Coltrane, Giant Steps, and the Blues

“Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

Sooner or later, a sax player has to deal with it–that most lopsided, knuckle-busting of all digitally oriented tunes.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but it’s also a very rewarding one. The tune has a beautiful, geometrical logic to it. Practicing patterns to it comes easy, but breaking away from the patterns and doing something truly inventive in an improvisation is a challenge. You’ve really earned your saxophone merit badge when you can get around comfortably in “Giant Steps.”

Around ten years ago, I steeped myself in “Giant Steps” for a lengthy period, to the exclusion of just about everything else. My focused practice paid off: I got to where I could negotiate the changes with a fair degree of fluency and creativity at over 300 on the metronome. Not a bad achievement–but I forgot how to play the blues. I kid you not! You’d think all that technical work would bleed over into the rest of my playing, and I”m sure there were ways it did. But when it came to sounding pretty on a basic bebop blues, my fingers just didn’t seem to remember the territory. It was weird.

I can still get around “Giant Steps” today if I need to, but I’m pretty rusty at it. However, my blues playing sounds much more convincing. It”s a trade-off. If I had all the hours of the day to practice, I’d practice all hours of the day. But in this busy life, I do what I can. We can’t all be Coltrane. For that matter, none of us can. I’m content to listen to him, admire him, learn from him…and enjoy playing my horn.

February 1, 2008 by
Filed Under: Entertainment, Jazz, Life, Music, Recording, Saxophone

Made for Dancing

I love to watch people dance, and I get to do a lot of that on my monthly gig at Westwood at the Crossing. Over the past few months, Westwood has hosted weekly, Sunday evening dance lessons. Afterwards, the Westwood features live entertainment for the dance crowd. Once a month, it”s the Rhythm Section Jazz Band. On our night to howl, we get the dancers up and shakin” it to a hefty dose of big band swing and Latin music. That kind of material is eminently danceable: Basie, Ellington, the Dorsey brothers…it”s the stuff swing dance evolved out of. We have fun playing it, and the dancers have fun dancing to it.

Jazz covers a lot of territory, and much of it was created as dance music. I”ve spent considerable time on the side of the bandstand where music is made, and I”ve always enjoyed watching how people respond to the music out on the dance floor. Some folks just shuffle, and that”s fine. Others are truly fabulous dancers, and they are a real treat to watch.

Of course, not all jazz is good to dance to, nor is it intended to be. During my visit with my friend Kathy Bavaar in D.C. last December, we took in a jazz dinner at the Smithsonian. The featured band was an Afro-Cuban bop band. It was a world-class group made up of absolutely monstrous players, but I defy you to dance to their music. It”s too complex. The cross rhythms create all kinds of interest, but they seem to intentionally obscure the downbeat.

This is by no means an objection. I marvel at music of that caliber, music which is at once intricate, challenging, emotional, and beautiful. It has its own sense of swing–but most people”s feet won”t find it. There are exceptions, I”m sure, but they are likely to come in the form of very seasoned dancers who have steeped themselves in the complexities of Latin rhythms.

Some jazz is made for dancing. Some is made for listening. All of it is made for enjoyment and public consumption. Whatever your preference–whether madcap Dixieland, fast-paced bop, tender ballads, or floating fusion–if it puts a smile on your face, it has done its job.

February 1, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Event, Jazz, Music

Tornadoes: A Global Warming Litmus Test?

This January has unquestionably been the strangest one I can remember, and I”ve experienced fifty-one of them. The month opened with a bang, with a tornado outbreak on the seventh. That was followed by a period of blizzards and bitter cold. Come tomorrow, another round of mid-forties temps and thunderstorms will be staring us in the hairy eyeball, with yet another blast of mid-teens Arctic air chasing hard on its heels. What a thermal roller-coaster!

Global warming, you say? Well, could be. But the problem with making such a quick assumption is, it ignores the fact that climate is simply a broad-scale averaging of anomalies. Extremes in the weather are, in a sense, the norm, and the uncommon isn”t all that unusual.

