“Jazz musicians are unique because they can adapt jazz music to every wedding ceremony, wedding reception, cocktail hour, luncheon, dinner and more,” Chandler Judkins, owner of Las Vegas Wedding Music in Las Vegas, said. “This also saves money for couples because they can use the same band throughout the day so they don’t have to hire other musicians for different aspects such as a string quartet for the ceremony. The jazz musicians can do the wedding ceremony too.”

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The hot summer in July 2006, on the fantastic Island of Corfu.

I had just spent the most incredible week of my life as students of the Ionian Academy of music, a jass workshop with Sheila Jordan. 

More on Setting on the Wall Jazz Music

This, and the kind of chord progressions used in Jazz gave it a unique flavor. In Jazz there is a soloist who plays a lot of chromatic notes thus making it melodious. It has a definite discernible rhythm. Drums are usually a part of it and that makes it so soothing. In Jazz the soloist has the freedom to play whatever he wants as long as he maintains the meter and stays in time. It is what makes Jazz Jazz. And an all time favorite for all music lovers.

For more information on Independent music artist visit Indietunes.com">http://www.indietunes.com">Indietunes.com

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More on Jazz –the (Jazz Loves Lili) music is forever

Saxophones are musical instruments belonging to the woodwind category. Saxophones were generally used in the military and in big orchestras, but are now found in smaller bands as well. They are generally used for big band music, pop music and jazz. A saxophone is as complex as a classical instrument and as unconventional as a non-classical instrument. People who play saxophones are called saxophonists.

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Widely regarded as the birthplace of Jazz. KC’s early reputation as a “wide-open, anything goes” city captivated and allured the musical performers of the day. It’s central location and ease of access via rail were the other components which induced this musical migration. Kansas City became a haven for musicians and fans alike.

The musicians, who interpreted their experiences in KC’s permissive environment through their music, were also creating the elastic techniques and musical license, which remain at the heart of Jazz today. The hub of this development was the 18th and Vine district. Many legendary musicians, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Turner and Charlie Parker to name a few, made their way to Kansas City. Their connection to one another and to the Kansas City “scene” brought about a unique musical expansion which enriched the city’s history and initiated the genesis of Jazz.

Kansas City’s affiliation with Jazz is celebrated daily at the American Jazz Museum in the 18th and Vine District and nightly at clubs and restaurants throughout the city. Live Jazz and Blues are still an important part of the Kansas City entertainment and nightlife scene.

Kansas City’s early sports history, specifically its affiliation with Negro League Baseball, is showcased in detail at the Negro League Baseball Museum.

Also located at the 18th and Vine District, the museum documents the history of Negro League Baseball from its beginnings in the mid 1800’s, to its demise in the 1960’s. If you are interested in this facet of the histoy of baseball, a visit to this museum is highly recommended.

A part-time writer and full-time webmaster, Joseph Patrick, can usually be found managing his full service travel website, http://www.Triptactics.com where you will find the resources to book affordable trips to Kansas City as well as other exciting vacation destinations.

About the author:

A part-time writer and full-time webmaster, J. Patrick, can usually be found managing his full service travel website, http://www.Triptactics.com where you will find the resources to book affordable trips to Kansas City as well as other exciting vacation destinations.

More on We Love Lili – Jazz Music: History of Jazz Music in Kansas City

Also recorded live at the Historical Missouri Botanical Garden’s First Annual Jazz in June Series 1993, the Rob Block Latin Jazz Sextet Lay down some nice original Latin Jazz Songs The Personnel for this set include Russell Gunn, Willie Akins, Ken Bleu Campbell, 1997 New York Best New Jazz Artist nominee Gregory Tardy, Tenor Saxophone, with Jaime Restrepo, Bass, Keyboard, Alex “Bo” Deal, Congas, with Mattheo Mulcahy & Dan Fermin adding percussion.
Project also includes a never released song (Red Room Poppin) from the 1990 Russell Gunn Quintet with Greg Tardy, Lesmoisne Carlise, Jim Green, Rob Block, and Ken Bleu Campbell Other Musicians include Webster University (St. Louis, Mo.) Music Instructors and musicians Paul DeMarinis, Kim Portnoy, Randy Smith, Dan Eubanks, Emmanuel & Kenyon Harold and others
The Musicians on this album have collectively recorded 15 personal projects with respected jazz industry record labels ( Atlantic, Impulse, Palmetto, Maxx Jazz, Justin Time ) and have performed on over 75 other CD projects with well known musicians including; Branford & Winton Marsalis, Cyrus Chestnut, John Hicks, George Mesterhazy, Mulgrew Miller, Nicholas Payton, Maxwell, DeAngelo, Arturo Sandoval, The Rebecca Parris Quartet, James Moody, Elvin Jones, and many others.

