Sorry for missing the last couple of weekends, but if you’re looking for some music related stuff to visit around the web, here are my weekend picks.
Are you a trombonist working on solo repertoire, like the Hindemith Sonata, Creston Fantasy, or Larsson Concertino? You might want to practice with an accompanist, but it can be expensive to practice a lot with a quality pianist. Laine Lee has got you covered, with free downloadable midi files of the accompaniment parts for those pieces – and several others. Thanks, Laine!
Do you like Latin music? Me too. Would you like to learn more about the musicians and development of the diverse musical styles that fall under the umbrella of “Latin music?” Check out Latin Music USA and watch this great PBS documentary.
Have you ever hear been at a jazz club and heard the following conversation?
Lastly, you should take a few minutes and learn a little bit about Carol Kaye. You may not know her name, but you probably have heard her play bass. It’s unfortunate that the full documentary was never made.
Got a cool music related link? Post it in the comments or drop me a line.
I recently came across an interesting article on The Strad (an online magazine for string players) that mirrors some things that as a trombonist (particularly a trombonist who plays a lot of jazz) I guess I just assumed was a pretty typical approach to performing those awkward lines that composer/arrangers sometimes write for us. Faking it – the great unmentionable of orchestral playing discusses the idea of “Faking, smudging, flying, putting the orchestral pedal down.”
In these economically parlous times, only a handful of the major orchestras in any country attack new compositions on a regular basis, with faking mentioned as necessary in anything from ten to almost ninety per cent of some modern works. One player commented that while music by some modern composers presented no problem, with others it was ‘a case of keeping in the right bar and hoping the trumpets drown you out’. There is also a widespread – if erroneous – belief that Tchaikovsky wrote ‘for effect’, and one well-known first violinist admitted that he aimed to land only about a quarter of the high passages, max.
While McVeigh is writing from the standpoint of professional orchestral string players, I find it interesting that this seems to be something that not many string players are taught early on. My first trombone teacher called the idea of faking challenging passages “streamlining” when I asked him about playing unison bebop lines with trumpet players and saxophonists. He pointed out that if I concentrated on nailing what I was capable of and ghosting the rest that my sound would slot in just under the trumpet/saxophone and sound just fine. The key, he taught me, was to do this confidently and perfectly in time. Gradually, as my technique got better, I found that I needed to ghost less and could play more.
Even in solo playing I’ve discovered that ghosting notes works quite well. There are some Carl Fontana solos I transcribed where I discovered the aural impression of what lines he was playing were much more complex than the licks he actually played. Again, the key is that he played those lines perfectly in time and emphasized the important notes while ghosting notes around them. The ear will lock into the underlying harmony and logic of the melodic line and fill in the gaps much more effectively than you might think.
McVeigh concludes her article with 10 recommendations for faking lines in an orchestra string section. Much of what she suggests are specific to string players, such as maintaining the same bowing as the rest of your section. Other points make for great advice for any musician, such as keeping good posture and ensuring that the downbeats of any rhythmically complex line are on time.
How often do you find yourself “faking” difficult passages? Do you feel as if you’re “cheating” or do you think it’s an important part of performing music? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Today, May 26, 2014, is Memorial Day in the United States. We honor the men and women who served our country and made the ultimate sacrifice. Here is the Trinity Jazz Orchestra performing my big band arrangement of the theme songs of the five branches of the U.S. armed forces.
Regular readers may already know that one of my pet peeves is the huge number of brass teachers who (ignorantly, in my opinion) discourage all students from placing their mouthpiece in a way that the rim is contacting the red of the lips. It’s fairly common to hear players talking about the “evils of placing on the red.” I recently came across another example of this by trumpet player Bill Bing.
Bing is skeptical that brass players (or at least trumpet players) can play successfully with the mouthpiece placed in such a way that a lot of rim contacts the lower lip. That said, other than a brief mention at the beginning, the rest of this video doesn’t mention placing on the red at all. Nor does he explain why he feel’s it’s a bad thing other than that he’s never noticed it before. The closest thing to explaining why this is wrong is when he comments that he didn’t personally find it successful.
My personal experience happens to be the exact opposite of Bing’s. He found it didn’t work to place the mouthpiece on the red of his lips and made a correction that made things better. On the other hand, I found that after being instructed to play with a centered mouthpiece placement moving my setting onto the red of my upper lip actually worked best. It really depends on the individual player and is something that I don’t like to generalize.
