Giant Steps

Tonight Ben Prentiss, Shea Ellis, Graham Duval and I are scheduled to have rehearsal for a performance in class tomorrow.  We had a rehearsal on Friday, but we didn't seem to be getting into the groove, so we called it early.  At that practice we were working on 12-bar blues.  Perhaps it was mostly me who wasn't getting into the groove on that one.

I feel that 12-bar blues are about the most simple and boring music to perform (perhaps that presents a challenge in itself...how to make it interesting, but we won't go there).  I have been playing 12-bar blues since I was five.  In fact just the other day I visited my friend, and his young son had just taken up guitar lessons.  The first chords the teacher showed him were E, A, and D.  I showed him how that easily translated to a 12-bar blues (especially on guitar, because one can use the open strings), and he was quite excited to know that he could now play a song after only one lesson.  It just goes to show that 12-bar blues are one of the simplest things that can be played though.

I feel limited by only three chords, and solos consisting primarily of either a seven note diatonic scale, or even worse simply a minor pentatonic scale.  I was having a feeling like that in practice last friday, so I suggested we regroup after the weekend, and I would bring in some jazz charts that were essentially 12-bar blues, but "jazzed" up a little.

In my search for 12-bar jazz I went through all of my Fake Books and Real Books.  Boy did that bring back the memories.  When I first started guitar lessons my teacher and I used these extensively (he had just graduated from UMA's Jazz program, so naturally he would choose that route).  By the time I started perusing these books I had strayed very far from 12-bar anything.  In fact I ended up at John Coltrane's "Giant Steps."

In attempting to warm up on the chart, I was doing okay.  All of the chords are either major, minor, major seventh, minor seventh, or dominant seventh chords.  Nothing too tricky there.  The tempo is really quick, something like 280 beats per minute, but I was doing okay with it.  I had to put the chart down to go to Dr. Carlsen's theory class.  When I arrived I asked him whether jazz, such as Giant Steps, would be analyzed in the methods of tonal harmony, or twentieth century harmony.  Before I knew it we had spent an hour discussing this piece!  Boy did I learn a lot.  Giant Steps has so much depth to it.  There are sequences galore, and once we got to analyzing Coltrane's solo (which I had a transcription of) I found that Coltrane is quite a genius.  The way his solo arpeggiates and flies through scales show that he had a very deep understanding of music theory.

Before theory class my thought had been that we could play Giant Steps, and whoever was soloing could just play random notes as fast as they could the whole time, and it would sound fine.  In analyzing the piece I have now decided that I might feel embarrassed to show up to class and do such a thing (although to the untrained ear it would work, since the solo is moving at eighth notes...560 notes a minute!, it would be hard to try and judge the quality of the solo).  I also realized I might be embarrassed by how I was voicing the chords.

Like on a piano, one can play the same chord in many ways on a guitar.  With my rusty jazz chord vocabulary I was all over the place in my first attempt at Giant Steps.  My left hand was literally sliding up and down the neck between every chord.  Although I was playing the right chords, it would look very ridiculous to play this way on stage.  I could definitely sit down and figure out how to voice the chords so that they were all in first position for instance.  But these shapes would not be in my muscle memory at all, and haven't been since I played jazz in high school.  I am afraid that this piece may be too much to bite off for only one rehearsal the night before class.

So we will see what we show up to in class tomrrow.  I do want to do something more structured than just 12-bar in E though.  A theme that has been rolling around my head all semester has been, "How does one balance improv with structure?"  I am a believer that structure can lead to even greater depth in improv.  Dr. Pane quoted his wife Dr. Funahashi as mentioning something about how even classical pianists improvise.  I believe what she meant was that with a structured score, the improv gets even more exciting because the performers can improvise between the notes, or use rubato, or many other techniques.  No composition is so complete that it leaves nothing up to the performer.  Perhaps then the age old battle has been between performers and composers...the composers are trying to get the performers to stop improvising, and realize the vision of the composition completely.  And the performers are trying to stick their own improvisation in, in order to create a sense of individualism.

In closing, please check out this amazing YouTube video of Coltrane's Giant Steps.  It is an animation of the score, in which the notes fall into place as the piece goes along.

Jambands Lights

Tomrrow I have to present on "Jambands and Lights."  I'm really glad that I was given this opportunity to present on lights in a music class, even though they stimulate the eyes and not the ears.

I think I am going to start with the 1960's.  Concert lighting really came into its own at this point.  Much of what it utilized was stolen from theatrical lighting.  However concert lighting is also responsible for many innovations.  For instance before concert lighting there were not many options for portable rigging and trussing.  Since theatrical lighting designers are afforded a longer time in the venue, and if it is a touring theatre production then the venue most likely already has rigging built in, theatrical lighting didn't need to put an emphasis on portability.  During the advent of concerts with world tours the lighting designers quickly realized that bands play in very different venues than theatre.  Sometimes the venue will be a theatre, but very often it might be a civic center or outdoors, and so the bands had to bring their own lights.

In the 1960's the mecca of lighting was San Francisco.  Some of the original Jam Bands (such asa the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, etc.) cam from SF.  I found a great book by James Moody that has a nice history of concert lighting.  There would be "happenings" that truly broke any sort of categorization into any one art form.  There would be video, music, non-musical audio, and lights.  Most people at these events would take LSD and try to just take it all in.  Very often the Grateful Dead would play at these events.  Many people did experiments in lighting that have led to what we know today as concert lighting (a side note: many people also did experiments with surround sound at these events too).