Available For Review/Sale, 2001, Big Steve Candela Music, Candela Block Music, BMI, Rugken Music, BMI, Kenny Candela Music, BMI www.Good Ground Records.5u.com

More on Jazz Great Miles Davis Home Town Finally Creates a Jazz Record Label (Lili Loves Jazz)

Jazz Goa is formed by a group of musicians and music lovers to promote jazz in and out of Goa. The club’s principal aim is to improve the lot and provide an organised platform for local as well as visiting international jazz musicians. Goa has always been a favoured chillout destination for some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians. Beautiful surroundings, peaceful laidback lifestyle and the people’s genuine warmth and hospitality has made Goa an inspirational paradise for creative artistes from all over the world. Jazz Goa will play host to visiting jazz musicians offering them opportunities to perform in informal jam sessions as well as full fledged concerts and professional gigs at various venues in Goa that feature live jazz.

More on Jazz Goa (Lili Loves Jazz)

Coltrane did not start his first jazz group until 1960,( a quartet including Steve Kuhn, Pete LaRoca and Billy Higgins), so the period of time described in this CD is prior to any real self controlled, organized play on his part. First Weinstein discusses the difference between Coltrane s pre-Atlantic, pre-Impulse recordings versus the later sound. Coltrane has recordings that go all the way back to 1946 but he did not start recording professionally and with a means to preserve and distribute until 1955. After this point however, he created and produced an impressive number of albums. Since his death, some of these have been released. Still others have been releases solely on the merit of his having been playing on the side or in a lesser portion of a recording. Weinstein mentioned that a previous Coltrane release, a 16 disc set was overwhelming and that the new 6 disc set of his review is a much more manageable collection of Coltrane s music, though not as exhaustive as the aforementioned collection.

He recommends tuning out the other musicians and concentrating solely on Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers and calls Coltrane s playing intensely inspired.

Weinstein goes through each disc, listing the songs and recommends listening to the CD s in backwards order as they are chronologically listed. He suggests that the listener go back in time and listen to Coltrane s earliest represented recordings last instead of first as a kind of musical audio deconstruction.

Biographical information on Coltrane suggests that he began to play while a young man in a racially segregated community after the death of his aunt, grandfather and father. His musical passion seemed to be built from the grief over these deaths and his sadness was transformed into practicing obsessively. Though the new CD set does not go that far back into Coltrane s early years. It depicts and records a specific time of his growth. Weinstein contends that you are able to hear that growth and that it is well worth the purchase.

More on Jazz Beginnings (We Love Lili)

More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Caf in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be labeled), gave new dimension to the perennial “where’s the melody?” complaint against jazz.

For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on its opening night was in fact sheer cacophony.

Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method.

But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural nationalism movement, the madness did indeed have a method. The avowed objective of the dramatic innovations that musicians like Ornette, Cecil Taylor and, in their footsteps, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period) John Coltrane, among hundreds of others initiated and practiced from the late ’50s into the early ’70s, was to restore black music to its original identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song form, the fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and began to employ, among other things, simultaneous improvisations, fragmented tempos and voice-like timbres, they were very deliberately replacing, with ancient black methodologies, those Western concepts and systems that had, by their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in America to either a pop music or (for many of them no less a corruption of what black music was supposed to be) an art form.

Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the leader of his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made the point in an interview I did with him for Rolling Stone.

