile marker 92. It was half a mile wide at that point. Had we kept going instead of pulling over when we did, we’d almost certainly have been blown off the road. God was looking after us.

Twelve is the dread number.

Twelve major scales. Twelve natural minor scales. Twelve melodic minor scales. Twelve harmonic minor scales. Twelve pentatonic, twelve blues, twelve…aaaaaiiiiieeeee!!!

Scales, scales, and more scales. Is there no end to practicing scales?

No.

But, trust me, there is a way to nudge your attitude toward scale practice from drudgery to enjoyment and even inspiration. It begins with understanding how scales apply to your goal of becoming a good jazz improviser.

I wish someone had helped me to understand this better back in my college music days. Maybe my fire would have gotten lit a bit sooner. Or maybe not; admittedly, I was a slacker. Still, if I had understood how those boring, linear progressions of tones became the stuff not only of Bach and Brahms, but also of Bud and Bird, it would have answered a few questions, shortened my learning curve, and helped me to understand not only why to practice scales, but also how.

Here are a few things I wish I had known:

◊ Practicing scales does not just mean playing them straight up and straight down. How often do you actually hear an entire scale played that way in jazz–all the way up for two or three octaves, and then all the way back down? Depending on a player’s approach, what you normally hear in actual jazz solos consists largely of fragments of scales, digital patterns, arpeggios, and the occasional longer, scalar line.

◊ Scale practice includes digital exercises and arpeggios. Once you start adding these, you begin to hear stuff emerging in your practice that sounds like actual building blocks of jazz. Triads and seventh chords rooted on the degrees of the major scale, for instance, are as relevant and functional as you can get, particularly when you start convoluting them in different ways. The following is a sequence of triads in the key of C major; consider each group of four notes to be barred eighth notes: C-E-G-C, D-F-A-D, E-G-B-E, F-A-C-F, G-B-D-G, A-C-E-A, B-D-F-B, C-E-G-C. Get that under your fingers, then try varying the note order thus: C-G-E-C, D-A-F-D, E-B-G-E, F-C-A-F, etc. Figure out other variations.

◊ Interval studies are a great way to get inside a scale. Don’t just practice intervals–think about how they apply. For example, a sequence of sixths has a wonderful way of adding sweetness to a passage. Here’s a cool little application, provided you know some rudimentary piano: first, sound a CM7 on the piano with your left hand. Now, with your right hand, play the following sequence of sixths against the chord: B-G, A-F, G-E, F-D, E-C (hold out the final C). Sounds nice, eh? Note that the first couplet of notes, B and G, are consonant tones, the seventh and fifth of the chord respectively. The next couplet are dual passing tones, and the next consists of two more chord tones, G and E, the fifth and third. Following is another couplet of passing tones, followed by two more chord tones, E and C, the latter being the root of the chord. My point, besides giving you a nice lick: don’t just exercise your fingers–exercise your brain and your ears along with them. THINK about how the material you are practicing applies to various musical situations–to altered dominants, ii-V7-I’s, and so forth.

I’ve by no means exhausted the topic of practicing scales with a jazz purpose in mind, but this is enough to give you the idea and get you started at working things out for yourself.

Be diligent, have fun, and keep blowing!

This is the view to the west of the Palm Sunday Tornado memorial in Dunlap, Indiana. With the little cedar tree spotlighting itself in the foreground, the photo may be lacking compositionally, but it”s true to what you actually see as you walk down Cole Street.

At 6:45 on April 11, 1965, the view was much darker. One hundred feet away, in a place now occupied by a large commemorative stone, seven-year-old Debbie Forsythe huddled in the basement with her mother and brother Stevie as F5 winds swept away her home and her neighborhood.

In the golden sunlight of a late August afternoon, it’s hard to fathom the horror that visited this area on that fateful Palm Sunday forty-three years ago. Debbie lost her brother in the storm. Entire families perished.

Life continued after the disaster, as life must. Yet over four decades later, the wounds still persist deep in the hearts of those who lost loved ones in the storms. Located south of Elkhart, the tiny park was created by Debbie on the site of her childhood home, not only in loving memory of the dead, but also, in particular, as a place of healing for the living.

I have made several visits to the park since 2004. The place exerts a strange pull on me. Both geographically and spiritually, it is the epicenter of that terrible day. Stories are etched into the soil of this little community; voices whisper from the earth, and here is where they find their expression. The memorial is an altar of faith and hope that endure the very worst life can inflict. I know this not only because of what I experience when I visit the memorial, but also because Debbie Forsythe, today Debbie Watters, is my friend. She is an amazing woman, gifted with a heart of gold and an earthy, very real faith in God’s love and wisdom in the face of things that make no sense. Through Debbie, I have a personal understanding of how deep the roots of this tiny parcel in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Dunlap, Indiana, really go.

At the eastern edge of the park stands a plaque bearing the image of the infamous twin funnels that became the icon of the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak. While I”ve heard one story that insisted this freakish tornado was in fact the Dunlap F5, the eyewitness account of the actual photographer, Elkhart Truth reporter Paul Huffman, places it in the Midway Trailer Court south of town down US 33.

It was here that another friend of mine, Pat McIntosh, lost her toddler, Chris. This is the other location I always feel compelled to visit whenever I make a pilgrimage to the area–for that is what it is: a pilgrimage. Over the months, the elastic bands of Dunlap begin to pull on me, and I sense that it is time for me to make the trip.