At any rate, watch Bing’s video (particularly at around 4:51) and take a guess on Bill Bing’s embouchure type. My guess after the break.
It’s Friday so here are some interesting links I found for you to surf this weekend.
John Morton writes about the Rise and Rise of the English Brass Band. Depending on where you live there may be a community brass band you could join. There are also some brass bands that perform some of the finest brass music around.
Take a look at John Coltrane’s handwritten outline to A Love Supreme and learn a little bit about the creative process of one of the greatest musicians ever.
It’s Friday. Here are some random music related things around the web to educate and amuse you.
Are you a classical music fan? If so, embrace your inner geek and thrill in the 10 Geekiest Moments In Classical Music. Did they miss any that you think should have made the list?
Mick, a trumpet/cornet playing friend of mine, and I were recently talking about jazz harmony. A while back Mick found a great resource on common patterns in traditional jazz (I wrote about it here, but the original page seems to have been deleted). That blog and our conversation reminded me of something put together by pianist Marc Sabatella called The Harmonic Language of Standards. Sabatella’s discussion on jazz harmony was required reading for my jazz improvisation students. I think it’s a great summary of the harmonic language of jazz standards.
While only a summary of his more in-depth book, you can get quite a bit out of reading what Sabatella has made available for free on his web site. He has put together a very complete list of common chord progression patterns in a section about functional harmony. In my opinion, one of the most useful parts of it are Sabatella’s breakdown of common idioms. He divides basic chord patterns into five categories – cadential progressions, pre-cadential progressions, static progressions and turnarounds, transitional progressions, and modulations.
Just as we can usually break a song down into a handful of broad sections such as AABA, we can usually break down each section into a handful of these idiomatic phrases. The phrases I am talking about are usually around two measures each. At slower tempos they may be squeezed into a single measure, and at faster tempos they might take four measures each.
An understanding of these types of chord patterns really helps me memorize chord progressions because instead of thinking so much about individual chords I’m thinking of broader chord patterns. It also helps you come up with some new ways to think about chord progressions and reharmonizations.
Sabatella mentions an example he uses on how to apply these principles to composition.
I then discuss how to apply your understanding of chord progressions to substitution and reharmonization, using the standard My One And Only Love by Guy Wood and Robert Mellin as an example. Looking at just the “A” section, I first break it down into a series of eight harmonic phrases and then show how to go about performing substitutions using other idioms from the same categories as well as more direct application of the guidelines of harmony themselves.
This is a great exercise for composers. Take a tune you know and break down the chord progression by the common idioms. Make note of certain key centers and using those as a goal, write a new chord progression that continues to maintain the road map of common idioms. For example, if you take the A sections of rhythm changes you might start your A section on the tonic, write a static chord progression for three measures, transition to the IV chord in measure 4, then cadence back to I in measure 6. A static chord progression for 7 and 8.
Just to demonstrate, I came up with the following by intentionally being a little goofy with it and in the process I bent some of the parameters from the rhythm changes A sections. I often compose chord progression in this way, with target harmonic goals in mind and then try out different things randomly until I get something I really like. My solution:
Not the greatest there is, but there’s some potential in there. Maybe I’ll come up with a bridge and a melody for it too and see what it develops into.
Try it out yourself. Read through Marc Sabatella’s Harmonic Language of Standards and then try reharmonizing standard chord progressions using those common idioms as a road map.
I’ve got a lot of embouchure questions piling up and want to try to get more of them answered here for folks. Here are a couple from way back (and sorry for the long delay in getting back to you folks!).
Krešo asks:
Hello Dave. I am curious, I bought a didgeridoo and started to mix my trumpet playing and didgeridoo playing. I play didgeridoo mostly as a warmup before trumpet. It seems to get blood flow to lips quicker then else. What do you think about that and can I damage my lips with it?
I have a couple of didgeridoos myself and enjoy playing them once in a while. Personally, I’ve never found them to be detrimental to my brass playing, but you have to realize that a didgeridoo does generally use different techniques and that if you get too used to it and aren’t aware of what you’re doing you might bring some of the didgeridoo technique back into your trumpet playing.