“I don’t want to make music that sounds nice,” Silva told me. “I want to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual communion between people. There’s a flow coming from every individual, a continuous flow of energy coming from the subconscious level. The idea is to tap that energy through the medium of improvised sound. I do supply the band with notes, motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off point. I also direct the band, though not in any conventional way like I might suddenly say ‘CHORD!’ But essentially I’m dealing with improvisation as the prime force, not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen musicians together and they all play at once, eventually a cohesion, an order, will be reached, and it will be on a transcendent plane.”

(I commented in the interview that “Silva says his band wants to commune with the spirit world and you aren’t sure that it doesn’t. With thirteen musicians soloing at the same time, at extraordinary decibel levels, astonishingly rapid speeds and with complete emotional abandon for more than an hour, the band arrives not only at moments of excruciating beauty, but at sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and waves and becoming almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight and force of their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird, spectral things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your head.”)

Of course not all of these musicians shared Silva’s position entirely. Some saw the music as an intimidating political weapon in the battle for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others, like Taylor, did and quite emphatically, regard themselves as artists. For Taylor, a pianist and composer who took what he needed not just from Ellington and Monk, but from Stravinsky, Ives and Bartok, it wasn’t about jettisoning Western influences on jazz, but about absorbing them into a specifically black esthetic.

For the most part, however, disparities among the younger musicians of the period amounted to dialects of the same language. All of them shared the “new black consciousness” a new pride in being black and their reconstruction of jazz, their purging of its Western elements, or their assertion of black authority over those elements, was, to one degree or another, intended to revive and reinstate the music’s first purpose.

Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints the inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other. “Man,” he said to me once, coming off an especially vigorous set. “In another ten years we won’t even need traffic lights we’re gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another.”

And I have to say that I agreed with him.

This was, after all, a period in history when “restrictions” of every conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to (with the moon shot) the very law of gravity, were successfully being challenged. If you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary’s “atomic” level of consciousness, and if you could call a girl you’d been set up with on a blind date and she might say, “Let’s ‘ball’ first and then I’ll see if I want to have dinner with you,” you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of a revolution in human nature itself was taking place.

And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of all ill (had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation with the hydrogen bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a transformation, saw the new black music as leading the way, as the veritable embodiment of what Herbert Marcuse called “the revolution of unrepression.”

In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about the relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock the other musical phenomenon of the period were not uncommon.

I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan activist, poet and author of Guitar Army.

John took the position that rock was the true “music of the revolution.”

No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the sensual and the mystical. But in these respects it only caught up to where jazz had always been. In contrast to what some of the younger black musicians were up to the purging of white elements African music had picked up in America rock was simply the first hip white popular music.

Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western disciplines by going “outside,” as the musicians termed it, of Western procedures and methods and letting the music find its own natural order and form got to an actualization of what true revolution would be. Rock’s lyrics, I said, promoted, in many instances, the idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically rock remained bound to the very traditions and conventions that its lyrics railed against and the audience never got a demonstration or the experience of authentic spiritual communion. Rock’s lyrics were undermined and attenuated in the very act of their expression by the system used to express them. The new jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from the purely formal structures of western musical systems, but, implicitly, from the emotional and social ethos in which those structures originated.

As I say, it was a heady time.

Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine form just barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist altogether as a revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic movements of the epoch with which it shared the faith that a new kind of human being would surface once all structure and authority that wasn t internal in origin was rejected, free jazz was ultimately ambushed by its naivet .

But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an ongoing impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it to, it did (however contrary to its original ambition), expand the vocabulary and the field of options available to mainstream jazz musicians. And while they function today in what are essentially universes of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray, Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are still very much around and continuing to discover surprise and the marvelous.

Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as harbingers of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians continue to produce musical miracles as a matter of course. For an especially vivid demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of his live performances what he would call “exchanges of energy” with drummers like Max Roach or Elvin Jones.

In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of rampant often willful mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.

