Coming Up This Week

Hi everybody,

I don't really have anything to post today, and I'm more or less out of day, so I guess I will just kind of give you my plans for the week on this blog.  I have a surgery on Friday, so chances are nothing new will come out then.  But, in the meantime, I have a lot of plans:

a) crash course on the blues
b) jamming with ii - V7 -I with left hand voicings, major scales, and pentatonics.
c) Discussion of tritones and tempered tunings, and basically the western musical scale / tradition, in particular as it relates to jazz.

Topic C, I know, looks a little mysterious as of now, but trust me, it is an interesting topic.  And I think it will fit in well somewhat with the blues discussion, but I think I will leave a lot of the interrelations there to the reader, it's just that one is meant to be a crash course in playing a style of music, and mixing that with a theoretical discussion would not serve either purpose well.

As to those left hand voicings I have been talking about ad nauseum, I mean the rootless ones that everyone credits to Bill Evans.  I think they are actually much easier to play, though a bit harder to learn.  But once they are learned, they will sound very jazzy, and be very easy to conjure up without talking much mental focus.  The difficulty with them is not playing them, but mastering them to the point where all the alterations of all the notes can be played with ease so that they can be used creatively.  But hey, have to walk before you run.

And of course I will still use shell voicings from time to time -- I am just beginning to appreciate that having the root necessitates a lot of left hand leaps, and I have not yet been able to get that to the point where I can do it subconsciously, while I am already there in the keys that I know for the Bill Evans style chords.

Hopefully I will be learning tunes using these newfangled voicing really quickly -- but there is an A and a B position of the ii-V7-I progressions, and there are 12 keys total, so it might not be overnight.

Anyhow,  big week for me, blogging, playing, surgery.
Malcolm