Sunset Photos and Sax Licks

We finally got a break in the gray skies and snows. Today’s morning sun rose into a flawless sky, and sunshine predominated all day long, along with warmer–which, at thirty-two degrees, is not to say warm, but an improvement on what we’ve had–temperatures.

I grabbed my saxophone and my camera and headed out to Grand Ledge this afternoon, and on the way out there, I grabbed my first workout in months. I haven’t been in the gym since last October, I’ve been feeling the lack of exercise, and I finally decided the time had come to get back into my workouts. So I dropped in at a modest but great little weight lifting gym out by Lake Odessa and ran through a quick, twenty-minute break-in routine. One set per movement is enough; I’ll be feeling the pain Monday when it comes time for my next bout in the gym.

Anyway…I took a number of photos out near Grand Ledge. The ones I liked best were of an old, deserted farmstead at sunset. Thought I’d share a couple with you.

Old Shed at Sundown

Old Shed at Sundown

The Sun Sinks Lower

The Sun Sinks Lower

Afterwards, I found a place to park my car and practice my saxophone. It has been a while since I’ve spent time on my horn. I’ve been writing a book and have been singularly focused on that, and I need to exercise a little balance, tend to other things that are also important. Staying on top of my sax is right up there at the top. It felt good to limber up my fingers and run through some Charlie Parker licks.

It takes discipline to be a good jazz musician. Licks and ideas you think you own for keeps can desert you after a while if you don’t practice consistently. Fortunately, I’d only been away from my axe for a bit, not long enough to damage me. But it always feels good when I pick it back up.

January 31, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Photography, Saxophone, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Lake Michigan Ice Formations

Ice Formations Along the Coastline

Ice Formations Along the Coastline

These past few days have been busy ones, but yesterday I took time to head out to Lake Michigan with my friend and fellow storm chaser Kurt Hulst to photograph the ice formations. They’re spectacular. If you’ve never heard of them, let alone seen them, I can assure you that you’re missing something. Ice forms all along the Great Lakes shores, but I have a hunch that the formations along the west coast of Lake Michigan are particularly scenic for the same reason that the sand dunes are: they’re a product of the prevailing winds that blow across the lake, whipping waves and spray across vast stretches to create, layer by layer, fantastic frozen sculptures of  ice, sand, and snow. A more austere landscape you can’t hope to find this side of the Arctic Circle–otherworldly, almost alien in its frigid beauty.

I’m not going to write much about the ice formations here because I want to save my creative juices for my next installment on the WaterlandLiving blog this Friday. But I am going to share a few images to give you a taste of one of the upsides of winter in Michigan. And be sure to check out Kurt’s site, too; he’s a great photographer, and I’m sure he’ll have some very cool (pun totally intended) shots of his own on display.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse

Lighthouse, Holland State Park

Lighthouse, Holland State Park

Kurt Out On the Ice

Kurt Out On the Ice

Crack in the Ice

Crack in the Ice

Lake Ice

Lake Ice

January 28, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Life, Nature, Photography, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , ,

Significant Tornadoes, by Tom Grazulis

Man, what a busy day it has been! It’s amazing how occupied I can be without hardly budging from my La-Z-Boy couch. But then, my couch is as much my office as it is a piece of living room furniture. More, for that matter. With my computer keyboard in my lap and my screen parked on a stool to my left, here is where I earn most of my living as a freelance writer.

I’ve spent most of my day hammering out copy for a couple clients. I just finished a project a short while ago. I still have a chewy assignment that I haven’t even begun yet, but that can wait till tomorrow. This weekend will be a busy one, but in this tough economy, it’s great to have the work, and I can say in all honesty and with much gratitude that I have some truly wonderful clients. I am richly blessed, not just with consistent work doing what I love to do, but also with good relationships with people who, besides clients, are friends and brothers in Christ.

But the working day for me is over, and I am now turning my focus to other things. In my spare time, I’m acquainting myself with cPanel and–now that I can actually access the code–revamping the metatags for my Stormhorn.com website. The switchover from GoDaddy to Tablox as a web host, and from b2evolution to WordPress for blog software, has freed me up to take a more hands-on approach to my website and blog, and the next phase of the learning curve for this non-techie has begun.