More on Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the ’60s (Jazz Loves Lili)

Duke Ellington is considered to be one of the greatest figures in the history of American music. Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington was born in Washington D.C. on April 29, 1899.
His parents were James Edward and Daisy Kennedy Ellington. They raised Duke as an only child, until his sister, Ruth, was born when Duke was sixteen years old.
Duke, even as a teenager had a great talent for music. In the beginning of his musical life, Duke began to take a promising interest in a new type of music that would later be called jazz. Choosing to base his career on a new idea may not have been smart, but Duke did take this chance and in turn became one of the most famous musicians in America.
Duke’s first job was at a government office. He was a clerk who received the minimum wage and was barely getting by. He would arrange dance bands for weddings and parties for extra money. His mother taught him how to play the piano. Sometimes he put this knowledge to use and played at a few of the dance parties and weddings.
After Duke’s first job, he became more interested in painting and the arts. For a few years he painted public posters. Duke then decided to put together his own band. At this point in his life things started to change for the better for Duke, but not for long. In those days, this new music was just beginning to develop and would later be given the name of jazz. In that time it was considered to be low and vulgar because it was music that grew directly out of the Black culture. In those early years, segregation was at one of its all time worst points in history. I think that is why Duke Ellington was one of the most important individuals to the growth and development of jazz.
During Duke’s long career, the new music slowly spread out of bars and saloons, to dance and night clubs and then eventually onto the concert stage.
In time, jazz became a universally recognized form of art and has been said that it is the only real form that has originated from the American soul.
By the 1960’s Duke traveled the globe so many times that he became known as the unofficial ambassador to the United States. Duke’s band had played in Russia, Japan, Latin America, the Far East, the Middle East, and Africa.
Duke, himself, was an elegant man. When the white people looked down on the black man and his music, Duke managed to bring dignity to every one of his performances. Once, the jazz historian Leonard Feather described Duke as, ‘an inch over six feet tall, sturdily built, he had an innate grandeur that would have enabled him to step with unquenched dignity out of a mud puddle.’
Duke’s private life was something of an enigma. Although he had many friends he never really told them everything about himself. He would often guard his privacy probably because he had so little of it. When he was alone though, he would almost always be arranging the next tune for the band to play, and was always thinking or preparing something for the band to do in the next performance.
Duke attracted some of the greatest musicians to join his band. Because of this it has been said that many of Duke’s pieces are almost impossible to exactly duplicate without the personal style of the original musicians. One of the strange things that was known about Duke was that his school music teacher, Mrs. Clinkscales, who played the piano, was always the inspiration for him to just sit down and start tinkering around with a few notes that usually became big hits.
In his band the two, probably most famous musicians were the trumpeter Whetsol and the saxophonist Hodges. As the band became more and more popular, saxophonist Hodges became the highest paid performer in the United States.
The 1920’s became known as ‘the Jazz Age’ because jazz had hit its first great burst of popularity. At that time Duke then added a young drummer named Sonny Greer. A few years after Greer was hired, Duke’s band hit a very rough spot. They were often stuck in the street with no money and nowhere to go. Duke and his band often were stuck doing crude recordings just for a few dollars to buy a meal.
In the autumn of 1927, luck had crossed paths with Duke again. The manager of Duke’s band, Irving Mills, had heard that the prestigious cotton club was looking for a new band and immediately Irving began campaigning for Duke. Duke and his band opened on December 4, 1927 to meet a mad rush of spectators who eagerly awaited to hear Dukes newest pieces. Duke’s band became very prosperous and they had their own spot on the Cotton Club floor with special lighting and accommodations.