The twentieth century closed with the highest tornadic wind speeds ever recorded, clocked at over 300 miles per hour in the nightmare that rolled through Oklahoma City on May 3, 1999. And that tornado was just one in a devastating central Okalahoma outbreak.

n”Well, there you go,” you say. “More storms and stronger storms. Global warming.”

Not so fast, hoss.

The worst recorded tornado outbreak in modern history–the notorious Super Outbreak of April 3-4, 1974–was twenty-five years prior, long before global warming had been invented. With 148 tornadoes affecting thirteen states, and with an unmatched six tornadoes receiving an F5 rating, that event far outstrips the 1999 Oklahoma outbreak.

Okay, right–that”s still relatively recent history. Let”s go back considerably farther. On March 18, 1925, the Great Tri-State Tornado claimed 695 lives during its three-and-a-half-hour, 219-mile blitzkrieg across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. In terms of fatalities, longevity, and path length, as well as size, intensity, and forward speed, the Tri-State was a phenomenon among phenomena.

But can you draw inferences from such a storm regarding climate change? No more, I think, than you can from a 100-year flood. Such things simply happen.

Am I suggesting that global warming isn”t a real and present concern? Of course not; I think it”s pretty well established that we”ve got a problem on our hands. What I am saying is, a lot of factors go into creating weather events of any kind. Moreover, we are far more aware of whatever weather is occurring at any given time and location today than we were thirty years ago. Our warning technology has vastly improved. And our population has grown, meaning there are simply a whole lot more people around to notice the weather and feel its impact. The fact that your house got washed away by a storm surge doesn”t necessarily mean hurricanes have gotten worse; it means you built your house in a vulnerable location, just as multiplied thousands of people have been doing these past few decades, and the inevitable finally caught up with you.

I”m all for making balanced connections between storms and global temperature increases. But I”m not much of a fan for drawing snap, simplistic conclusions. Weather extremes of one sort or another occur just about every year. They”re not all that unusual. They”re just extremes. They were happening long before the polar ice cap went into meltdown. They”ll continue to happen. They are what they are–something to consider as parts of a much bigger picture. The picture is indeed an alarming one, but an alarmist perspective on isolated events neither explains nor solves anything.

January 28, 2008 by
Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Weather

Taking Time to Listen

Silence.

Space, a place to listen.

In all the programming that goes into what we call a church service, particularly in “praise and worship,” taking time to still ourselves enough to hear and respond to the Holy Spirit seems to be the one thing we haven”t fit into the schedule. Probably that”s because God”s voice–the real thing, not the spiritualized weirdnesses that often masquerade as it–is the one thing we can”t manufacture, and therefore, can”t program in.

But it”s also the one thing people, both Christians and those exploring Christianity, long for above all else. Not evangelical sing-alongs, no matter how talented the musicians. Not great preaching, no matter how gifted the preacher or relevant the message. These things are fine, but they can”t touch the heart”s deepest hunger. Only God can do that. Everything else is just a tool.

Tools are good when used right. But tools can be noisy–sometimes too noisy. We can become so fixated on our tools that we forget they”re just a means to an end. They can drown out the voice of the One we seek to encounter.

When I read through the book of 1 Corinthians, chapters twelve through fourteen, I”m struck by one thing: when those early believers came together, they expected God to show up as well. And they made room for him to have his way. While Paul was writing to correct some of the problems which arose from the human part of that equation, let”s not lose track of what those problems signify. The Holy Spirit is real. The question isn”t whether he”ll talk to us; it”s whether we”ll listen.

Are we willing to submit our carefully planned, thoughtfully timed worship order to God? What would happen if we started thinking of silence and listening as an integral part of our worship experience? What if we were to risk taking our corporate worship beyond just singing, clapping, and raising our hands–which in themselves can get pretty rote and mechanical–to points of encounter where we learn to “be still, and know that [the Lord is] God”?

Listening.

Learning to hear, truly hear, the voice and the heart of another person.