One thing that a number of brass players have experienced is that a bit of playing on a brass instrument with a significantly larger mouthpiece can work great as a warm down. For example, trumpet players might play a little trombone to warm down or trombonists might play a little tuba. The difference between this and what Krešo mentions is that this is as a warm down, not so much a warm up.
I’m not certain that I would use didgeridoo as a warm up, but without being able to watch you play it’s hard to say if what you’re doing could cause some potential risk to your playing or not. One way it could be detrimental is because a didgeridoo feels very different from trumpet and if you try to make your trumpet playing match your feeling of playing didgeridoo you could create some inefficient habits.
John sent the following, not really a question, but some good insights and related in part to Krešo’s question:
Here is James Morrison talking about his warm up or lack of warm up.
I had heard that he takes the horn out of the case and starts the gig. When he appeared at the U. of Montana Jazz Festival he said that he hadn’t played any trumpet for the previous two weeks. I saw him take the horn out and start the rehearsal. He sounded great from the first note on. I believe he does what Reinhardt calls the “Sensation Theory”. I talked to Doug Elliott about this and he agrees. Doug said that he also never warms up anymore. The main point is that a player really only needs a couple of minutes of warm up at most. Anything after that is practicing.
My most influential teacher regarding brass embouchures is Doug Elliott and I recall him saying the same thing to me about his lack of warmups. One of Doug’s teachers was Donald Reinhardt, who wrote a bit about a concept he called the “sensation theory.” In the Encyclopedia of the Pivot System Reinhardt wrote:
The SENSATION THEORY is the approach to the instrument whereby the player relies primarily on feeling rather than on sound to produce his notes. Generally speaking, the more completely the dependence on feeling the player can achieve, the more accuracy he will acquire. As dependency on sound is lessoned, the player arrives at how a note will feel rather than how it will sound. His accuracy and assurance will grow commensurately. . .
Your pre-playing sensation is the feel that you experience in your embouchure formation and anatomy a split-second before you execute your attack for the particular tone to be played.
Your playing sensation is the feel that you experience in your embouchure formation and anatomy during the actual blowing of your instrument.
Your unified sensation, the “must in all consistent brass playing, is the merging of your pre-playing and playing sensation into one solidified feel.
Some folks will confuse this concept with ignoring the sound altogether. Nothing could be further from the truth, but what Reinhardt was advocating was consistency in making your embouchure formation and anatomy matching as closely as possible to what you do when you play before you even start blowing. Brass players who get braces, for example, know first hand how strange it can feel when the braces get put on and taken off and it takes some time to adjust and get comfortable with the feel because of the changing support of the teeth and gums behind the lips and mouthpiece rim.
Or as another example, I remember when my braces came off and I wore a retainer (which I took off to play) I spent a few days talking a little funny because the retainer covering on the roof of my mouth meant that where I was used to putting my tongue to speak consonants had radically changed. Even though I knew exactly what the sound of the words I was speaking should have been, it took me some time to get used to the different feel.
Most brass players will go after this feel of playing unconsciously. Reinhardt was an advocate of specifically going after this unified sensation, which involved some specific playing and practicing techniques that are somewhat unique to his teaching (such as the mouth corner inhalations).
How many of you play didgeridoo? Do you ever feel that practicing didgeridoo is detrimental to your main brass instrument or have you only found positive or neutral effects? How do you think playing didgeridoo affects the playing sensations on your main brass instrument? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below and let us know what you think.
Are you a parent of younger children? Maybe you’ll be interested in learning more about Experimental Music on Children’s TV. It reminds me of the Portlandia episode where they start a band that performs for children to very different results.
Writing for All About Jazz Bill Anschell writes a half serious/half tongue-in-cheek article about Careers in Jazz.
Finally, a clip from the 1947 film This Time For Keeps, Jimmy Durante sings about The Lost Chord.
It’s Friday, so I’ll share some more bookmarks of random music related stuff around the net.
For an online, freely editable database of trumpet exercises, visit the Trumpet Exercise Database. It includes warmups, warm downs, flexibility, endurance, scales, etudes, and more.
Are you looking for a fancy online pitch pipe? Check out the Virtual Piano.
Joe Jackson played trombone for Maynard Ferguson, played lead trombone with the Airmen of Note from 1991 to 2011. He also served as the Airmen of Note’s music director from 2004 to 2011. He knows a few things about how to be a good bandleader.
Do you know “The Lick?” If not, watch this video and learn in all 12 keys.