At the year of 1928 the band consisted of Bubber Miley, Freddy Jenkins, and Arthur Whetsol on trumpet, joined with Tricky Sam Nanton, and Juan Tizol on trombone. Johnny Hodges, now on alto sax, with Barney Bigard doubled on tenor sax and clarinet, and finally Harry Carney at seventeen years old joined on bari sax. Carney was known as one of the first people in a band ever to use the bari sax as a solo instrument.
While Duke’s band was performing at the Cotton Club, his band participated in more than sixty-four recording sessions.
In 1931 Duke grew so tired of the show-business routines that he decided to try his luck again on his own. When he arrived in New York his band grew to almost three times what it originally had been at the Cotton Club. Duke feared that this would become a very serious problem considering how the stock market crashed in late 1929 and millions of people across the United States were out of work.
Somehow, though, most of the entertainment business survived the economic hardships. Ellington’s band had appeared on Broadway and had even gone to Hollywood to make a movie. Duke’s band was having a hard time performing in the south because of the segregation laws not allowing blacks to eat in white restaurants or finding accommodations that would allow blacks and whites to stay together in a half-decent room.
In 1932 Duke added a trombonist named Lawrence Brown. In the same year, most of the other big bands were adding vocalists to their ensemble and thus Duke felt pressured to do so too. Duke then hired a woman named Ivie Anderson and quickly proved that he had done the right thing.
Then in 1933 his band got a chance to play in Europe. At first Duke was very skeptical of how his music would be reacted to just because jazz had its roots in America and the Europeans had a very contrasting style of music. The band managed to talk Duke into believing the idea was a good one. The band’s first stop was England. The band was amazed at how well informed they were about their entire past. Even the Prince of Wales came to hear the band play. At the time the prince was an amateur drummer and Sonny Greer Showed the prince how to work the drum set and they played together and in the end were calling each other ‘Sonny’ and ‘The Wale’. All the concerts held in England were sellouts. The band then moved on to Scotland, and then Paris, France where their music was greeted with open arms.
When Duke’s band returned to America the band really began feeling the hardship and sorrow of traveling on the road, being separated from loved ones. Also, many of the band members, including Duke, began developing drinking problems and started making some of the musicians lives miserable. What made things worse was the fact that Duke’s mother, Daisy, died in May of 1935 that set Duke into a deep depression and he used to sit and stare into space while he talked to himself. Fortunately though, those long pep-talks with himself seem to snap Duke out of his depression.
But despite everything the band survived and in 1946 a saxophonist/clarinetist named Russell Procope joined the band and brought everyone up to a new point of view about traveling on the road. Around the time that Procope joined the band Duke invented a new song called ‘Reminiscing in Tempo’ and was not looked upon favorably by critics but it did seem to sum everything up that was written by Ellington from 1931 to 1939 in a combination of gladness, sadness, triumph, and tragedy. But then Duke’s friend Arthur Whetsol became and had to leave the band.
Then the future of the band seemed uncertain as the depression continued and millions of people were still out of work. Until around 1935 when the ‘Swing Era’ hit the U.S. Irving Mills had then formed his own record company in 1936 that boomed with popularity as the demand for big bands playing this new swing music was in intense demand.
Later on Duke hired a lyrical writer named Billy Strayhorn that led a premature death in 1967. But when Strayhorn was with the band he wrote many compositions that often went into the band’s book of music. Then in 1942 Duke hired one of the best tenor saxophonists ever and let him play the first tenor sax solo ever arranged by Duke Ellington.
In 1951 Saxophonist Johnny Hodges, trombonist Lawrence Brown, and Sonny Greer left the band together and formed their own band but then in 1955 Sonny Greer returned to the band and stayed with Duke until his death in 1970. And then by the 1950’s the Ellington band was carrying on almost alone.
By 1972 the times and styles of the world no longer fit the old time style of Duke’s band. The band was not known like it used to be and that could be the point in time I suppose you could say that the band broke up.
Duke Ellington’s career spanned the whole history of the birth of the music called jazz. And nowhere in that glorious history is there a man who had more love for music, more respect for his art, than the man they called the Duke.

