Would you like to be able to play jazz well? Have you wondered what it would take to be able to improvise with color, inventiveness, and freedom? Perhaps you”ve got some basic jazz ability, and you”d like to take it to the next level?\r\n\r\nAfter giving the matter some thought, I”ve decided to create an e-book on jazz improvisation. The initial thrust will be geared toward the needs of beginning improvisers. It will cover such things as\r\n* basic theory: essential scales, modes, and chords\r\n* the hows and whys of practicing your instrument\r\n* adopting a jazz style versus a classical approach\r\n* circle of fifths\r\n* the blues\r\n* rhythm changes\r\n* solo memorization\r\n* and more\r\n\r\nMost lessons will give you a mix of theory and practice material. One of my focuses will be to help you take an analytical approach to your practice that will help you create your own exercises, and hence, your own style.\r\n\r\nIf you”ve wondered how to go about connecting what you”ve already learned on your instrument to the art and discipline of jazz, consider this your first heads up. And–ahem–stay tuned. I”ll keep you posted as this project progresses from concept and moves toward implementation.

It looks like the first snow of the year is on the way for Michigan. A cold arctic blast is slated to move in over the weekend and interact with the much warmer waters of the Great Lakes for a good round of lake effect snow. Ugh. Looks like I got out of Dodge just in time.\r\n\r\nI”m down in Branson, visiting my friend Lisa and enjoying a beautiful, sunny day from the elegant comfort of my lodgings at the Stonebridge Village resort. Today is supposed to be in the sixties, and tomorrow will scrape up into the seventies. I couldn”t ask for a better time to enjoy autumn in the Ozarks with Lisa, aka “Stormy”–she”s a weather buff like me. That makes two people for whom talking about the weather goes deeper than just the superficial.\r\n\r\nSo, friends and family in Michigan, I”m afraid I”ll have to skip our state”s prelude to winter. But you all have fun, hear? Enjoy the snow and cold while I sit here in front of the fireplace and snicker, har, har, har!

The Coltrane quartet was known for its intensity, and this film clip of “My Favorite Things” is a prime example. The YouTube writeup indicates that it was filmed in 1965 in Belgium, and attributes it to a DVD titled The World According to Coltrane.\r\n\r\nWith as much going on as there is in this video, I”m not going to try to analyze it. The piece is a tour de force of modal playing, and it”s enough to simply listen. However, I can”t help but notice Coltrane”s command of trills. It”s hard to connect trilled notes to trilled notes, but Trane does it effortlessly.

You can fumble the chord changes in a solo, hit a host of clinkers, and still come up sounding brilliant if you swing. It”s true. That elusive, hard-to-define concept called “swing” is the heart and soul of jazz. Master it and you”ll play with conviction; miss it and you can hit all the right notes and still sound wrong.\r\n\r\nSo what”s the key to developing a solid, personal sense of swing? Practice. Your playing, particularly your improvised solos, will never swing harder on the bandstand than it does in the woodshed. So it behooves you to incorporate a swing style into your practice sessions.\r\n\r\nDoing so is not hard. Granted, swing is about more than just a way of engineering rhythms; nevertheless, you can approach your scales and arpeggios in a way that accents the offbeats and instills a sense of syncopation in your thinking, and therefore your playing.\r\n\r\nHere”s is one way to accomplish that: assuming you”re practicing your scales and arpeggios in eight notes, slur the upbeats into the downbeats. For instance, let”s say you”re playing a C major bebop scale (C, D, E, F, G, G#, A, B, C) in eight notes. A classical approach would be to slur C into D, E into F, G into G#, and so forth. But in order to make the scale swing, you”ve got to switch the accents around. You want to begin by articulating C. But then you also tongue D and slur it into E, F into G, G# into A, and so on. In other words, you”re tonguing the upbeats, not the downbeats.\r\n\r\nThis approach won”t seem natural at first. You”ll have to work at it a bit. But after a while, it will become ingrained, and you”ll love what it does for your jazz concept. So stick with it. Apply it to all your scales, arpeggios, intervals, and licks.\r\n\r\nAnd don”t forget to listen to the masters. Phil Woods is a perfect example. They don”t swing any heavier than Phil. Give guys and gals like him a listen, and let their approach guide you into your personal swing style.

