The Other Blog

For those of you interested in following my personal blog, the address is
http://cogentcode.blogspot.com/

Happy reading.

The End (of the Beginning)

The class performed last night in Killian Hall, a straight two hours without intermission. Fortunately, our audience endured.

The concert was a surprising success, considering that we started rehearsing the bulk of it two weeks ago. For many pieces it was even less than that.

For me, it was a vastly enjoyable concert. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while in the audience. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while on stage. I was really having fun, whereas normally I'm nervous on stage. Perhaps the greatest personal success for me was that I didn't feel nervous at all on stage. Okay, so a bit of adrenaline - but nothing close to what I've encountered in the past, especially with solos. Maybe it helped that it was a group setting, not a solo recital. But if you had asked me a few months ago, I could not have imagined being on stage, improvising, and not being nervous.

Incidentally, I played my solo violin piece (Brahms violin sonata no. 3 with Sarah on piano) in my violin teacher's studio recital tonight, and I wasn't nervous at all either - about the same as I was at the jazz concert. This has never happened. I've never had such a relaxed formal solo performance. Ever. In eleven, twelve years. I wonder if I've finally broken a performance barrier?

This class has given me a lifelong benefit - appreciation for blues. That's one of the primary reasons I signed up for the class.

I've gained a lot of non-musical things as well. For one, confidence that I can pick up new concepts. Confidence performing in front of an audience. Openness to new art.

I've made great friends through this class too. It's normal that I get to know some people in my HASS classes, but usually it's not everyone in the class and on this personal a level. Without this class, I probably wouldn't have met some of these musicians; I wouldn't have had anything to do with Dylan, Dennis, and Chih-yu, who are involved in jazz ensembles, or Dorian, who is involved in drumming (Rambax). And without meeting Dennis, I wouldn't have started learning guitar. Domino effect.

I say "End (of the Beginning)" because I think this class isn't quite over yet... after the concert, a bunch of us wanted to get together over IAP to jam.

I look at music differently now. I value live performance a lot more, and I get my head out of the page more. I now think it's totally cool to be able to just listen to a piece and play it, and then expand on it. Improvisation is a skill that I'm going to keep nursing on my own, as a complement to my classical training. I'm excited now that a new avenue has been opened in my mind.

All Blues Update/Dream Theater

All Blues met again tonight at Kresge, and we played Chih-yu's arrangement of Dream Theater's "Pull Me Under" for the first time.

Sarah joined us on piano for both pieces! I'm so happy she's branching out.

Dream Theater went very smoothly. Even though it was the first time we'd done the piece, Chih-yu had her vision all written out in nice printed scores and parts, and we basically learned the form she had in mind. We just need to practice our individual parts now, and I just have to improvise something stylistically appropriate in e minor.

So I'll be listening to this piece quite a bit in the next week:


We also tweaked All Blues after rehearsal, and it has a slightly updated form now:

* Start: (12/8 feel) Bass starts vamping the intro, drums joins in, then everyone except voice
* Chih-yu cues the head, which we play twice.
* We go into solos: piano, violin 1 (Paula), violin 1+2 (Jess/Paula duet), violin 2 (Jess), then drums. The drum solo transitions from 12/8 to 11/8. During solos, only bass and drums play along with the soloist, except everyone including bass drops out for the drum solo.
* Intro vamp starts again on bass, and all instruments vamp on it. Chih-yu cues the head and we play the head once only.
* Solos: voice, sax, and bass. During the bass solo, the violins and sax vamp in the background.
* We vamp briefly after the bass solo, then Chih-yu cues the head (2nd half).
* Ending: We repeat the last four bars two additional times, then vamp with everyone doing small improvisations on the vamp, and gradually fade out.

I'm feeling really good about All Blues. I've been practicing improvising on it in my private practice time, and I'm comfortable with it now. I actually had a lot of fun playing it tonight, especially in the final run-through. I felt so loose - it reminded me of something Donal said early on in the class, that he can tell when he is really getting into a piece when he's loose. I think I felt that "looseness" tonight, and that relaxation helped me improvise better.

Practicing

In the practice room today I came up with a few ideas when practicing improv.

