To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in [...]
I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, deford bailey, folk, grateful dead, harmonica, howard levy, little walter jacobs, major scale, mixolydian, Music Theory, sonny terry, stevie wonder, toots thielemans
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My friend and sometime musical collaborater Leo Ferguson is releasing an album of his adventurous jazz compositions and arrangements. Leo Ferguson Ensemble (2011) by Leo Ferguson As part of the album’s extended liner notes, I interviewed Leo on May 5, 2011. Here’s an edited transcript; you can also hear the audio on Leo’s site.
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Music, Race and Identity
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Also tagged barack obama, classical, composing, john coltrane, leo ferguson, miles davis, steve reich, wayne shorter
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There’s no music I love more in the world than Duke Ellington’s. When I was a kid, the New York Transit Museum had a commercial in heavy rotation on local TV that used “Take The A Train” and I remember being riveted by it. I should point out that Billy Strayhorn wrote this tune, not [...]
Filed in Music
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Also tagged andy jaffe, billy strayhorn, charles mingus, duke ellington, john steinbeck, max roach, nyc, remixes, soundcloud, subway, synths, tchaikovsky
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
I’ve read that Quincy Jones carries around copies of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue in his briefcase, and that he hands them out to kids whenever he meets them. Q-Tip compares Kind Of Blue to the Bible — you’re just expected to have a copy around the house. If you’ve never heard jazz before, Kind [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Theory, Sampling
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Also tagged ahmad jamal, classical, debussy, erykah badu, gil evans, james brown, john coltrane, mashups, mccoy tyner, memes, miles davis, morton gould, Music Theory, public enemy, Sampling, the heavy
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to do the blues justice, and that’s diminished chords. To make a diminished chord, you start on [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, chords, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, fats waller, lambert hendricks and ross, Music Theory, robert johnson, roots, symmetry, thelonious monk
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My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop and so on: natural minor, harmonic minor and dorian. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the melodic [...]
Saturday, January 22, 2011
When you first set out to learn your scales, it can be discouraging. There are so many of them, and their names are so bewildering. The good news is that when you learn one scale, you get a bunch of other scales that you get “for free.” This is because many scales share the same [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged beatles, benny golson, bjork, blues, classical, dizzy gillespie, lynyrd skynyrd, miles davis, modes, Music Theory, rock, samuel barber, scales
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Expanding on a post about blues basics. When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, charles mingus, chords, dave brubeck, guitar, harmony, henry mancini, miles davis, Music Theory
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Since I’m teaching the twelve-bar blues to some guitar students, I figured I’d put the lessons in the form of a blog post. Blues is a big topic and this isn’t going to be anything like a definitive guide. Think of it more as a tasting menu. Blues is a confusing term. You probably have [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged aretha franklin, batman, blues, chords, country, duke ellington, Emotion, flatt and scruggs, guitar, hank williams, harmonica, herbie hancock, john coltrane, john lee hooker, louis armstrong, memes, modules, muddy waters, Music Theory, race, thelonious monk, tritones
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