barrymclark

Having navigated the waters of Beyond the Sea (pun intended) numerous times... enough to be comfortable with the changes, I went into this week's lesson ready to go with it. It was fun being able to jam with Sal on another song. Having him pick up a melody line on top of the backing chords and embellish some. His challenge to me this week is expanding the backing chords into utilizing the melody in the chord changes. That is to allow the melody to dictate to me the chords I use as opposed to the chords dictating the melody. So, my quest this week is to take the F-Dm-Gm-C7 vamp and go about choosing the F chord but the 'right' F chord in my ears so as to support the melody. Do more active counting as opposed to feeling the beat by tapping my toes. Play the single line notes and fit chords in over dead space between the melody notes and, where fitting in chords over 'dead space' pick some sub chords to push the song along. As short as this post is, the above is easily a heavy workload for me over the next week. Let's just see how it goes for me. I think the next song I want to tackle is Ev'rything I've Got. I love that song. Just dark, humorous and all over a nice bouncy, happy sounding song.

Not much to tell this week really. Sal has a gig so we didn't get together this week. I am getting more comfortable with the changes in Beyond the Sea and continuing to play Autumn Leaves. On YouTube, for Beyond the Sea, I play along with the Robbie Williams version because it has footage from Finding Nemo on it. haha.

I started this week figuring I would have to cancel the next two lessons because money is just too tight right now. I called Sal up on Monday to let him know and he insisted I come anyway. "Don't worry about the bread," he said. "It's more important to me that we keep this going." That meant more to me than anything I could put on here. That definitely signaled to me that I wasn't just a half-hourly pay. That coolness aside, we immediately dug into Beyond the Sea. That song really moves through the chords! The changes to me are a bit awkward but I am getting it slowly but surely. I think what makes this one so much fun to learn is my familiarity with it. That presents its own obstacle for me since I tend to do what I want to hear as opposed to what I should be doing for the sake of learning. I have to pay attention to when I wander off and reign it in. It still amazes me how fast he can make changes to a song. In utter awe of it. He often leaves me in the dust but quickly notices I am not with him anymore and comes back for me. He won't be there next week so I will spend the next two weeks on All of Me, Beyond the Sea and Autumn Leaves.

Alright, I am back meeting with Sal after a couple if missed weeks. We jumped right in with learning All of Me and then later in the lesson picking up on Beyond the Sea. These were songs of my request as they are in constant play in the ol' iPod. I got a bit of a jump on the lesson as I get there early. He gave me the sheet music for All of Me and let me use a teaching room not in use to get familiar while I wait. This song is another great example of how chord tones can make the lion share of the melody. Song starts in Cmaj. From there, the melody is pretty simple. It is, in Cmaj, descending root ©, fifth (G), third (E) for the words "All of me...". The use of the root, 3rd and 5th for the melody keeps up through the A section as the chords change. There are notes outside of the chord tones to be sure as well as some passing tones, but this pattern will get you most of the way there. Beyond the Sea is more of a homework assignment than All of Me as we just went over it quickly. I will have more on this song next week I am sure.

Sort of a bummer of a week on a couple of fronts. Mainly because the boy - 6 month old son- got an eye infection which babies are prone to get but also, and leastly, I had to cancel my meeting with Sal to tend to his needs. Don't regret it, just a bummer. Anyways, the upside on both counts is that the boy is better and the week off from Sal I have seen as HUGELY beneficial. How? Well, it gave me a couple of weeks to practice what I have picked up and not having more piled on every week. Also, I found an awesome tool for jamming with Autumn Leaves on line. There is a Jam Track on YouTube and you can find it . Very cool stuff. Jamming along with this I can hear better what Sal is talking about. I started with just the chord changes. Then start doing the chord subs. Then, I practiced running chord tones instead of chords. Then a mix of the two.

