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.