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More on Duke Ellington Starring in The Evolution of Jazz (Lili Loves Jazz)

Yup, notes are the problem. How many to play, which ones, and at what time.

Guitars Guitarists are known by their desire to play one or two extra notes on their instrument after the song has ended. This works well in the early part of the gig, but sooner or later the drummer notices what happens and will cover their final odd notes with a short flourish on the drums. Later still, the alto player joins in. In the hands of professionals this becomes an extended improvised coda which surprises everyone since it bears no relation to the song at all. Guitarists try to sit next to drummers but a long way from pianists. There is no known reason why. Perhaps it is because pianists can use all ten fingers at the same time.

Ending songs This is one of the most difficult bits in jazz to do properly. Some bands are on record as not knowing how to do it at all, and once the final melody has been played out, someone then strikes up with another solo. (True) This makes for fascinating and meaningful social interaction within the group. This is one reason why audiences prefer to watch jazz players rather than listen to them.

Starting solos Knowing where the 1 is tests the mettle of all soloists. For some of them, listening to the music itself is of little help, and they need someone to nod them in on time. Singers are particularly prone to starting problems and frequently offer themselves to band leaders who look after them in this regard.

Playing duff solos If you play a duff solo it is because you have forgotten where you are in the song, or forgotten what key you are supposed to be playing at that moment, or because you are out of it anyway. After you have finished everyone goes quiet – although everyone knows where you went wrong and will talk about it behind your back. The thing to do is to ask the band loudly, “Did someone cross the beat at bar 23?” The band will look at the drummer, who will say “Sorry” and you are off the hook.

Drummers Drummers usually take up the instrument as part of an anger management course. You can’t play as many notes as a drummer plays and worry about what key you are in as well. There are too many jokes about drummers, too often told in public announcements for them to feel totally at ease at all times. A bit of tlc to drummers pays off.

Double bass Double bass players have feelings of insecurity, and carry their instruments to gigs as self-abasement. They feel bad because they always play far fewer notes than anyone else but receive the same money. They are given occasional solos to play because the rest of the band want a lift in the van going home afterwards. The bassist will love it and will smile shyly if you tell him that his is the most important instrument in the band. This has the advantage of being true, unlike everything you say to everyone else about how good they sound. Sincerity needs to be practiced.

Classical musicians playing jazz Jazz players all have feelings of self-doubt when they play with classically trained players. Jazz workshop groups sometimes attack classical newcomers immediately by advising “Just follow the 2-5-1 progressions, dropping down to a minor third in the bridge.” They then destroy the classical player by taking their music away from them, and immediately starting in the count in. Professionals raise their game here by saying, “Let’s do it in Gb” and then starting the count in, in double time.

The way for classical musicians to get their own back is to suggest that the piano or guitar player plays the melody. These people can only read chords and not dots so they are cooked.

Pianists Pianists are up against time. They know too much. They know about harmony and chord progressions. They have to make a decision between 786 different chords and voicings, plus substitute chords, they have ten fingers to use and the possibility of using any of seventy-four scales. They are also the only people who can see every note they are going to play, which somehow contrives to make the problem worse. A fast swing piece at 240 bpm with two chords in each bar means they have 0.5 of a second to decide whether to play the altered chord, or the diminished chord, or the straightforward dominant 7th or maybe even a flat sixth triad in the upper structure and how to voice it and which inversion to use. (Which fingers on which notes) In addition they have to do something interesting with the fingers of their right hand. This all may seem a bit technical but it indicates why there is so much turmoil going on inside pianists heads and why they all end up playing by ear like everyone else after the first four bars. It is little wonder that they are bald and introverted. It is also the reason why they are so condescending to the rest of the group.

Saxophone players The problem here is that they are recruited and trained by other saxophone players. Personality tests shows that they are exhibitionists, first and foremost. Some of them are social contrarians who will play in a scruffy T-shirt with We Love Atlantic City on the front. These people will always play with a very dirty instrument. But a dirty instrument many also be a much loved archeological find. They are taught that their aim in soloing is to play as many different scales as possible at a very fast pace and never to acknowledge that the rhythm section is telling the audience, and them, where the music is in reality. Later on in life, saxophone players realise that they really need to know more about chords and progressions so they buy a small keyboard in order to see the notes. Then they find that there is a lot of mental effort involved in learning about progressions and so on, so they end up playing the blues scale 99.9% of the time.

Trumpeters Trumpeters are nearly always male and are in it only for the sex. If they play loud, and very high they can attract women from miles around. Not for nothing was triple tonguing invented by a trumpeter.

Jazz singers No one in a band can make the musicians change the usual key of the song except a female singer.

If the singer smiles at them and says thank you then the rhythm section will forgive her for not coming in on time, not finding the right note and for talking to the audience while the soloists are playing. Male singers have to stick with the key the music was written in.

