If you have never listened to jazz before, Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue is a great place to start. If you’re an obsessive jazz fan like me, it never gets old. The heart of the album is its first track, “So What.” Even before you press play, there’s a world of meaning in that title. …
Tag Archives: John Coltrane
Greensleeves
In fifth grade, my class studied the Middle Ages, which my fantasy-nerd self adored. I have a memory from that time of playing “Greensleeves” on the recorder. This memory is probably not accurate, though, because “Greensleeves” was much too hard for me to play. There are some tricky non-diatonic notes, and the two halves of …
Learn to improvise on the white piano keys
Improvisation is a core musical skill across a variety of styles and genres. Being able to make up music on the fly is obviously useful in and of itself, but improvisation is also an excellent tool for songwriting, composition, production, and teaching. The best way to learn how to improvise is to do it along …
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Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude
Let’s get the name out of the way first. Chopin didn’t title the piece “Raindrop,” nor did he give catchy nicknames to any of his other preludes. The names were given later by a fan named Hans von Bülow. Chopin’s actual title of this piece is “12 Préludes, Opus 28 Number 15 in D-Flat Major.” …
An intro to remixes
One of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music is the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new musical expression. The remix began as a way to make dance versions of pop songs, but it has evolved into an entire new art medium unto itself.
RIP McCoy Tyner
One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” …
Ignorant Populists
Build A Fort is the drums/saxophone duo of Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir, two of the leading lights in progressive music education. The title of their new album, Ignorant Populists, is presumably a play on their role in advancing popular music pedagogy. The album was mostly recorded while Gareth was in New York and …
Teaching dynamics and loudness
When I cover dynamics and loudness in music theory class, I only spend a small part of the time talking about forte/piano, crescendo/diminuendo and so on. Once you have the Italian translations, those terms are self-explanatory. They are also frustratingly subjective, and they refer only to unamplified acoustic music. To understand dynamics in the present …
How do key signatures work?
Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, …
Naima
I’ve been doing so much explaining basic music theory that I thought it would be fun to dig into something advanced: “Naima” by John Coltrane, from his all-killer-no-filler album Giant Steps. There are as many interpretations of this tune’s chord changes as there are transcriptions of it. The ones in the Real Book are real …