It”s one of the most relational things we can possibly do. It is critically important in our relationship with God. He himself is a great listener, but he has things to say as well. Giving him a little room to do so could transform our experience of what church is about. It could also move and refresh the hearts of non-Christians, as they encounter a gathering of believers that is neither mere religious entertainment on the one hand, nor a spiritual freak show on the other, but a setting of genuine communion, where people listen for and respond to the voice of Jesus with genuineness, gentleness, self-discernment, sobriety, humility, and love.

January 25, 2008 by
Filed Under: Christian Music, Church Worship, Life

The Problem with Phil

Phil Woods–a problem? Who could have any problem at all with Phil?

I can, and here it is: the guy is too good!

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was blowing choruses on Donna Lee while still in his diapers. Of course, Woods paid some serious dues to play as beautifully as he does, but he seems to have been playing that way awfully early in the game. Here”s a black-and-white video clip of Phil from back in 1968.

He would have been…um, let’s see, born in 1931…okay, well, one can certainly be playing a lot of horn at age thirty-seven. I guess that much is obvious. And in Phil’s case, he evidently was playing outstandingly at least fourteen years earlier. His extensive discography goes back to 1954, two years before I was born. Phil had to have been darned good even then for a record company to pick him up at the tender age of twenty-three.

I guess that’s why he’s Phil Woods. Why he’s a jazz icon. Because he was a killer player back then and remains so today. He had the fire in him at an early age, he took it and ran with it, and he’s been running ever since.

And playing beautifully.

You got a problem with that?

January 24, 2008 by
Filed Under: Entertainment, Jazz, Life, Music, Recording, Saxophone, Video

Good Beer, Revisited

I never did make it to the Fletcher Street Brewery after my gig in Alpena last December. Not that I didn’t want to, not that I didn’t try, but I’m here to tell you that life has its ironies.

A few other band members seemed reasonably enthused about hitting the brewpub once we had packed up the equipment, so we wound up with a bit of an entourage cruising the streets of Alpena. Finding Fletcher Street Brewery was not much of a problem, but I had forgotten one small detail: the place doesn’t serve food.

No food!

What’s wit dat?

How can you serve beer without offering something in the way of edibles to take the edge off an appetite, not to mention off the alcohol?

Now, this lack of food didn”t bother me to the extent that I was prepared to give up on my prospects of a fine IPA. But everyone else was hungry. So off we went to a restaurant down the block for a meal, all ten or twelve of us.

The place we wound up at majored in high-decibel background noise and your usual American pilsners. Frankly, I would rather drink lizard pee than Miller’s, but at least Sam Adams was available in a bottle, and that”s what everyone ordered.

Everyone, that is, except me. Nothing against Sam Adams, mind you–it”s decent enough beer–but I was saving myself, you see. Fortified by visions of that mug of IPA at Fletcher’s, I wasn’t about to sacrifice either my stomach space or my sobriety on lesser brews. So I suffered beerlessly through my hamburger. It was hard. But my mind was focused on a higher cause.

An hour later, we headed back to our vehicles, spun down the side streets, and pulled into Fletcher’s parking lot.

The lot was empty.

Fletcher Street Brewery had closed five minutes before our arrival.

And that, my friend, is why my lip trembles and there is a tear in my eye as I write these words. If ever a man wanted a good beer that night, I was that man. If ever a man deserved a good beer that night, it was I. And yet, out of all our little coterie, I was the one–the only one–who didn”t get a beer. Not even a lousy Sam Adams. Still, tonight, nearly two months later, just thinking of this is causing me to relive the trauma.

Thankfully, I”ve got just the cure for the pain. There’s a sweet, fat growler of Hopnoxious IPA from the Walldorff sitting in the fridge. There’s a good, solid glass beer mug in my cupboard. As for the rest, well…you know the drill.

January 23, 2008 by
Filed Under: Humor, Jazz, Life, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized

Storm Chasing in the Great Lakes

The snow has been flying today, as it has consistently for the past week, but at least the temperatures have risen into the balmy low twenties. For several days, they were down into the single digits, making for some bitterly cold days. And we had it good. Across the lake, in Wisconsin, I saw readings as low as -14 degrees Fahrenheit. Had it gotten that chilly here, I’d have been sorely tempted to put on a long-sleeve shirt before venturing outside.

