Free Jazz Education and Music
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
Passive Ear Training: A Natural Approach to Hearing and Understanding Modes. This innovative ear training method, which I call “passive ear training,” mirrors the natural process of language acquisition. By emphasizing repetitive listening and imitation, it cultivates a deep, intuitive
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
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
Here’s the track “Esthesis” from the album: 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 –
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
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
