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 …
Tag Archives: jazz
Diminished chords and the blues
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 fully inhabit blues tonality, and that is the mysterious diminished seventh chord. To make a diminished …
The freakiness of melodic minor
My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop, and film scores: natural minor, harmonic minor, and Dorian mode. 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 …
The major scale modes
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 “for free.” This is because many scales share the same pitches, just in …
The blues scale
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 …
Blues basics
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 …
The Mad Men theme and Autumn Leaves
Mad Men’s obsessive devotion to period accuracy has one conspicuous exception: its hip-hop theme song by RJD2. The track plays under one of television’s all-time great opening title sequences, which I can’t embed because AMC doesn’t understand how internet marketing works. Click this collage I made to watch on YouTube. The theme song is an …
The Choice Is Yours
There’s a commercial on TV right now featuring a bunch of CGI hamsters that reacquainted me with this Black Sheep classic. I knew the song better as the one that goes, “You can get with this or you can get with that.” Thank god for Google, otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about anything. This is …
They Reminisce Over You
Hip-hop at its best is about truth-telling. It doesn’t get any realer than “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth.
Moody’s Mood For Love
My neighbor and friend Diéry Prudent is working on a documentary on the bebop saxophonist and flutist James Moody, best known for his 1949 recording “Moody’s Mood For Love.” It’s an improvised solo over the changes to “I’m In The Mood For Love,” one of those off-the-cuff jazz solos that came out so tightly structured …