Free Jazz Education and Music
While rummaging through my attic, I stumbled upon a treasure: a cassette tape containing practice sessions recorded during my time at Berklee around 1987 or 1988, when I was about 20 years old. The tape captures a series of short
As a creative educator in improvisor, I often enjoy working on Cycle 4 and Cycle 5 melodies. This Etude is a vertical melody over the Giant Steps progression (John Coltrane). Each melody starts on the root of the chord and
Another CD is now out on Origin records. “Otto is a true original in his compositional efforts. He sounds like no-one else. Free? Sort or, and laid back, with a beautiful sax tone. It sounds like he is laying out
https://mattotto.bandcamp.com/album/notebook This new recording features two groups; essentially two EPs put together. One group is a tenor trio the other a quintet with the members of the band Esthesis. Quintet: Tina Raymond – DrumsDawn Clement – RhodesEmma Dayhuff – BassElsa
Here’s a pdf and video of a contrafact I wrote over the Sam Rivers tune “Cyclic Episode”. I love working on improvising over this progression because it uses all 12 minor 7th chords; making it a lot of fun to
Saxophonist Xose Miguelez and I put together an ear training series that uses what I like to call “passive learning”. The series includes 156 mp3s and pdfs to sing along with and train your ear focusing on the modes of
This recent CD is my first standards album. As jazz musicians we arguably spend most of our time improvising over the jazz cannon; old show tunes and jazz pieces written by our mentors and heroes. This album is a collection
Here’s a short tune of mine I recorded on Aug 3rd 2022. It based on an augmented major 7 melody. I wrote the melody from those four notes and harmonized it afterwards. Jeff Harshbarger plays bass and John Kizilarmut plays
Several of my students have been asking about various Barry Harris approaches to playing changes and creating strong melodic lines with chromatic notes (non-scale degrees and non-chord tones). Although I love Barry Harris as a playing and improvisor I never
Here’s a brief look at another great Charlie Parker tune based on the Blues. I learned this out of the Omni Book when I was young and it turns out that a lot of the notes on the melody are
My friend Richard Giddens came out to KC for some gigs and recording summer of 2022. Here’s a take of Soul Eyes by Mal Waldon we did with Doug Auwarter on drums. Doug is an amazing drummer steeped in the
I wrote this song in 2001. Wanjiku was inspired by the book Pedals of Blood, recommended to me by my step-father Bruce Baron, who studied with the author while doing his undergraduate degree in education. I recorded the song in
