If you major in music at most universities, you have to take several semesters of aural skills classes. These classes traditionally consist of two main activities: sight-singing and dictation, that is, hearing a melody or chord sequence a few times and then writing it out in notation. Aural skills class was the definite low point …
Continue reading “Check out these grooves that I have my aural skills students improvise over”
Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter. In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one Read on Substack In A Silent Way, side B: “In …
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Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and …
Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious …
I spent this past weekend at Super MAGFest, where I led some sessions in their Jam Clinic. I was there at the invitation of Ashanti Mills, with whom I have had some great online conversations about participatory music cultures over the years. Before I explain what I was doing there, I need to explain the …
RIP Phil Lesh, who passed on while I was writing this. In the first part of this post, I analyzed the Live/Dead recording of “Dark Star” and compared it to several other versions. In this part, I survey the academic literature about the tune, of which there is a surprisingly large amount. First, let’s consider …
Just after I posted this, I learned that Phil Lesh died. RIP Phil. See also the academic literature review in part two. Space: the final frontier. “Dark Star” is the ultimate Grateful Dead jam vehicle, and the purest experience of the band, at least as far as the true believers are concerned. The song also …
My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version: Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of …
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If you listen to a lot of jazz or R&B, the Grateful Dead sound primitive and sloppy, but if you listen to a lot of classic rock, the Dead sound dazzlingly original. I was listening to classic rock radio recently, and after a bunch of tedious songs by the Eagles and such, “Playing in the …
The Dead recorded a bunch of rehearsals and jams while making Blues For Allah. John Hilgarth helpfully compiled and annotated them. A Reddit commenter pointed me to “Descent Into A Spacy Place”, which is farther out harmonically than the Dead usually get. I heard a lot of interesting ideas there, and I wanted to see …
Continue reading “I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming”
