The Rhythm Comedians

I miss the Rhythm Comedians! Over two years have elapsed since our little unit disbanded. The time had come; it happens that way for many creative group efforts involving musicians. We cohere for a while, then move on to other interests, or simply move apart. So it was with the Comedians. Yet, looking back, I feel grateful for the time I spent with leader, composer, and drummer Ric Troll, bassist Dave DeVos, violinist Pat Foley, and guitarist Jeff Boughner.

Jeff passed on not many months after the band broke up. His death came as a complete shock. I had seen him not long before, on New Years Eve at a gig in downtown Grand Rapids. He looked fine then. But a few weeks later, poof. Cancer. Gone. Unbelievable. One can get another guitarist, but not another Jeff. With his creative spark and gentle, congenial personality gone, the rest of us who comprised the Rhythm Comedians are left with some wonderful memories, and, thankfully, Ric”s backlog of Rhythm Comedians jazz originals on his jukebox at his Tallmadge Mill website.

For me, the zenith of my time with the Comedians was our April Fool concert at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA). With the extraordinary Kurt Ellenberger joining us on piano, I consider that event the height of our playing. The nice turn-out of friends, family, and area jazz lovers made the evening all the more memorable. But concert aside, it was the music, the creativity, and the cameraderie that made the Rhythm Comedians one of my most rewarding musical experiences.

To all you guys–Ric, Dave, Pat, and yes, to you, Jeff–thanks.

February 4, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Life, Music, Saxophone

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

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

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

Foundations in Bebop

Bebop is to jazz what Baroque harmony is to classical music. Both became the “common practice” of their genre, foundations on which the entire body of music that was to follow would stand. Even seemingly unrelated musical expressions, such as Schoenberg’s atonalism or Miles’s modalism, were creative attempts to break free from what had gone before, and as such are vitally linked to the common practice of their genre.

This is why I’ve concentrated quite a bit on developing my bebop capabilities–not that I’ve by any means mastered bop, but I get around in it fairly well, well enough to hold my own in most settings. My philosophy has been that a good foundation in the common practice of jazz, bebop, will equip me to handle a broad range of other music besides. The premise is simple: metaphorically speaking, if I own a car that can top out at one hundred thirty miles an hour, I know it will handle seventy, no sweat.

The harmonic sophistication and technical demands of bop lead to the development of a respectable musical toolkit. The melodic language is nearly as universal as the blues; a lot of it is in fact dipped in the blues, and works with reasonable success in blues bands.

There is one challenge I face, though, that stems from saturating myself in a particular style. It’s hard to break out of the box and think in a different mode. I have to remind myself to lay back, take it easy, and not default to frenetic double-timing when I’m playing some up-tempo piece with the Grand River Blue Cats. That approach doesn”t fit, or rather, it fits when used sparingly. Ditto with smooth jazz. I am not a smooth jazz player–not that I can”t handle it, but it’s not my area of concentration. Smooth jazz is a highly nuanced music. A lot of it isn”t particularly challenging technically, but that doesn”t mean it’s simple stuff. You have to think in a smooth idiom, and in order to do that, you have to listen to a lot of the stuff. And to be honest, when I”m getting set to plunk down my fifteen bucks for a CD, I naturally gravitate to something a little more hardball. Jackie McLean. Mike Brecker. Cannonball. Eric Marienthal. That’s just my musical instinct, and maybe I need to broaden it.

But that being said, while I”m no music educator, I’ve heard it said more than once that a lot of young players are sidestepping the roots. That”s too bad. Bebop may not be what everyone listens to these days, but it remains the foundation, the source of much contemporary musical language. Studying it–really getting inside it and working at it–pays off. The best players know that”s true.

January 15, 2008 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized

Sonny Stitt

My earliest encounter with Sonny Stitt was through a live performance album that featured Sonny on alto, Miles on trumpet, and Stan Getz on tenor. That was back in my college days, and at the time, I couldn”t detect a difference between Stitt and Bird. Both had a blazing technique, and both had a phenomenal command of bebop.

Today, of course, the differences are instantly discernible. Bird was simply nonpareil. His rhythmic approach was considerably more sophisticated than Stitt”s; his vocabulary was broader; his technique, more facile; his overall conception, more inventive.

But that is hardly to diminish Stitt. I am, after all, comparing him to Charlie Parker, and if Stitt stands in the shadow of Bird, he nevertheless stands dauntingly tall. Sonny Stitt was a monster of bebop, and when I listen to him today, my admiration for his playing remains as strong as ever.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a CD called Sonny Stitt: Just In Case Your Forgot How Bad He Really Was. The title is an apt one. The venue is once again a live performance, or possibly a couple live performances, featuring such other sax notables as Richie Cole and John Handy. Stitt plays both alto and tenor, and he shines on each.

