Relaxin' at Camarillo

Gypsy Jazz Sundays

I've been learning Django's solo to "Douce Ambience" on and off for about eighteen months. I learn it, we play it in the band, then we have one of our extended breaks, then I forget it and have to relearn it all over again. I just re-learnt yesterday for practice on Tuesday. It's the only recorded solo I've ever bothered to learn all the way through, and I did because playing anything other than Django lines over Hotclub tunes sounds rubbish unless you happen to be a genius bebop innovator or possess the wanker chops of Joe Pass. It's an exemplary study in making melodic improvisations out of simple triads. It's also a sort-of blues. I play it at 180bpm, rather than the 240 or whatever QHCF play it at, and there are more than a few mistakes, as well 6-beat superfast chromatic triplet descent that I don't even pretend to play. Otherwise, blah, blah, blah, etc. Douce Ambience. You can find links to gypsy jazz transcriptions here.

After that little treat, your thoughts will have probably turned to your summer holidays. We're having a week on the Bristol Channel (tres miserable, mon braves), but I suggest you get yourself off to the annual Gypsy-Jazz Festival near Django's resting place in the French town of Samois-sur-Seine. Here's a nice Django travelogue to get you in the mood. Be sure to send a postcard.

Russell Malone Interview

Here's a link to an interview with Russell Malone in Guitar Player magazine. Funnily enough, once after a Massif Central gig a kid came up to me and said he was fine until he heard me play, but now he was going home to kill himself. Ain't it always the way?

11 Heads

Well there you go... I only just mention the instructional merit of bebop heads and look what shows up.

A Couple of Charlies

Older and wiser, I've decided to renovate my practice regime. Actually, I don't have a practice regime, so I should say I've decided to work on a couple of things I've either studiously avoided or strike me this afternoon as being particularly useful. 

First: Time passes, but It's time to face up to time -- I'm going to bite the bullet and knock the dust of the metronome. I hate the friggin' metronome, churlish disapproving tyrant that it is, and consequently my timing blows. From now on, I'm going to be a good little guitar student and warm up by playing a diatonic arpeggio exercise [powertab file] in time with the bleeps. I tried it today and after several million attempts managed to play quarter notes through the keys of G and C at 120bpm without screwing up. I'm aiming to be able to play it at 160 by next weekend, and I'm also hoping to go through the whole cycle of fifths. Why do I do this to myself?

Second: Every effort to get better inevitably involves the Omnibook at some stage or another, so I've decided to finally adopt the advice I keep hearing and play through a load of different Charlie Parker heads in an effort to better internalize the sounds of bebop. I started with "Scrapple from the Apple" and I was surpised how quickly I managed to get it (at 120bpm, not 220). Bird's really good for tricky fingerings and unusual note choices that put you out of position and open up a whole world of sounds. I'm definitely not going to try playing these with the metronome for at least six months.

Finally: I'm going to practice major and minor triads all over the neck. Looking over solos by Django and Charlie Christian, it's clear that the real foundation of their playing isn't anything esoteric like advanced chord-scale theory or complicated substitutions and alterations, but just a rock-solid and emphatic knowledge of major and minor triads ornamented with extensions, chromatic notes, neighbour tones, swinging time, masterful confidence and all the rest of it. I can play a load of extended and altered arpeggios in all kinds of positions, but I'm not at all convinced that I could connect three chords in simple triads tastefully in real time. The most obvious place to start with this is the good old CAGED system, so I'm going to do some work on that.

Once that lot's covered, it's on to the Massif repertoire, comping and improv, followed by an hour of cardio, two hours of free weights, a colonic irrigation and twenty Benson and Hedges. What are reading this for you big pansy? PRACTICE!

(BTW: I hope this guy keeps his project going. And does anyone else feel sorry for Britney Spears? Is it just a sign of my age?)

Again with the "For Josie"

On reflection, last night's flubbed and hurried attempt at "My Funny Valentine" probably wasn't the most romantic tribute I could offer my darling selfless wife, the one who said I could have a D'angelico and is also the mother of my children. So tonight I fancied it up a bit by adding a comp track and soloing over it with the effect that just screams mad, mad love -- spring reverb! I'm afraid I struggled to find anything to play that wasn't horribly platitudinous. Fortunately, our relationship is built on much stronger foundations than my guitar playing. At least I hope so: MFV2

It's my birthday tomorrow. Thirty-friggin-eight and I find myself perfectly poised between being incredibly grateful for everything I have and all I've achieved, and wondering where the fuck the time went and how I'm not rich or much more exciting, manly and mysterious... like this bloke,

For Josie

A comping sheet: My Funny Valentine (three note voicings with a couple of familiar four-note chords thrown in), and a comp-less go at a solo played uniformly in Eb save for one or two passing tones.

