Author Archive
Reading through the thread about incorporating/creating dissonance in jazz improvisation in Café Saxophone forum, I was thinking about contributing some of Michael Brecker's gorgeous treatments on Coltrane Changes to spice up the discussion. For several days, that idea has dangled in my mind like a gigantic sneak magically sent by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (or, aka Lord Voldemort). But, when I finally got some time to really sit myself down and began itemizing...
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Jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was not only the representative figure in the Bebop movement in terms of his musical exploration, but also in his continuous struggle with substance abuse. Evidently, the problem of substance abuse was pervasive during that period within the jazz community, as Burton W. Peretti elucidated that "while World War I, Prohibition, and the first flush of the adolescent subculture had prompted alcoholism among some early white jazz musicians, a deeper disappointment fueled the bebop turn to drugs......
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Fashionista series was a side-project completed during my stay at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. I dug a musical hole and spent most of my time thinking about metatonal music theory, that mysterious mystic chord, MASS MoCA, and yummy caramel popcorn recipe. I woke up. Fresh. Harvested some musical notes. Or played with some graphics while waiting for those shier music notes to finally call...
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There are of course countless ways to introduce dissonance into jazz improvisation. As mentioned in the forum post, we might try to use symmetrical scales to spice up our Bebop line, such as integrating the "Slonimsky motive" derived from the diminished scale. In addition to scalar treatments, symmetrical scales such as the octatonic scale, aka the diminished scale, also offer some flavorsome opportunities to pepper up our Bebop lines with sequential patterns.
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I love to quote. But You probably notice that already. You, clever you. For me, quoting tawdry or cutesy lines from novels, poems, movies, songs, commercials, disclaimers, and even product nutrition panels, is less an attempt to reaffirm my steps or missteps. It is more a way to clutch something, to remember something, to get a whiff of something from the hectic stream of everyday-life. piece by piece. poco a poco.....
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Bird soon immersed himself in works by composers active in the first half of the twentieth-century. In addition to Igor Stravinsky, composers of Western classical music that Parker venerated included Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, Paul Hindemith, Sergey Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schönberg, and Dmitri Shostakovitch. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s works came to be on Parker’s listening menu around 1945...
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