As posted last week, Sal and I weren't getting together this week. Still thought I would post anyways as I am still working on it regardless. This time without a get together with Sal has proven helpful too. I am able to really play around with what I have learned and beat it into my head a bit more as opposed to learning it just a little before I get a mess more crammed in there. So, it is more of the same. Autumn Leaves played all kinds of ways. Doing some minor improv stuff. Very, very minor. Nothing to get excited about. I would, say, play Autumn Leaves with every other chord rushed a half beat. For instance, I would play the Amin on time, but play D7 a half beat early. Gmaj on time then Cmaj early and so on. Gives it a neat groove. From there, I would tool around with the 'vocal melody' part. Making it have as many notes as syllables at first. Then adding a flavorful extra note here and there. Nothing crazy. Again, I would, outside of the 'vocal melody' part, play single note stuff. Playing just the 3's. Playing just the 5's. Playing just 5's over the Amin and D7 then just 3's over the Gmaj and Cmaj. Do that in a few octaves. Then I would find ways to 'dress up' the boring single notes. A quick and easy way I found to add class to a note all by its lonesome is a simple slide up from a half step down nice and quick like. For the sake of argument, over the Amin, the third is a C. Slide up to the C from B. Don't linger on B or it just sounds like you screwed up. Other than that, I finished learning the basics of Autumn Leaves. I have found some fun in going on YouTube and playing along with other people's versions of it. This morning, it was Nat King Cole's turn! I have been discussing with a friend over the past few weeks of the rather Zen nature of learning jazz. He sent me this quote from Bill Evans' liner notes in Kind of Blue: "There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful of reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording. As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with sure reference to the primary conception. Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a take." Thanks again, Ben!

Alrighty. Week 5 was great, but I will get to that. I figure I should put more in detail what I am doing with what Sal teaches me for those interested so..... here goes. Since my week 4 meeting with Sal, I have been using Autumn Leaves as my playground a bit as I am more familiar with it and using Georgia on my mind as more theoretical study. Which is proving just as helpful. On Autumn Leaves, I have experiemented a bit on that one like I mentioned. I would play it straight the way I have it in front of me. I do that most of the time. Just getting more familiar. Then, I went through and changed all the V7 chords with the bII7 chords. Didn't always sound great, but I just didn't do it again if it didn't work against the melody for me. I also substituted the 7b9 chords with it's dim7 and other 7b9 cousins (Still workin on this one). I also dropped the chords out and just played the 3rds of each chord in various places about the neck. I am now adding the 5th's of each chord into the equation. For example, after the walk up from Emin, I play C and E over where Amin is then F# and A over D7 and so on. I listen to how each note, where ever it is I play it, works in the song as I go. If I like something but it doesn't seem to resolve to the next chord the way I want, then I just keep it in my back pocket until another opportunity comes along where it might fit better in my ears. Also doing this with the chord substitution previously. Starts pretty randomly, but a method begins to come of the chaos. On Georgia on my Mind, I merely went through the sheet music and wrote in pencil above the chord names the subs. I also went through the vocal melody and put down what interval the note was of the chord it was being sung over. Pretty much all I did with that song. Just a study in spelling the chords. Sal commented on my standards book. He really digs it. For those interested, it is called Jazz Standards and is by Budget Books. Here is the book on Amazon. Great price. This week, we jammed a bit on Autumn Leaves. That was definitely cool. I am getting less nervous playing in front of him. That is a progress in its own right as far as I am concerned. We also played around with chord tones and how they make up the vast majority of popular melodies. All of Me and the Cradle Song and all that. Very interesting. Explored chord tones over Autumn Leaves: took the root, 3rd and 5th of the chords and played in various orders. Was a lot of fun. There won't be a Week 6. He has a gig. So... I have two weeks to work on what we have done up to this point.

This one had hardly any blur to it at all. That was nice. Still a boatload more info than I can take in for a session, but still very productive. Some of it was reinforcing what I knew already but tons of new info and things I can do for study and practice. Lots of sub work. Dim7/7b9 and I/III sub'ing. We used Georgia on my Mind for working lead melody into chords and sub practicing. At the end of it, I as looking at his Super 400. He has owned it since about '78 and, from what I saw, it is a '66 made in Kalamazoo. When we got talking about used market values, I mentioned that models like his easily go for over 10k and run around 15k to 20k. He said, "I'd drop it in a heartbeat if someone offered me that kind of money for it. The guitar isn't as important as the player. There is this kid in his 20's and he plays on a $300 Ibanez and he sounds incredible." In a nutshell, the old adage that it's a poor workman who blames his tools (Thanks for the adage, Ben). Of course, I knew this to be true already that a top quality guitar in the hands of a novice will always sound rudimentary and cheap, beat up, old jazz box in the hands of a master will make it sing. Sorry for the late entry. I came home to a baby with a fever last night so the wife and I were taken up with caring for him. He is fine now. Just needed a day. So, off to a week of practice.

