Free Jazz Education and Music
Lessons
In this video lesson I’ll demonstrate a few ways to practice the minor pentatonic concept outlined in the first video (Countdown Part 1). I start with an brief overview of the last lesson and than play examples of sequential ideas
This is a 3 part series on ways to practice and think about Countdown my John Coltrane. This is on of his challenging tri-tonic tunes based on the song Tune Up. Countdown is one of those tunes that, depending on
Here’s a nice major melody I wrote today at the piano and began learning, singing and playing through 12 keys. This short two bar melody incorporates several nice upper structure alterations including #11, #9 and #5. The phrase starts off
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
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
Passive Ear Training: A New Approach to Mastering the Modes of the Major Scale. Buy Here I’m excited to share a new ear training series I’ve developed with saxophonist Xose Miguelez. We’ve created something that I think will really help
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
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
