Free Jazz Education and Music
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
In the video below, I explain a few ways to conceptualize the Sus chord. Sus is short for suspension – in church music, the “ah” in “Amen” – is an example of a simple 4 to 3 “suspension” sound; the
The 4 note structure or tetrad made up of 1, 3, #11 and b7 is a very useful note set for voicings and improvising over all sorts of dominant 7th chords. These 4 notes are common tones from both lydian
This is a short melodic phrase that I wrote that includes use of the #9 on a major chord. I often think of this sound coming from the 6th mode of harmonic minor which works nicely over a major 7
In this live discussion I outline the entire process I go through when I work on a new idea. In this case, I have written a short 7 note melody which comes from the Altered scale (also called diminished-whole-tone or
Yesterday I wrote a short 3 chord tune by writing the melody first using a minor pentatonic scale. Many great songs use a pentatonic scale (or relative minor pentatonic) as a theoretical basis for all or part of the melody.
Here’s a simple progression with a chromatic melody. It’s in the key of G starting and targets iii minor (maj7) and I using substitute secondary dominants. I became interested writing really short form tunes by both Monk (Light Blue) and
This cell phone recording was from a quartet gig on Aug 15th 2019 at Ca Va in Kansas City. Matt Otto – tenor sax, John Kizilarmut – drums, Seth Lee – bass. (Stephen Martin was the band leader also played
Here’s a transcription of my tenor sax solo from the Alliance album (2020). This is over the chord changes to Woody and You (Dizzy Gillespie) on a contrafact I wrote called Woods. In the transcription I tried to notate what
