Posts Tagged ‘John Coltrane’
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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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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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.
More →High Point Museum Historical Park | 2010 | Photo by Jen-Kuang Chang On my way to downtown High Point, North Carolina to find tenor saxophonist John Coltrane’s bronze sculpture made by Thomas Jay Warren, I stopped by the High Point Museum & Historical Park on the edge of the town to explore the historical park adjacent to the museum. This well-maintained park featured the John Haley House, the oldest house...
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Strokellectanea III | Excerpt | 2009 | Jen-Kuang Chang The musicsphere for working on Strokellectanea project, a series of blissful generative graphics, orbited through Glenn Gould’s The Goldberg Variations (1955) to Henryk Górecki’s String Quartet No.3 to John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman CD to Per Nørgård's Symphony No. 3 to Van den Budenmayer, and then concluded with Gould’s The Goldberg Variations (1981). The inclusion of Van den Budenmayer in the...
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