Besides serving as the administrator for the renowned online forum for storm chasers, Stormtrack, Tim Vasquez operates Weather Graphics, a resource for meteorologists, students, chasers, and weather enthusiasts.\r\n\r\nI own most of Tim”s books, and I just recently purchased one of his software products. Forecast Laboratory is an apt name for what amounts to an educational game designed to help storm chasers hone their forecasting skills.\r\n\r\nMarshalling atmospheric maps, soundings, and satellite and radar imagery for 488 actual weather days from past years, Forecast Laboratory gives you the basic resources you need to determine whether and where to head out for wild weather. To be exact, you get\r\n* 15,400 surface mesoanalysis charts\r\n* 11,200 radar images\r\n* 8,800 soundings\r\n* 4,900 upper air charts (850, 700, 500, 300, and 200 millibars)\r\n* 3,140 high-resolution satellite images\r\n\r\nBeginning at 1200 UTC, you peruse the full ensemble of charts, then choose from one of twelve cities in the southern and northern plains as a starting point for your chasemobile. From there, you continue to consult the hourly surface charts, radar, and satellite to determine where to move your vehicle. You can move it no more than fifty miles per model run, so you need to make your decisions wisely. Since the software unfolds random scenarios that range from null days and blue-sky busts, to a single tornadic storm in the entire plains, to full-fledged tornado outbreaks, your best choice could involve anything from lots of driving to staying home and playing cards.\r\n\r\nAs the chase progresses, assuming there are storms to be had, you begin to receive LSRs from within your area, and at 01 UTC, you get a final report that tells whether you”ve busted or witnessed your share of severe weather, and perhaps photographed tornadoes. \r\n\r\nI”ve played with this software enough to enjoy it, learn from it, and become acquainted with its pros and cons. Here are a few observations:\r\n\r\nLacking such common indices as CAPE, CINH, SRH, sigtors, 0-6k shear, and so forth, Forecast Lab”s stripped-down approach forces you to learn and extrapolate from just the essentials. That”s not at all a bad thing! I find myself paying attention to things I had overlooked before, and to thinking about their implications for the weather six to eight hours from now.\r\n\r\nA quick glance at the list of features will show you that you get far more surface maps than anything else. From 850 mbs up, the 1200 UTC run is the only run provided. Obviously, that”s not realistic; RUC updates all of those maps hourly, not just the surface map. I”d like to see more upper air maps. However, I”ve found that what is available is still usually enough information to work with.\r\n\r\nThe program is more generous with radar and satellite info, but you can”t count on having them. Sometimes the remote imaging drops in and drops out from run to run–you just never know.\r\n\r\nAlso, the “chase karma” feature appears to have a bug that makes it a bit quirky. The feature is supposed to give you a sense of how you”re doing, but I”ve found that I”m better off just ignoring it.\r\n\r\nIn all, Forecast Laboratory leaves some room for improvement. But that being said, Tim Vasquez has hit on a great concept. There”s nothing else like it that I”m aware of. Just as it stands, it”s a lot of fun, and a superb way to make use of the off-season by sharpening your forecasting abilities. You get to test your knowledge and instincts in real-life setups and then see the results, and you have the luxury of busting–an inescapable part of a storm chaser”s “tuition”–without wasting time and gas.\r\n\r\nIf you”re new to storm chasing and haven”t familiarized yourself with the fundamentals of severe weather forecasting, do your reading before you tackle Forecast Laboratory. If you already have an essential grasp of forecasting, this software can help you tighten the screws.\r\n\r\nRecommended.

Speaking of Francesca Amari, here”s a review of her new CD on MLive.com. It includes an audio clip of “Good Morning, Heartache,” a call-and-response vocal/sax duet between Francesca and me.