In the 60's concert lighting was defined very differently than theatrical lighting.  The point wasn't neccesarily to make it easy to see the band.  It was for the overall effect.  Now someone in the nosebleed seats wouldn't have to try and squint at the band, but could look at the giant light shows instead.  In the 60's the preferred method of lighting effects was to use a typical overhead projector with petri dishes on it.  Then oil, water, and food coloring would be added (oil and water don't mix, but rather swirl around each other).  The heat from the projector would cause the mixture to make very interesting patterns.

Throughout the 1970's concert lighting continued to expand.  The overhead projector was seen less and less, and giant rigs with par cans (basically a concert lighting fixture that is a coffee can with a light bulb, and a colored filter on it) were seen more and more.  Unfortunately microprocessors were still unheard of, so the method of controlling these was very archaic.

In the 1980's computers started to be incorporated into lighting.  This was the first time that programmable lighting boards were seen, and also the first time that lights that could move via control from the computer were seen.  These new lights were fantastic.  Inside the light they had a color wheel that could be controlled remotely, and they were mounted on yokes that could allow them to move in 360 degrees on the X, Y, or Z axis, also controllable remotely.

In the 1990's these movable fixtures became the norm, and one band to utilize them greatly was another Jamband: Phish.  Many people call Phish's light designer, Chris Kuroda, the fifth member of the band.  His instrument was the light rig.  He would have to learn all of the changes in the songs, just like the members of the band.  During improvisation sections of songs the band and he would be in the pocket together too.  The band would look to the lights above them for inspiration, just as Chris was listening to the music for inspiration.  

Last Week's Class Performance

Well last week I performed in two groups.  The John Fox Company performed to catch up from the week before, and The Pond Duck Trio had a surprise reunion.

I thought that the John Fox Co. went very well.  We had rehearsed the song "Crazy Bus," and it came out fine, aside from some issues with levels.  Ben came up with the lyrics, which reflected on a time when he heard WTOS broadcasting live from a fair in Maine.  The DJ was advocating that people come down, and ride the crazy bus there.  The DJ also said they had a guy there who could sing any song that anyone named.  It was a good prompt for lyrics.

The levels were a little iffy, but that is part of what comes with technology.  The Kaoss Pad has so many settings, that without any time to refresh my memory that day, I was getting a little lost in the circuits of the machine.  As unfortunate as that was, it also brought a fresh new sound to our song.  In fact the rendition of Crazy Bus that we performed sounded nothing like the one we rehearsed.  That is okay with the John Fox Company though.

We also did our experiment with the Chromatic Memory Game.  Quite a coincidence that that day we studied John Zorn, who also developed music performance/improv games.  I thought that the game worked out alright, but it was tough to make the transitions sound good.  I think if I used that game again, I would have the players play the game until the end, write the order of notes that they came up with on the board, and then improvise from those after the game was done.  Then we could spend more time on each note, and have someone call out when it was time to move to the next note.

The Pond Duck Trio performance was interesting anyway.  It was odd to play in that group again.  The three of us hadn't played together since December when we did Abbey Road (other than the night before to practice for class).  I think that since we were a little rusty, and our band intercommunication was rusty, it was hard to be satisfied.  Human nature allows me to remember only the best times, and I sort of just expected that our performance would be as good or better than those times we played together in the past.  It also didn't help that it was so early in the morning, and I was running on very little sleep.

Kaoss Memory

The John Fox Company strikes again.  This week we tried a new electronic setup.  Using two electric guitars and the mini '80s Casio keyboard we ran our instruments through the Korg Kaoss pad that is in the EA lab, then that into Ben's sampling pedal.

This worked very well.  There are three inputs on the Kaoss pad (although only one can be played simultaneously, Ben's sampling pedal can still create textures by sampling one at a time), so it effectively acted as a mixer.  We inputted one guitar, a microphone, and the Casio.

Then the sampling pedal has two inputs, so we plugged the second guitar into that.  Now we had four sources of sound, all able to be quite effected.

For most of the time during our practice we just did free form layering, getting familiar with this new setup.  The sampling pedal was placed at Dan and Ben's feet, and I put the Kaoss pad on my knee.  Dan and Ben each took an electric guitar, I took the Casio, and we began.

The Kaoss pad can act as either a sampler, an effects module, a synthesizer, or a drum machine.  To start our layers I played the drum machine off of my Casio.  Then I hit the BPM button on the Kaoss to be the same as the Casio.  Pressing the tactile pad, I could signal various drum beats samples to play to the BPM of the Casio.  This created a very nice drum texture for our first layer, since the modern Korg drum beat contrasted so much with the Casio's drum beat.

So we continued to add layers.  Eventually I brought up an idea I had a few weeks ago to create more interaction with the class as we improvised.  I suggested that we create a deck of twenty-four cards in pairs of twelve colors.  Then put every note of the chromatic scale on each of those twelve pairs, and presto...we have Chromatic Memory game (I'm still waiting to hear back from Parker Brothers).

The game is a two player game, ages 6 and up.  The deck is strewn across a table, face down, and each player takes turns flipping any two cards.  When s/he gets a pair, that goes into his/her hand.  At that time it will be indicated to the band which note of the chromatic scale was on the pair, and the band will proceed to modulate so as to tonicize that new note.  The player goes again.  Whichever player gets the most notes by the end of the game wins!

We shall see how this works out on Tuesday.  I think there perhaps should be a third person who indicates on a piece of paper to the band what the note is.  Then it can also be looked at after the game is done to see what the order of notes was.  Wouldn't it be wild to play and coincidentally turns out to be the circle of fifths?

In closing I will leave a link to a piece of technology that I have heard of that reminded me of the Kaoss pad.  It is a tangible music device.  Bjork uses it.  Need I say more? Reactable on YouTube.