* For rhythm, I set up a beat (tapping my foot) and tried to fill a certain number of beats (4 or 6 depending on the feel/time signature I'm trying to get at) with as many interesting and different rhythms as possible, just playing mainly open strings on the violin.

* For technique, I practiced double stops (two notes at once on the violin), which I should normally do but don't. Good thing my violin teacher isn't reading this. I played the usual thirds, sixths, and octaves, then the less-traditional tritone.

* Finally, I played around with All Blues, trying out things I wouldn't try in public. I want to integrate better technique into my improvisation, because I always tend to play things that are easy for me, all single notes and nothing too high up the fingerboard. I tried integrating double stops into All Blues and that required figuring out what intervals work well. I don't write anything down when I improvise, because I'm afraid it will make me play the same thing when I do actually try to improvise. However, it doesn't seem to be a problem - I'm getting happier with my improv over All Blues with each successive practice session, so something must be sticking.

Jazz Combo

Tonight, I went to see Dennis and Chih-yu's jazz combo concert. Their group played a forty-five minute long set with no breaks, stringing together seven songs. One pretty cool thing they did was to sandwich one song inside another - so they played half of a song, transitioned to a new song and played that in its entirety, and then played the other half of the first song. The two songs were different, but they complimented each other. Anyway, that's one example of the "transformation" in musical improv that Donal always talks about. I particularly enjoyed the song "Body and Soul" - they took it slightly faster and more upbeat than I've heard on youtube versions, and Chih-yu sang it gorgeously.

All Blues

This afternoon, I had the first rehearsal for All Blues with Dylan, Dennis, Chih-yu, Dorian, and Paula.

We came up with the following form:
*Bass starts with the intro, then drums, and then violins and sax come in with harmony. We're playing in 12/8.
*We played the head twice, during which Chih-yu sings her lyrics.
*Right after, we begin solos. Dorian will have the last solo, and then he'll transition us into 11/8 (which is really just a bar of 6 and a bar of 5).
*We play the head again twice through again, with Chih-yu singing.
*More solos. Dennis will play the last solo.
*We play the head for the third time.
*Ending...?

We tried a couple of ending techniques. First, we tried fading out on a vamp, which was moderately successful - we just need to practice it a few more times. Dennis also had the idea of repeating the intro vamp at the end, but cutting out one beat from the bar each time, so we'd go from 11/8 to 10/8 to 9/8, etc. It was a cool concept but we thought it would be too hard to implement. Very mathematical though - what do you expect from a bunch of MIT kids?

In class we originally listened to this classic recording of All Blues by Miles Davis (1959):


And another, later recording by Miles Davis (1964):


I found another version by Buddy Rich:


I like the first and third versions the best, which are mellower and/or more melodic. I don't like the sound of the trumpet when played in spats as in the second version above. I'll be listening to these recordings for inspiration in my spare time now. Someday I may be able to play strings of running eighth notes on my violin like the Buddy Rich band pianist... I'll learn to walk before I run though.

Don't Leave Me High and Dry, Ravel

Tonight, Dennis, Xiao Xiao, Dorian, Claxton, and I met at Sid-Pac for the first rehearsal of "High and Dry." By the end of the rehearsal, we had another piece as well.

I had originally showed up to play in Autumn Leaves, but after briefly messing around with that, the rest of the group decided to start High and Dry. Dorian hadn't listed violin in his original arrangement for this piece, but after listening to them play a while I was tempted to join. I liked the groove. I asked Dorian, and he was like, sure yeah, hop on in. Today was basically Xiao Xiao figuring out the chords on the piano, and the rest of us listening to the youtube video and improvising along with it. Since we got started late and Dennis had to leave to play a concert, we're going to have to get together again to really hash things out.

High and Dry:


At the end of rehearsal, Xiao Xiao started playing Ravel's Toccata on piano, and Dorian started playing drums along with it. It sounded really cool, pretty jazzy - the drums gave the Toccata a toe-tapping/head-bobbing quality it doesn't usually have. Then Xiao Xiao vamped parts of the Toccata, and the rest of us joined in playing along. It was quite spontaneous, and it sounded good. We're probably going to roll this into a real piece for the concert. This will be a piece that takes after what Donal does with Bach.

Ravel Toccata: