A Minor Situation In Jazz Improvisation

[Doug Hoople]

"This is a minor diminished and a half a fifth, this is your run of the mill endoplasmic reticulum, and here are your para-di-chloro-methyl- hot and cold running door knobs."

Pretty good, but does it stand up to analysis? Mine does! In fact, I ran it by my analyst last week, and he/she said "I Can't Stand It"

[JeffD]

Pretty good, but does it stand up to analysis? Mine does! In fact, I ran it by my analyst last week, and he/she said "I Can't Stand It"

[John McGann]

I love this stuff, but I have gaping holes in my background that affect my ability to absorb it all. I sometimes have to resort to various on line musical dictionaries, though what I need is a taxonomy of chords and intervals - one that I can listen to.

A really good DIY project would be to take a simple recording device (even a cassette recorder if not a computer based thingy) and record, in one key, the chord types you want to get to know. Looping would be great- I've used Finale and had it play back a chord with an organ sound (a long drone w/ no rhythm)- looped via tying a bunch of whole notes together and played back at quarter=20. Lasts awhile!

Then, against that backdrop, play whatever you want to hear- a particular minor scale, mode, intervals, double stops, what have you. The discipline is in focusing on ONE thing at a time and milking it so that you can really, truly HEAR the relationship of the notes to the drone.

Multitracking would allow you to create your own dictionary of sounds that you could take with you in the car or iPod- you could announce "4th mode of melodic minor" or something to help catalog the sounds...

Maybe not as instantly gratifying as just learning a tune, but if you are looking to get deeper into improvisation and harmony and more 'exotic sounds', it's time very well spent...you can create your own musical dictionary, and become a badass in one key before moving onto the other key (I read somewhere there are 3 keys, C#, Db and D minus...)

'scuse me while I go catch my running doorknobs, it's not warm enough yet to have the doors a-flappin'