The Melodic Minor Scale in Pieces

Back from a fairly shittly trip to the old country, and in order to prevent my playing from falling into utter disrepair, I set myself the task of learning the melodic minor scale in four different positions. I used the patterns from Jimmy Bruno's Six Essential Fingerings, and once again appreciated the clarity and simplicity of that document.

I don't really know much about this scale or how to use it, except that it's often played over V chords starting one step above the root of V, thus generating all four alterations: b9-#9-b5-#5. If anything at all has become clear out of all this jazz guitar mullarky, it's that there are many ways to skin a cat, and when we talk about this or that scale over this or that chord, we're not really talking about entire scales at all but just a couple of particular notes that sound especially good when superimposed over the underlying harmony. Scales are merely the mother ship from which our funky monsters descend, and as what we all want most in the world is to avoid playing an entire scale starting from the root, it seems to me that, following on from the last post, in practice it helps to think about much smaller clusters of notes that you could realistically land on at the appropriate time. To this end, I've been experimenting with non-scalar-sounding fragments taken from within the meldoic minor scale to play over a V chord. For example: here's the entire scale as you'd play it over D7 (Eb melodic minor):

And here are two examples of fragments you might usefully hope to play over a bar of D7:

To get a sense of what I mean, here's me playing these ideas over a looped backing track of Am7-D7-Gmaj7-Gmaj7. It's much easier to digest chord-scale relationships if you break them down into petit morceau. Fragment your thinking! Melodic Minor Fragments

Oh, and a note: Bob Erwig's Jazz Films (passim) have been busted by the jack-booted ones at YouTube, but he's moved a little of his stuff over to Daily Motion. Let's hope he keeps adding.

Rico!

Le Massif Central have a new member -- well, a  new trial member at any rate, which is to say, we're not auditioning him, he's auditioning us. Rico (absolutely his real name, which is why we want him  to join soooooo much), plays a killer tenor, has enormous confident and monster chops. He's also about 12. Ramos is uncertain whether Rico could ever truly graduate to become a fully-fledged member of the Massif -- presumably because his beamish adolescence remains unsullied by drink, drugs and STDs and his dainty fledgling hopes still wait to be pulverised beneath the pounding boots of drudgery -- but as I pointed out, it's all entirely moot as: a) he probably won't ever come to practice again; and b) even if he does, I dare say young Rico is far to cool to give a flying monkey's whether or not he's wholly inducted into our delusional world of pretend-French existentialism. As an interim measure, we've agreed to re-name the band "Le Massif Central mit Rico," which I think has a nice gay German quality to it, don't you? Very Viennese.

I recorded most of last night's practice (absolutely top -- easily our best ever) and was going to bore you all with it today, but I got all the settings wrong and instead have 50 minutes of silence. "Ain't it always the way", as a toothless old cockney in a flat cap with his trousers tucked into his socks once said to me as he found me mending a puncture on my bike in the pissing rain (this on a cobbled street just behind Columbia Road flower market in the east end of London, and to this day, I'm convinced he stepped out of a time-warp connecting the present to the 1920s for the express purpose of offering his sympathies).

Anyway, as there are no recordings, I thought I'd share this: a dog-eared old piece of paper I found while sorting through some files.

(Here's a PDF version of the same).

What this shows is a diminished arpeggio handily split into four-note cells on various string sets and in different places on the neck. As you know, you can cover all twelve keys with just three diminished arpeggios, so they're well worth learning. The purpose of splitting them up this way is to make them into useable fragments that you can easily find and then fit over four beats of a V7 chord. It's also a really good way to break the habit of starting arpeggios always on the root.

So that's that. But wait, in the bottom right hand corner there are a couple of diagrams that show little patterns you can play to get interesting and varied alterations over V7 chords. These six-note patterns can be begun on any one of the four notes that make up a diminished arpeggio, and will achieve slightly different results depending on where you start, though will always give you at least a b9 or b5 sound.

Here's what I mean, an Amin7 arpeggio (starting on A, 12th fret, 5th string), followed by an  example of the pattern (starting on Eb on the 9th fret, 3rd string): Dim Fragment. (After listening back to it, I realize that I've left out a final note resolving to G, so please feel free to imagine it, if you will.)

And here's a couple of unspectacular goes at it in different places over a ii-V-I in G: Diminished Fragments Example.

So there's another thing we can add to the mix when thinking about ii-V-Is, and yet another thing to practice. So now I'm off to London for a week on an entirely non jazz-related mission (where hopefully I'll bump into that prophetic old man again.) I'll see you all when I get back. Ain't it always the way!