Playing simple jazz. The simplest way an amateur can play a jazz solo is to turn down the sound control on the amplifier. Afterwards you should ask if there was something amiss with the sound balance. Experienced amateurs realise that there are seven notes in each scale. (Actually there are eight notes in the diminished scale but only pianists know that.) Players can cut down the amount of notes they have to think about by 28% if they only use the pentatonic scales. (5 notes in each pentatonic scale, saving 2 notes. 2 notes saved out of 7 equals 28%. Music is very mathematical)

Theoretically, you can cut the number of notes used in a solo to four if you just use tetratonic groups. (This is the pentatonic scale minus one note). But very few people know this, and it has never been tried in anger. It is mentioned only by clever dicks who want to get one back on the pianist.

(Actually the chromatic scale has 12 notes in it – but this is so obvious that even Rover Scouts can work it out, and no one can use it for long before being thrown out of the band.)

Jazz teaching Jazz teachers will tell you that there are no bad notes in jazz only “poor” choices. They say that if you can play immediately a semi-tone below or above your bum note you will get out of trouble. In theory this may or may not be true but by the time you’ve tried it the band has gone ahead with another couple of bars by which time the “corrected note” will now have become a bum note so no one has ever found out. Look behind at the motives of jazz teachers who say this kind of thing. Jazz teachers want you to like them and keep hiring them which is why they tell you this crap. You are their living after all. It is possible to make so many poor choices, that you get thrown out of the band.

Deps This heading is to test you, to see if you know the “in” words in jazz. Band leaders hate it when people can’t turn up for the gig. People always claim illness but it is usually because they have got another gig that night which pays a bit more. Sometimes band leaders insist on you providing and rehearsing your own deputy. (“Dep” – see it now?) Never ever bring a dep who is better at playing jazz than you are. Otherwise, in the long run you will have to go back to looking at the small ad cards in musical instrument shops. By the way the yanks don’t say dep but sub (substitute) but that could be confused with tritone sub so stick with the English.

Avoiding copyright fees No copyright exists if you wait 70 years after the death of the last surviving composer. You can bring this event forward by several years if you let the composer hear you improvising on his music. Jerome Kern hated jazz.

Copyright exists only in the melody, no one can copyright chords. This is how bebop was started by a bunch of crafty but poor musicians. They took the chords used in standard songs and then invented new melodies over the top of them. This is how Ornithology sounds so much like How High the Moon. You still have to pay the estate of the composer of Ornithology a copyright fee. I don’t know who he was or when he died but no doubt several million jazz ancestor worshippers will e-mail in and tell me and I’d reply that any nerd can look it up in seconds.* *before you clever dicks start it was Charlie “the Bird” Parker, d 1955, the bird, ornithology, Birdland the famous New York jazz club, geddit? Did you know that they put a flock of birds into Birdland as a decorative feature, but they all died of smoke inhalation when a fire broke out. Laugh a minute jazz is.

Real Books For about 35 you can buy a Real book consisting of about 500 jazz song manuscripts with the words. This costs you 7p per song and looks like a bargain. But you’ll never play about 450 of them in your lifetime. So it actually costs you about 70p per usable song. Still a bargain when compared to paying for downloaded music scripts.

Bandleaders have to buy Bb and Eb versions of Real books because you can never expect alto sax players and trumpeters to buy their own copies.

What the sellers of Real Books don’t tell you is that the song the band wants to play is in a different copy of the Real Book – one you don’t own.

No, I’m not going to tell you how to get an illegal copy of half a dozen different Real Books downloaded to your hard drive. But you can.

Playing by ear You are not supposed to do it. This is what the old great jazz players used to do because there was no jazz music theory then. But how can you build a world of jazz music education if people just pop off and play by ear? As a trained jazz musician you are supposed to know what you are doing and why at any time. This of course is absolutely impossible and all professionals end up playing by ear themselves. Afterwards they’ll tell you what they probably did in theoretical terms, but will be unable to reproduce it. “I was using D7 over C major, I think” they’ll bluff.

You can tell when the pianist is at his wits end and is playing by ear. He will drop the left hand out and just play with the right hand. This means he does not know where he is in the song and hopes the drummer will give a big flourish at the end of the section. He is too worried to listen to the bass as he should.

Abstracted with permission from jazzenthusiasts.com “>www.jazzenthusiasts.com

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