Just kidding. This is has been some cold weather. January 2008 has proved to be a month of extremes. Two weeks ago, tornadic thunderstorms erupted as far north as Racine, Wisconsin, and I was chasing supercells in Missouri. Now, this. Such is life in Michigan, land of variety, contrast, and freezing your butt off.

It’s okay, though. March is only five weeks away, and for me, that marks the arrival of storm chasing season. Of course, I’m being optimistic here–Michigan winters have that effect on me. Wanting to push the envelope comes naturally this time of year. But I”m not being unrealistic. March produces some toothsome chase scenarios, as blobs of juicy Gulf of Mexico moisture begin to push northward into regions of radical lapse rates, wild helicities, and screaming jets.rnrnIf I sound a little overeager for severe weather right now, blame it on cabin fever. I’ve been cooped up in this icebox far too long. But the truth is, while I’ll chase the big storms when they visit my area, I have no desire for them to do so. The southern half of Michigan”s lower peninsula is simply too populous. Sure, a lot of it is still rural, but you can’t travel far without encountering a town, often a good-sized one. This is not the Great Plains. It’s Michigan, a state checkered with population centers–not a good place to have some mile-wide Oklahoma-style wedge carve a twenty-mile path.rnrnMichigan is also heavily forested, which doesn’t make storm chasing easy. It”s not as bad as chasing in the Ozarks, where one’s view of an approaching storm can be blocked by mountainous terrain, but it’s also not as good as those wide, gracious, open stretches of Kansas grassland.

Frankly, the most chaser-friendly territory I’ve seen so far has been central Illinois. It’s not only incredibly, breathtakingly flat, but it also has a beautiful gridwork of nice, straight roads, roads that behave themselves and rarely offer you unpleasant surprises. No clay that turns into chocolate pudding when wet and tries its damndest to slurp your vehicle into a ditch. No miles and miles of driving like a maniac to the nearest river crossing twenty miles away while the big storm of the day moves off to the east. Just, for the most part, a nice setup of very gentlemanly north-south/east-west roads spaced at regular intervals.

That’s Illinois: you not only can see the storms as far as forever, but you can also get to them without breaking a sweat.

It’s nice.

To all you Great Lakes chasers–I hope to bump into you out there sometime this spring.

January 22, 2008 by
Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing

Putting It Together

I wish I had understood early on the value of getting away from notes on paper and getting everything in my head. During my days in music school, I memorized scales up the wazoo, but the actual applications that scales are intended to serve were things I consigned to paper. I remained glued to my Real Book, and to solo transcriptions such as the Charlie Parker Omnibook. Those are fabulous tools, but they’re just a means to the end. The goal is to download as much as possible of what they contain into one’s head and fingers, moving the music from the paper to the player. I didn’t make that connection for quite a while. Consequently, I had the ability to play scales and scale patterns at lightning speed, but I was lost when it came to actually making music out of them.

However, once I started memorizing a few of those Omnibook solos, something interesting happened. Suddenly my fingers began to find their way through the music. I began to develop my inner ear, and to connect it with my instrument in a very organic way. I worked mainly on blues and “Rhythm” changes–and the work paid off. The next step–actually transcribing a few solos myself, starting with a simple Wayne Shorter solo and moving on to Cannonball Adderley–provided even bigger dividends. The process of listening analytically, laboring over challenging musical passages, opened up my ears still more. I haven”t done a lot of transcribing, but I can vouch for its value in developing as an improvisor.

I definitely plan to sit down and transcribe a few more solos soon, and I’ve got just the tool to help me: a program called SlowGold. Available as an Internet download, it allows the transcriptionist to slow music down without changing its pitch, to the point where even very fast, complex passages, a la Michael Brecker, become accessible for analysis and memorization. You can select short passages and loop them, so you can hear them over and over at the tempo of your choice. You can also change the key to whatever you please. Ah, the wonders of digital technology!

To be honest, I haven’t really worked with this great resource yet, but it’s on the slate for 2008. The process for me involves analying short sections of a solo and writing them down. But the goal is always memorization.