The old trailer park is now no more than a shady grove of large trees and overgrown tarmac, bordered to the south by a new overpass. On previous occasions, I was never quite certain that I had the right location. All I had to go by were a general sense of the area and a few visual clues, including a scattered handful of old utility hookups which suggested the prior existence of a mobile home community. Pulling into the site last Saturday evening, I discovered that now even these were gone. But this time I wasn’t alone. Pat was on the cell phone with me, and with her serving as my guide, I walked at length through the long-gone trailer park, strolling down rows of mature shade trees that lined the vanishing remnants of old drives. I explored the boundaries of the site, poked around the woods edge to the north, and managed to locate a crumbling cement foundation near the center that had to have belonged to the cellar where a number of residents took life-saving shelter.

Sorry, I have no pictures of the old Midway Trailer Park. The sun was setting, and the light had grown too dim for photos. Perhaps another time. For now, I”m left with my thoughts, gleaned from my thorough exploration of the site with Pat on the phone. Being uniquely linked with her story, I find it hard to describe how this place affects me, and I won”t attempt it here.

I will say, though, that the tale of how I came to know Pat, and through her, Debbie, is a most unusual one. God is real, prayer is powerful, and the results of prayer, while unpredictable, can occasionally be mind-boggling and wonderful. My friendships with Pat and Debbie are an example. They remind me that, when the winds of circumstance turn our lives into a desolation, an even greater, life-giving wind will visit our souls if we will let it. It is the wind of God”s Spirit, which in its own time causes wildflowers to grow on blasted landscapes and beckons us to look upward into the face of hope. That is at least a part of the message of the memorial park, and one of the reasons why Midway and Dunlap call to me over the miles and across the years.

Do I have to learn all twelve keys on my saxophone?”

Good question, young ‘un. Here’s a good answer: yes.

True, most jazz is played in a relative handful of keys. But modulations can take you all over the musical map, and there are plenty of tunes written in keys that just might not put a smile on your face. If you plan on playing in any kind of a situation involving guitars as the lead instrument–and, trust me, you will, whether it’s a blues band or a church worship team–then you’d better be on friendly terms with the concert keys of E, A, and D.

But while mastering all twelve keys can admittedly be a pain in the keister at first, once you build up familiarity with the different keys to the point where your learning curve starts to snowball, you’ll find that you actually enjoy the challenge.

By “mastering,” I don”t mean just acquiring enough technical proficiency to play intervals and arpeggios up and down a given scale (although that’s a part of it). I mean being able to play real music as an improviser in any key, and to connect different key centers to each other creatively and convincingly.

That’s a tall order, and it doesn’t com overnight. After forty years of playing, I”m still not where I”d like to be in my command of every key. However, I have learned some approaches that can make learning effective and fun. Here are a few tips:

1. Practice dominant patterns around the circle of fifths. Getting a few V7s under your fingertips will not only foster your ability to smoothly connect one key to the next, but it will also open your ears to hear the movement of chord tones, such as the seventh of one dominant resolving downward to the third of the next.

2. Mix it up. Work a pattern or two through all twelve keys, but then pick one key and saturate yourself in it. Run a few licks through it till they lay easily under your fingers. Transpose part or all of a favorite solo into that key, and get it down cold. Woodshed the blues in your key of focus, paying particular attention to accidentals and borrowed chords.

3. Or pick a tone center, such as F#, and run your major scale, Dorian mode, mixolydian mode, melodic minor scale, diminished scales, and altered scales off of it.

4. Learn tunes that are written in less common keys. “Wave” by Carlos Jobim, normally played in concert D, is a good example. Or transpose a few tunes to different keys. Start with a simple melody such as “Cherokee.” After a while, you may want to try more complex numbers. I once spent a few months taking “Donna Lee” through all twelve keys. I couldn’t do that now, but there was a time when I owned that tune in every key.

The point is to combine both the shotgun approach–doing exercises that take you rapidly through all twelve keys so you become comfortable with voice leading and rapid key shifts–with the saturation approach, so you increase your ability to connect your inner ear with the technical demands and “finger feel” of a given key.

So…you”ve learned the first thirty-two bars of “Anthropology” in the standard concert key of Bb. Very cool. Now why not try transferring it to concert A? Go ahead, give it a shot–just the first eight bars to start with. You’ll be surprised at what a difference it makes in unlocking your chops. And what’s really interesting, not to mention rewarding, is the way in which hammering out a key you’re not familiar with bleeds over into other keys. Your playing can’t help but improve.

Stop thinking of some keys as easy and others as hard. The “hard” keys aren”t hard–they’re just less familiar to you. And you can change that. Use your creativity. Tinker. Experiment. Listen analytically. Practice the demanding stuff–but don’t forget to just lighten up and jam.

Do you really need to practice all twelve keys? If you’re serious about excelling at jazz, absolutely. But there are ways to enhance your learning and have fun in the bargain. So quit dodging the inevitable and get down to it today. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start reaping results you’re going to love.

Normally, I”m not one to take the copy-and-paste approach to blogs when it comes to text. I much prefer to generate my own content. But by means of introducing you to “jazz theologian,” pastor, and eloquent communicator Robert Gelinas, I want to let him speak for himself.

Responding to the question, “What is a jazz theologian?” Gelinas provides the following insight:

A jazz theologian is someone who understands that jazz is more than music. Music is a great place to hear and observe jazz, but jazz is so much more. Jazz has been expressed in a number of mediums: poetry, literature, sports and art to name a few.

Fundamental to jazz is Call and Response, syncopation and improvisation. A jazz theologian takes these concepts and then applies them to following Christ and living out his glorious gospel of the Kingdom of God.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in the link between jazz and spirituality to check out Gelinas”s blog, Reflections of a Jazz Theologian. You”ll find some refreshingly original observations about the nature of Christianity, the gospel of Jesus, the way the church was designed by God to function versus the different ruts it has fallen into, and the implications of a “jazz-shaped faith” for living a fully integrated life.

Keep an eye on Gelinas. He has a lot to say, and he says it very well, with a rare combination of thoughtfulness, creativity, and passion.