And that’s just what’s happening on the sidelines. Today I went to the Hastings Public Library and picked up the copy I had requested of Significant Tornadoes, 1680-1981, by Tom Grazulis. It’s a formidable volume–the authoritative, exhaustive record of virtually every significant tornado in United States history that can be traced. Grazulis’s work is nothing short of remarkable, a real labor of love, and the result is a book whose poundage alone is enough to impress. This is one you want to load on a pack mule if you plan on taking it anywhere, but the information it contains is priceless.

And I need that information because I’ve been working on a book on the 1965 Palm Sunday tornadoes. I’ll tell you more about that some other time, but if you’ve followed this blog for a while, then you know that the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak has been a recurrent theme. There is a reason for that, and the time has finally arrived for me to do something about it. I wrote the prologue a couple months ago, and now, after a bit of a delay, I’ve written about two-thirds of the first chapter. I expect to have it completed within the week, and then it’s on to the next phase, which will consist of a fair amount of research.

And that’s enough on that topic. I’ve done enough writing for the day, and my bowl of cottage cheese and mug of abbey ale are demanding my attention.

January 23, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Life, Music, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Michigan in January: Cold Snap and Hot Music

The single-digit temperatures are here at last, and it looks like they’ll be staying for a few days.

Tonight the mercury is supposed to dip down to ten below zero. That, my friends, is cold. Tomorrow, the projected high–and we”re using that word, high, loosely here–is seven degrees. Think twice before wearing your thong swimsuit to the beach. Particularly if you’re a guy. (For that matter, if you’re a guy, think twice about it any time of year; better still, just don”t do it.)

On Friday, we see the kind of warming trend that puts a smile on the faces of Michiganders everywhere as the temperatures skyrocket up to nine degrees. And by Saturday, we”re feeling downright tropical at a steamy twenty degrees.

This is most assuredly January in Michigan. It”s the month of the Wolf Moon, an apt name if ever there was one. At night, as the temperatures plummet and the stars gleam like ice chips in the arctic sky, you can hear the howls echoing eerily across the frozen lakes. It”s a haunting, wild sound that you never forget, emanating from ice fishermen who are freezing their butts off. What those guys are doing out there in temperatures like these is beyond me.

nOkay, so enough about cold weather. How about a word on a hot CD? My friend Ed Englerth‘s album Restless Ghost has been nominated for a Jammie Award. The Jammies are the regional equivalent of the Grammies–not as prestigious, to be sure, but not lacking in glamor and promotional value. It would be great if Ed scored, particularly since I played on a number of songs on the CD. It really is a great album, and Ed is a terrific songwriter and lyricist who deserves much wider recognition.

January 14, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Life, Music, Recording, Weather

Francesca Amari and Friends Valentine’s Gig at One Trick Pony

Laaayyy-deez and Gen’lmen!!!

Wives, Husbands, and Sweethearts!!!

Announcing the one and only, the fabulous…FRANCESCA AMARI and her band of musical pranksters…

…in a Valentine”s Day extravaganza of love songs, from the tender, to the sultry, to the humorous–all delivered with the spark, presence, and sensitive musicality of Francesca. I’ll be backing her up on the alto sax, along with Dave DeVos on bass and Dave Molinari on keyboards.

The place is One Trick Pony at 136 East Fulton in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. It”s going to be a memorable evening of music at a very nice venue. Francesca is a wonderful entertainer, and the rest of us don”t suck mud. So treat yourself and your special someone to a truly enjoyable Valentine”s date filled with great music and good times.

The show starts at 8:00 p.m. Do join us.

January 7, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Event, Jazz, Music, Saxophone

Using Substitute Dominants

Sooner or later, if you haven’t done so already as a jazz improviser, you”re going to want to broaden your harmonic palette with substitute dominant chords.

Say that term, substitute dominant, and what immediately springs to mind for most musicians is what is also refer to as a tritone substitute, so called because the root is a diminished fifth–a tritone–away from the root of the dominant seventh chord in any given key. For instance, let’s say you’re in the key of C major. The dominant of C is G7. In traditional theory, the G7 is a major/minor seventh chord.

If you drop down a tritone from the G7 and build another major/minor seventh chord, you wind up with a Db7. That is your tritone substitute, the most commonly used substitute dominant.

Note that the Db7 is just a half-step above your tonic chord, C major. Now, you could use a a Db Mixolydian mode with it. But another good choice would be a Db Lydian flat seventh scale–i.e. Db, Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb, Cb, and Db octave. Note that, as is so often the case, a single note makes all the difference. In this case, simply raising the fourth scale degree of the Db Mixolydian mode a half-step, from Gb to G, gives you the Lydian flat seventh scale.