Until you’ve memorized a solo, it’s not really yours–but once you’ve memorized it, really got it down cold, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how it begins to leak out into your playing in creative bits and pieces. You’re developing your inner ear–and as you do, your technique will follow. You’ve still got to spend plenty of time doing technical studies, but now you’re giving a focus to those scales, arpeggios, digital patterns, and licks. As you continue to hang actual musical flesh on your technical skeleton, you”ll love how the ideas begin to flow, and how your chops allow you to execute what you hear in your head fluidly and convincingly.

By the way, if you’re concerned that you’ll sound like a Phil Woods or a Charlie Parker clone if you memorize those players’ solos, don’t worry about it. In the first place, would it honestly be such a terrible thing to sound like Phil? If you ever do, count yourself very, very blessed–and congratulations! In the second place, if you want to find your own voice, trust me, you will, and memorizing solos is probably the shortest route to doing so. Learning from the giants doesn’t mean you become those giants. You’re simply embracing a wise, extremely practical tradition of jazz: going through others in order to arrive at yourself.

January 22, 2008 by
Filed Under: Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Saxophone

Cannonball, Hard Bop, and “Work Song”

More on Cannonball, one of the inescapable (as if you’d want to escape him!) influences on contemporary alto sax players. We’re fortunate to have a sizable body of his work, featuring him as both a group leader and as a sideman, notably with Miles Davis.

Cannonball’s technical abilities were remarkable, but his style largely reflects a trend from the harmonic complexity of bebop to a simpler, more visceral approach. Don’t take “simpler” to mean “simple,” though. There’s nothing simple about the playing of Cannonball Adderley. He was a ferocious player, with an inventive, very personal way of weaving “outside” playing into a wonderfully earthy, “inside” overall conception.

To me, Cannon is the essence of the hard bop approach, which combined tunes most listeners could readily get a feel for with lessons learned from the bebop pioneers. Arguably, no better-known example of what I’m talking about exists in the Cannonball repertoire than “Work Song.” According to the YouTube notes, the following rendition of it was performed in 1964 for the BBC series, Jazz 625. I give you…”Work Song.”

UPDATE: The YouTube clip that existed at the time this post was first published has since been taken down. Too bad, because it was exceptional, and my following comments hinged on it. As a compensation, the above link now takes you to an alternative, 1962 rendition. Sorry, no Charles Lloyd on tenor, but Cannon still burns like crazy!

Geeze, do you think those guys could play, maybe? Just listen to how they build energy. By the time Charles Lloyd is wrapping up his tenor solo, I want to stamp my feet and yell like a crazy man. Cannonball exudes a real joie de vivre. His group must have had a lot of fun playing together!

In previous posts on Sonny Stitt and Phil Woods, I’ve noted those players’ economy of motion. Bop lines like the ones they weave have no business originating from men who seem to barely move their fingers. By contrast, watch Cannonball’s fingers. They’re all over the place. So…who wants to critique his technique? Not me, that’s for sure. Besides, I’m of the philosophy, “Whatever gets the job done.” When it comes to that, Cannonball had everything it took and way, way more.

January 21, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Saxophone, Video

Cannonball Adderley: Primitivo

Let’s talk about Cannonball Adderly. Better yet, let’s get an earful of him–or should I say, of his sextet. Cannon doesn’t take the spotlight in the tune you’re about to hear, preferring to let his other band members shine.

The year is 1962, and “Primitivo” is the name of the Cannonball composition. The title aptly describes this brooding, chant-like modal piece with its droning bass and loose yet relentless rhythmic feel. Yusef Lateef plays a marvelous, haunting oboe solo–no pyrotechnics, nothing fancy, just a beautiful use of motif, with phrases ending on the same pitch–a note that falls off at the end like a sigh.

There’s plenty more to say about this tune, but I’m talking too much. Let’s listen.

Wow. Talk about mood. Talk about colorful note and scale choices. Talk about rapport between musicians. This tune has it all.

January 18, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Recording, Saxophone, Video
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