“Men have died for this music.”

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling. ~Bill Evans

…cartoons [are] America's only native art form. I don't count jazz because it sucks. ~Bart Simpson

No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa. ~Art Blakey

One thing I like about jazz, kid, is you don't know what's going to happen next. Do you? ~Bix Beiderbecke

For me, music and life are all about style. ~Miles Davis

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know. ~Louis Armstrong

If you can't play the blues, you might as well hang it up. ~Dexter Gordon

Jazz is not dead – it just smells funny. ~Frank Zappa

I think I was supposed to play jazz. ~Herbie Hancock

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. ~Louis Armstrong

Life is a lot like jazz – it's best when you improvise. ~George Gershwin

Those jazz guys are just makin' that stuff up! ~Homer Simpson

Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale. ~Mel Torme

Jazz is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. ~Francoise Sagan

There is no such thing as a wrong note. ~Art Tatum

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night. ~Count Basie

Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it. ~Yogi Berra

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that. ~Dizzy Gillespie

Las Vegas's one connection to the jazz world

Just got back from Las Vegas. I was going to check out the jazz scene, but found that I already had: A cursory search for jazz in Vegas turned up one whole venue: the bar at the Stratosphere. We did that last year. (Restaurant review: Great view, average to poor food, terrible service. Kind of like a cruise ship: there's nowhere else you can go, so we'll treat you how we feel...)

I did find one connection between jazz and Las Vegas, though. Treasure Island has a "head hunter" tournament on Wednesday mornings, where you pay an extra $50 and you get $50 for every person you knock out. And one of Herbie Hancock's most famous albums is called, "Head Hunters". Other than that, Vegas is water and jazz is oil, and they just don't mix.

Too bad Frank Sinatra isn't around still...

Saw on FB

According to one of my Facebook friends, Thelonious Sphere Monk would've been 92 this weekend. With the possible exception of Bill Evans, no other pianist has so defined the modern sound of the jazz piano. Here's a link for your enjoyment.

"Epistrophy"

Two "don't's" for piano players

So, it's Friday night, and I've drunk more than the recommended daily allowance of red wine, and I notice a chip on the fingernail of my right index finger. A smart and unlazy person goes to the bedroom dresser, finds the nail clippers and trims the affected nail. A tired, lazy person with slightly impaired judgment (okay, vastly impaired judgment) just pulls it off... and rips off half his cuticle in the process.

First: DON'T trim your fingernails by pulling off broken pieces of them.

So, it's Saturday night and Mrs. S and I decide to make tacos. You have to slice and dice tomatoes and you know that knives have a bad tendency to slip off of tomato skins, going every which way, usually straight to fingers. You also know that sharp knives are able to cut through the skin with less resistance, greatly reducing the chance of a knife slipping off a tomato skin and into something more tender and personal. So, before attempting to slice the tomatoes, I sharpened - really sharpened - the chef's knife. And I got within a hair's breadth of successfully completing the job when the knife slipped and found the tip of my bird-flipping finger on my left hand. Thank God for fingernails, because mine stopped the knife from slicing off the top of my finger entirely.

Second: DON'T slice anything with a finger close to it.

Five days on, I'm thinking about this because I haven't been able to put in any serious practice time (blood and piano key's do not mix) and because I'm still dealing with the injuries. Five days on, here's what they look like today:





Note: The pictures aren't very good, because it's really hard to take a picture of your hand. Note also that both pictures were taken after several days of healing.

Here's another "don't": DON'T tell me I'm an idiot.

I'm well aware of that fact.

Neither here nor there...

I still suck at ear training. Best I can get is 64% right. Usually, I'm in the 40% area. In fact, I think I'm getting worse. I noticed I can't even detect octaves half the time now. That's really bad.

I watched the Arturo Sandoval story, "For Love or Country", starring Andy Garcia. It was pretty good.

Spent two and a half hours today on my jazz theory class homework. It was all about harmonic minor scales and 13th chords, two more weak areas for me, and man, it was a lot of work. So when I can't play anything in the band tomorrow, I'll tell the director (who also teaches the jazz theory class) that I had too much homework. We'll see how that goes.

I've been listening to a lot of Dizzy Gillespie lately. Sometimes, you just forget how good some of these musicians are when you haven't listened to them for a while, and then when you do, you just can't put them away because they sound so fresh all of a sudden. I can honestly say, only jazz music does that to me. Or so it seems.

And it finally stopped raining in Alabama. I got some sunlight vitamin D today and it felt great!

I put out an ad online looking for a free piano. No surprise that one hasn't shown up yet. I may have to break down and spend some money on one. I should do it soon, too.

Something worth reading

Today is the 54th anniversary of Erroll Garner's wonderful work, "Concert by the Sea". So, rather than write about it, I'll just direct my readers to help themselves to this wonderful Wall Street Journal article about Garner and that recording. I'm also going to pull down my own CD and have a listen later. Y'all might want to do the same.

My hypothesis about jazz theory

Although my failing and unfortunate efforts to improve my ears have been well documented in this space, I feel it is time to look on the bright side. Namely, my jazz theory course appears that it is going to have a profound effect on my ability to understand jazz. Although we've only had two classes, I have one clear example.

Last week we covered the modes of the scale. Now, I learned about these from my piano instructor in something like my third lesson, but I never much paid attention to them, because I didn't really understand how they were (or could be) applied. It all just seemed a lot of excessive, unapproachable, forced idiom and jargon meant to discourage the uninitiated. Which in fact, it is. I mean, the chances are really good you'll never hear a jazz musician go, "Okay, man, this is A-flat mixolydian, so let that sax solo rip!" Musicians, and especially jazz musicians are supposed to infer what notes will work and what notes won't when they hear the tune. How uncool it would be to have to actually analyze jazz before you could play it, right?

But how much easier it is if you can decipher the tune and know in your own brain that A-flat mixolydian is correct and B-flat Ionian or whatever is not, because then if you know what A-flat mixolydian is, you automatically know what notes to play.

And the 1-3-5-7 notes of the mode define the ii-V-I progression, and so, if you know the mode you know the notes, and if you know the notes you know the chords, and if you know the chords you can play a song, any song, correctly, and guess what? You're suddenly a real jazz musician! So now I'm in the process of forcing myself to learn all the modes more or less by heart, or to at least be able to figure them out in a couple of seconds so I can use them on tunes right away. I completed our class homework assignment, but that wasn't enough practice, so I developed my own chart for going through and learning the modes. I can just pick one, write it out, cross it off, then pick another, and so on, until I've gone through them all, then I can start all over again. It shouldn't take too long to program them in my brain.

Here's the chart I made, with the modes and keys altering in different patterns around the circle of fifths:


So my hypothesis about jazz theory is simply: jazz is a mental music made easier by doing the mental work and understanding the theory behind it. It is possible to be a phenomenal jazz musician without grasping the theory, but I estimate you can take one or two years off the time it takes to become virtuoso, just by taking a jazz theory course. Someday, I may even turn out to be the proof of my hypothesis.