Now, here’s where things get particularly interesting: let’s say you want to inject a little color with an altered dominant, a G+7(#9). That chord immediately suggests that you”ll use a diminished whole tone scale. Guess what? The diminished whole tone scale uses the same notes as the Lydian flat seventh scale; the only difference is, it starts on the G instead of the Db. So in this case, you can use the same scale for either the altered dominant or the substitute dominant! Nice, eh?

One of the earmarks of the tritone substitute is that it flipflops the third and the seventh, which are critical tones in the function of the dominant sound. The flat seventh of the V7 chord is the third of the bII7 chord, and vice-versa. This means that no matter which chord you use, dominant or substitute dominant, the tritone interval between the third and the fifth remains, with all its tension that demands resolution to the tonic chord.

Using the substitute dominant in a ii-V7-I progression gives you ii-bII7-I. You can also alternate the dom/subdom sound on your journey toward the I, thus: V7-bII7-I.

By the way, the tritone substitute is nothing new. In Bach”s day, it was called a Neopolitan chord. Jazz is deeply rooted in European harmony; the genius behind it lies, in part, in how African American musicians fused that harmony with tonal colors and rhythmic approaches that no Western musician would have dreamed of. Jazz truly is a distinctly American art form.

January 5, 2009 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone

Jazz Improvisation E-Book: Another Update

Writing an e-book on jazz improv is definitely a challenge. The going is slow, since I’m still faced with the exigencies of life and the need to make a living. That being said, though, I am making progress.

In the process of writing, I find myself necessarily considering my approach. Any number of ways exist to accomplish the same end in jazz. A whopping amount of educational material also exists that says pretty much the same thing. After all, this isn’t a new topic, and I”m hardly the first person to write about it. How, then, can I offer value–something not different merely for the sake of being different, but something whose distinctions can help budding improvisers to better grasp at least some of the essentials of jazz craftsmanship?

As a street-level, self-appointed educator rather than a degreed, college-level didact, I myself am learning by doing, and my first lesson has been: start simple. I can’t possibly cover all there is to know about jazz improvisation in one book; such a book would have no end, and besides, I myself have still got plenty to learn. So I”ll probably write several books. This first effort will be for beginning improvisers. Note that I didn’t say beginning musicians. I”m assuming that anyone with an interest in improvisation already knows the basics of music theory, and while I do cover some of those basics, readers should already understand how a major scale is built, and what the church modes are, and what intervals are, and triads, and seventh chords, and so forth. Such things comprise the building blocks of all Western music; my interest is to help aspiring jazz instrumentalists assemble them in a way that fits the overall jazz genre.

In my approach, I hope to help players connect their inner ear with technical finesse, so that technique and the ability to “hear” develop together. We want to be able to not only conceive cool lines, but also to “feel” them in every key, even the weird keys such as concert E, B, or F#.

At the moment, chapter four is underway. It covers the unaltered dominant seventh chord and the Mixolydian mode. No need to say more, other than, stay tuned.

December 30, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Saxophone

Prost! In Praise of the Post-Chase, Post-Gig Beer

I am sitting in my La-Z-Boy couch partaking of a mug of Russian imperial stout. Outside, the winter wind blows strong, but that simply accentuates the pleasure I find with each rich, roast-malty mouthful. Stout is a winter beer, Russian imperial stout is the king of stouts, and “The Czar” by Avery is an exceptional Russian imperial stout. What more could a man ask for, in the way of simple delights, than to recline in comfort in a warm, lamplit room and fill his senses with a heady beer steeped in tradition?

What has beer got to do with storm chasing or jazz saxophone? Everything when you”re a beer connoisseur. Along with a good steak, a mugful of frothy brew is the only way to cap off a successful storm chase. And after playing a great gig, there”s nothing like a superb microbrew–a malty Scotch ale or a citrusy, Cascade-hoppy IPA–to complete the evening. Beer is the drink of celebration for storm chasers and musicians, and a good beer is well worth celebrating in its own right.

This Avery”s here is potent stuff. At 10.77 percent ABV, it packs a definite alcoholic warmth, not to mention quite a wallop, though not enough to write my affecting–er, that is, affect my writing.

“The Czar Russian Imperial Stout” received top commendation by Stacey, co-owner with her husband of Pauly”s in Lowell, Michigan. Stacey is one of two people I know whose opinions in the area of beer have clout with me. (The other person is my best friend, Dewey). A few months ago, Stacey underwent training as a beer sommelier, and prior to that, she educated her palate via something like twelve or thirteen years of homebrewing. The woman knows her beer.