Today still had a touch of that blur that I have experienced in previous weeks, but there was notably less of it and the lesson was even more focused than it was last week. We started on Autumn Leaves where we left off last week. It was in this that he introduced me to tritone subs. "You can actually use those things?" Yep. Made a different animal of Autumn Leaves right there on the fly. Just amazing. It was this week that really drove home to the both of us just how musically illiterate I am. No worries, it just better defined the path we need to take. Besides Autumn Leaves and the quick tritone lesson, there were chromatic scales and their common usage between chord tones. Backtracking (looking way ahead so you can change the chording coming up to resolve to a certain chord) which involved more lesson in tritone subs. Quick brief on turnarounds and more Jazz Philosophy 101. Expanding on last week's statement about learning it so you can forget about it, it is even more clear today what he meant: like you don't have to think about the words and letters that make up the words that you make your sentence out of, you want to get where you don't have to pay much mind to the chords and notes you choose. You just want to get your point across. Another philosophical point: You are going to make mistakes, the trick is to spin the lemon (mistake) into lemonade (something great). For that you need sugar (knowledge) and water (experience). Without it, you still just have a lemon (mistake). Like a good politician, you, in the end, can turn something wrong into something that sounds right... even if it is wrong because you did it and got out of it with conviction. This week I am to practice the things mentioned above and start on Georgia on my Mind.

This one was less of a blur, but still a blur. It all made sense, but the time I was there seemed to shoot by just wayyyyy too fast. This time, it was more focused as well. We started and ended on Autumn Leaves. To a powerchord heaving, heavy-metal expatriate, this was just mind blowing. A simple thing to you long time jazzers, but the door into a new world for me. Learned about the Jazz or Real Harmonic minor where I had only met the regular harmonic minor in passing at a bar once in Florida. Can't remember the name of the place. Anyways... it was just something. What is to be accomplished more immediately with Autumn Leaves in these lessons for me is: 1: Learn the progression and melody first and foremost (of course) 2: Understand how the melody and progression work together. 3: Understand how a chord may seem to suggest one scale but the melody will say another. 4. Forget about 1 through 3 as it is all bullshit (basically his statement), have fun and make it sound good to you. Worry about the hows and whats of it later. haha. Having just gotten back home, I am comfortable up through E rhm (real harmonic minor) so far. From there, I keep finding myself wandering off the written song instead of doing what is there. I am skipping to step 4 too fast. Possibly cause I have been playing for hours now since the beginning of my lesson. Pick up there tomorrow where I started to wander.

What a rush! I will admit, it was kind of a blur. Even with all the info he was throwing my way, somehow, it was sticking. It was things I knew, but now they were starting to make sense as I was hearing these theories in play as opposed to having them as book learnt knowledge. Although I was clearly the lesser of the two people in that little studio, I definitely felt good leaving. I brought my Gibson J-55 to jam along with him and his Super 400. That is a well worn guitar. Very cool. As exercises, he wants me to practice moving in thirds in a chord. Then moving in thirds in modes. As well, commit a major and relative minor pentatonic scale to memory. Finally, ... the ubiquitous Autumn Leaves which I am excited to learn. I am to start getting a feel for that song and we will work on that a bit next week. Day 1 of many under my belt!

Tomorrow is my first day learning from Sal. I know very little will happen tomorrow as I imagine it will be more of an orientation of sorts. Him getting a feel for what it is I am looking to get out of it and figuring out how best to get to that point. All the same, I am absolutely pumped about the experience I am about to have learning from a person I consider to be a true master of his craft.