Archive for ‘Dialogue’
I usually do my nonstop listening of The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings of John Coltrane on September 23 (duh, Coltrane's birthday). While it might seem like a self-imposed annual ritual of sort, it's really more like a superb excuse to shower myself with those less-familiar alternate takes of Coltrane's Giant Steps and daydream about that Trane's masterpiece would eventually become the number-one-hit on that jolly elevator-music-top-100-chart. This year,...
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Our beloved diabolus in musica has been kind enough to pay my inner ears several unsolicited visit after my afternoon reading session through a fascinating thread relating to the Diminished Scale in Jazz Guitar Group Forum few days ago. Believe me, diabolus in musica won't be winning the most-gracious-guest-award anytime soon. He kept reharmonizing my Philip Glass study scores with that knotty diminished triad and criticizing every single Johann Sebastian...
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Last Thursday, the gang gathered together in Miss Q’s basement to do our usual weekly jam session night. Miss Q’s basement is fully-furnished with a cool retro-see-through refrigerator (stocked with IZZE sparkling juice and Fuji spring water), an X-large comfy orange-color sofa big enough for an elephant to take a nap, and all-you-can-eat Miles Davis LP collection to go with a very nice pair of speakers from Cambridge SoundWorks. In...
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First of all, I cannot apologize enough for coming up with such a long title for a short post like this. My precious little sense of “less-is-more” has been taking a long vacation (Where? Where? I am guessing she is at the North-pole by now) to avoid the frontal confrontation with that merciless Heat-Index that has been hovering around 110F for days. Secondly, this post was supposed to be a...
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When browsing through an interesting tread in The Jazz Guitar Forum about Nicolas Slonimsky's monumental work Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns in a local café this afternoon, I just had to get my second cup of Americano to drum up my musical audacity to face again this gargantuan topic. Phew, what a book! In the field of modern Jazz, Slonimsky's Thesaurus has been the Gigantor among all twentieth-century pattern...
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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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