Tonight, inspired by renowned beer authority Charles Papazian expounding, in his writings, on a mug of Russian imperial stout, I moseyed into Pauly”s and asked Stacey to recommend a good RIS. She pointed me toward two, but the Avery”s was clearly her favorite, so I went with that. I”m not disappointed. “The Czar” is truly fit for an emperor, royalty in a 22 ounce bottle. At around $11.00, it”s a very pricey bottle, but trust me, this beer is worth it.

My mug is now empty, but my heart is full. I wax eloquent, expanded and uplifted by this fine, tar-black stout.

Beer. If you”ve transcended the mass-produced American pilsners, if your universe has expanded beyond Millers, then chances are that little four-letter word speaks volumes to you, as it does to me.

At the day’s end, after filming tornadoes in Kansas, you cap off your chase with a beer. When the gig is over, after four hours of playing your butt off, you reach for a cold one. Hopefully it’ll also be a good one, a fine ale, lager, or lambic worthy of its title. Given the often limited selection anywhere but in larger cities, you can’t go wrong with a Stella Artois. But whatever your choice may be, if your taste buds have led you off the beaten path of the big American brewers into adventure…I lift my glass to you.

Prost!

December 29, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Life

Bracketing: Changing Tones for Jazz Musicians

I’ve heard the technique referred to as “bracketing,” but it’s really just the good, old-fashioned Baroque musical ornamentation known as “changing tones” applied to a jazz solo. Whatever you call it, you can add interest and lyricism to your improvisations when you precede chord tones and target notes with both an upper and lower neighbor.

Three levels of chromaticism exist with the bracketing technique: diatonic, chromatic lower (or, conceivably but uncommonly, upper) neighbor, and dual chromatic upper and lower neighbors.

Play a C7 arpeggio, thus: C, E, G, Bb. Take it slow so you can hear the chord outline.

Now, playing each grouping of three as a triplet, surround each note of the C7 with its…

  1. 1. Diatonic neighbors (based on the C Mixolydian mode): D-Bb-C, F-D-E, A-F-G, C-A-Bb, D-Bb-C.
  2. 2. Diatonic upper and chromatic lower neighbors: D-B-C, F-D#-E, A-F#-G, C-A-Bb, D-B-C.
  3. 3. Chromatic upper and lower neighbors: Db-B-C, F-D#-E, Ab-F#-G, Cb-A-Bb, Db-B-C.

The latter two approaches are relatively common in the bebop language. Obviously, you can bracket any quality of chord or any scale tone. Devise bracketing exercises that will take you through all twelve keys and you’ll be well on your way to real fluency as a soloist.

December 28, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone

Phrygian Dominant Licks: Capturing the Essence of Minor Bebop

The harmonic minor scale was the first scale I learned to apply in a minor jazz setting over an altered dominant chord. No doubt that was because it was the easiest, but it also seemed to me to be the most consistent with the vocabulary of bebop a la Charlie Parker. Just as a given major scale generates the appropriate Mixolydian mode for the dominant of its key, so a harmonic minor scale produces a scale that works well with its dominant. Known as the Phrygian dominant (aka Jewish scale, Gypsy scale, or Spanish scale), this scale works beautifully with V7b9 chords. With its lowered sixth, and with the minor third interval between its lowered second and major third, it possesses an evocative, Eastern quality that makes me think of belly dancers and snake charmers.

The scale you’re likeliest to learn as the first choice for V7b9 chords is the half/whole diminished. It’s certainly a time-saver, as you need learn only three of this symmetrical scale in order to know all twelve. But the Phrygian dominant has an exotic beauty to it that the diminished scale doesn’t quite capture, and a built-in ease of use rooted in its relationship to the parent minor key.

phrygiandominantexcercises
In a previous post, I offered a couple of written exercises on major triad couplets. Now, in the spirit of Bird, here are three licks utilizing the A Phrygian dominant scale. The first and third one resolve to the tonic chord of D minor; the second is just a straight A7b9 lick, but you can still resolve it to the D minor–it just waits longer to define that chord.

As always, memorize each exercise in all twelve keys. And have fun!

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed that, in the third exercise, I didn’t include a Bb in the key signature. Please mentally insert it so you’re playing in the key of D minor and the ninth of the A7 chord is flatted.]

December 15, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Jazz, Music, Saxophone
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