Sonny’s quicksilver technique allowed him to execute the fastest passages with precision and conviction. He loved to play in double-time, and he typically outshone most other sax players at it. On this CD, the opening tune, a blues, spotlights Sonny’s penchant for high velocity playing. Following a riff-style blues head, Stitt, the sole horn man, charges into his solo with the aggressiveness of a heavyweight boxer on meth. The mode is double-time from the get-go–inventive, impeccable, a bebop tour de force a la Stitt. You just can”t ask for better.

I hadn’t listened to Sonny for quite a while, so it’s nice to return for a reminder of “how bad he really was.” He was the baddest! He was also accessible. He”s fun to play along with, and to absorb as best I can. Not that I”ll ever sound like Sonny–not that I would ever want to; I want my own language. But when it comes to a mentor in bebop, Sonny is hard to beat and well worth emulating. The man knew a huge number of tunes, and he knew them well. He also knew his horn inside out, and he had a solid command of the building blocks of music. To listen to him analytically is to sit at the feet of a true jazz master. If you at all aspire to excellence on the saxophone, don’t–do NOT–pass him up. Listen, be amazed, learn, and grow.

January 14, 2008 by
Filed Under: Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized

Church Music

I’ve been a follower of Jesus for nearly thirty years now, and from day one, I”ve played my saxophone as one of the means God has given me to worship him. I love doing so. However, I”m afraid the word worship is fraught with preconceptions and bad theology among Christians, and over the years, I’ve concluded I can’t live up to some of the expectations that arise as a result.

What do I mean? The best way I can explain myself is to consider a common saying among Christians in regard to the role of church musicians. To hear it told, my job is to “usher people into the presence of God.” I used to believe that, but today, I don’t think it’s possible. I can”t conjure up God’s presence, and I can’t cause people to experience it. The best I can do is simply worship God myself with earnestness and passion, whether with my instrument, or my voice, or simply in listening and silence. The rest is up to God and individual hearts.

Worship is an organic, intimate experience, and it deviates from person to person. One person may be filled with joy, and exuberant praise comes naturally to him; another may be struggling with a broken heart, and tears are the truest expression of her connection with God. A few seats down sits a couple who got into a nasty argument before church, and who are too pissed off at each other to feel very good about being in church at all right now. And those examples are just for starters.

In the midst of all the variables in even a small gathering, I’m supposed to “usher people into God”s presence”? Sorry, but I”m a musician, not a magician. I can”t usher anyone anywhere. Worship is part heart attitude and part divine action. It isn”t about selecting the right tunes, or about getting everyone to clap, or raise their hands, or dance, or any of that. Worship is a condition of the heart, and nothing I do can produce it in others. The best I can do is cultivate it in myself, and express it in ways that hopefully will free up others to follow me. Beyond that, I enter into spiritual manipulation, and I”m not willing to go there. I”ve seen too much of it, and it never bears good fruit.

Do I believe the Holy Spirit shows up in the midst of worship? Absolutely. But I can’t make him do so, nor can I determine how he will do so. I do think too many churches are so preoccupied with seamless musical productions they call “praise and worship” that they don’t give the Lord much opportunity to get a word in edgewise. I wonder how differently we would approach the act of corporate worship if we actually expected God to show up–if we really believed that he might have something to communicate or accomplish that placed the focus on his performance, not ours. Perhaps we”d be less concerned with smooth segues from one tune to the next, and more concerned with listening for his voice.

On the day of Pentecost, no mention is made of a well-rehearsed praise band facilitating the event which transpired in that upper room. As a church musician, I find this thought humbling, reassuring, and freeing. It allows me to keep things simple, and not make more of myself than I am. Because it’s not about me, it’s about Jesus. I’m just a man who plays the saxophone, and who loves God, and who has been given the gift of music as a language to express my love to my Lord. Hopefully, in what I and my fellow praise team members play, you will find something that frees and inspires you to find your own voice, be it song, or laughter, or tears, or whatever it is that most genuinely expresses your connection with God in the moment.

If you’ve prepared your heart through prayer, you’ll encounter God on your own, and if not, God may choose to initiate contact anyway, just because he loves you. Worship musicians can enhance an atmosphere for such a connection, but that’s about it. The rest is up to you and God.

It’s a matter of the heart.

January 13, 2008 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Church Worship, Entertainment, Jazz, Life, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized
« Previous Page
Next Page »