Quick, now: what”s the most universally useful scale in jazz?\r\n\r\nIf you answered the major scale, I beg to differ. The major pentatonic covers more improvising situations than any other scale I can think of. Whether you”re playing blues, jazz, or pop, the pentatonic scale allows even fairly new improvisers to sound reasonably convincing, if not inspired.\r\n\r\nRemove the fourth and seventh degrees of a major scale (F and B in the key of C major) and you”ve got a pentatonic scale. Minus the tone that is likeliest to create harmonic problems, the fourth scale degree, what you”re left with is a nice, vanilla scale that you can play over pretty much any diatonic chord with impunity.\r\n\r\nBeginning improvisers seem to gravitate instinctively to the pentatonic scale. It works equally well with major or relative minor keys. And with its two gaps of a minor third, the scale has a built-in angularity that stands out once you start working in interval sequences and digital patterns. The pentatonic gets really interesting when you use it in “outside” playing. But that”s a separate discussion. For starters, let”s take a quick look at one simple, common application of the pentatonic scale: the blues.\r\n\r\nYou can cover a basic, major blues using two pentatonic scales. For that matter, just one will do, but both are handy and add different colors. Let”s say you”re playing a blues in the key of F major. You can use an F pentatonic (F,G,A,C,D) for the entire twelve bars for a nice, down-home kind of sound. Of course, the blues needs a bit of grit and soul to it, so at some point, you”re going to want to funkify your approach. That”s when you jump your pentatonic scale up a minor third to Ab (Ab,Bb,C,Eb,F). You”re still playing an F major blues, but you”re using a different set of notes, including one “blues note,” the flat third. By playing Ab against an F major chord, you”re creating a harmonic clash. But it works perfectly in the blues.\r\n\r\nYou can alternate the two pentatonic scales as much as you wish in the blues. You have plenty more options as well, but learn these first, because they”ll help you form a foundation for other, more advanced choices you”ll make as an improviser.\r\n\r\nHere are the pentatonic scales to learn in a few common major blues keys:\r\n\r\nKey of C: C and Eb pentatonic.\r\nKey of F: F and Ab.\r\nKey of Bb: Bb and Db.\r\nKey of Eb: Eb and F#.\r\n\r\nYou can figure out the rest from there; the second scale is always a minor third up from the first scale. Have fun experimenting!

If there”s anything to the notion of a second, brief storm chasing season in the fall, now would be a good time for that season to show up. So far I”m not seeing it. Oh, there have been some tantalizing displays on the long-range models, but they”ve had a way of disappointing when push has come to shove.\r\n\r\nLast year was a different story. On October 18, a powerful system generated a widespread outbreak across the Great Lakes and the South. Sixty-seven tornadoes raked eight states, from the Florida panhandle to extreme northern lower Michigan near the Mackinac Bridge. It was one heck of an event. Bill Oosterbaan and I tracked a beautiful classic supercell from its inception in north central Indiana. It displayed a vigorous wall cloud and a deep clear slot that wrapped nicely around the circulation. A large funnel descended close to the ground maybe three quarters of a mile away. The thing wanted to tornado so bad it was practically peeing its pants, but we never could verify ground-level circulation. Not far to our north, though, the town of Nappanee sustained EF3 damage from another storm. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. Other towns in the outbreak area were not so fortunate. Two died in Williamston, Michigan, as an intense, long-lived tornadic supercell moved north from the border to the Saginaw Bay. Four lives in all were lost in our state.\r\n\r\nThat was one year ago today. This year is a much different story. As I write, the sky is a crisp, moistureless blue and the temps are in the fifties. Not much here to gladden the heart of a storm chaser. Not much in the near future, either.\r\n\r\nBut that can still change. If I learned anything from the Van Wert, Ohio, tornado some years ago, it”s to never write off possibilities just because of the lateness of the year. Not until the snows fly.\r\n\r\nSecond season? I”m not holding my breath. But I am keeping my eyes open. You just never know.

If you missed Francesca Amari”s breakout gig last Tuesday at One Trick Pony for her new CD, Better Days, you missed a standout evening. As her horn sideman, I admit I”m biased, but if you were to sample the sizable crowd, I think you”d get a similar consensus.\r\n\r\nThe two-hour show consisted of a mix of jazz standards, show tunes, pop, and special numbers with Francesca and some of her friends, including the fantastic Boogie Woogie Babies.\r\n\r\nFrancesca”s drumless backup combo included Wright McCargar on keyboards, Dave DeVos on bass, and me on sax. But Francesca was the centerpiece. Simply put, she”s more than a superb vocalist–she”s a delightful and engaging performer, both personable and professional. From my standpoint as a horn man, she”s fun and easy to work with, respecting her musicians and offering room for creativity.\r\n\r\nDave, Wright, and I got our chance to shine instrumentally on Horace Silver”s “Song for My Father.” Wright set a slower tempo than I”m used to, and the result was a moody, reflective feeling that I loved, and that inspired me to take a different approach to my solo.\r\n\r\nFrancesca and I teamed up on her vocal/sax arrangement of “Good Morning, Heartache,” which featured just the two of us, sans accompaniment, doing the same call-and-response rendition that we did on her CD. We joined forces again, this time with Dave and Wright, on a vocal/sax showcase version of “My Funny Valentine.”\r\n\r\nI love the small combo format, and I particularly enjoyed Tuesday evening. From what I”ve heard, so did the folks at One Trick Pony. Look for further announcements. We may be back.