Relaxin' at Camarillo

Rejoice, ye misremembered masses, for the urge, it swells before me~!

From the distance, footsteps. The jangle of long-forgotten keys and curses at a stubborn lock. The creak of a rusty hinge announces a room thick with dust, entirely dark save for the guttering light of an old computer that reads "Relaxin' at Camarillo".

For eighteen months there has been virtually no guitaring. There are a number of reasons - this mainly (BUY IT!), but also just getting into the habit of not playing. I allow myself to slip into habits very easily. I also turned 40 and became obsessed with preserving what remained of my imperiled virility, and started working out like a maniac. After many miles of running, two damaged neck vertebrae, a numb arm and being knocked out by a 20 year-old in a boxing ring, I've decided it's time to return to the original project - jazz mastery in time for retirement!

However, there are some rules:

1. This time, I'm focusing exclusively on playing solo. This doesn't just mean super-sonic reharmonizations and mental chord melodies, but also strumming the chords and singing along. From now on, I play each song in its entirety as if it were a performance - what I like to call the 'this is not a party, it's a hostage situation' approach to guitar playing.
2. I'm only going to practice when I feel like it, and I'm not going to let the non-existent readers of an incoherent blog tyrannize me into feeling bad about it. Fuckers!
3. I shall spend absolutely no money on new books/videos/instructional materials that promise to take my playing to a new level, at least until I can say that I've successfully exhausted those I already own.
4. I'm going to drink more.

And finally, some jazz-related content, here's a nice piece on Bucky Pizarelli that I heard on NPR on the 21st February. You saw it here first.

If you can't let your hair down, take it off

Though I've become utterly allergic to the guitar since November and have mainly been listening to a combination of Talk Sport and Acid Rock (sadly minus the acid - can't do psychadelics with my hernia), I did manage to get out last night to see the formidable Russell Malone Quartet, and even got to press some flesh when they were unintentionally trapped into shaking hands with every single member of the  audience as they walked to their dressing room while we filed out exits. What to say, except that it was an amazing show: the tune selection was an choice combination of up-tempo, Benson-like funk, standards, pop and theme tunes glazed with what he called an "afro-sheen" (Gunsmoke, "Unchained Melody" and the Carpenter's "We've Only Just Begun"). Though controversially, the highlight of the evening was probably the mad skillz and over-developed forearms of drummer Jonathan Blake, there many beautiful moments of chord-melody (cascades of Lenny Breau harmonics), including a nice "Home on the Range," and a standard that I wish I could remember the name of as I want to learn it (was it "If You Only Knew"? I can't find a title like that anywhere). Russell was playing a '76 two pup L5, and the only minor blot came when he forgot where he was and announced how glad he was to be in a totally different town. Life on the road, man...

(How Deep is Your Love - not part of last night's set, but you get the picture).

A Radiophonic Christmas

 
Hey ho! Christmas time has passed, and though I never quite managed to put together the deathly Christmas medley I'd promised myself, I've still been enjoying a fairly constant immersion in global jazz thanks to my brand new wifi radio, a stonking contraption that allows me to tune in to more or less any radio station in the world that transmits via the internet. Purchased in a bout of yule-tide homesickness, I thought that being able to listen to leaden adaptations of Victorian novels on BBC Radio 4 would somehow satisfy the frequent sensation of cultural displacement. Lo! a single day of  one-act dramas and unfunny news quizes was all it took to rehydrate the horrible claustrophobia and writhing discomfort of youth that had made me promise myself that one day I would winkle out of that gritty, parochial hell, and flee to a newer, altogether more stupid, world. So, here I am, subjecting myself to British radio in small doses, including the unbearably arch but oddly-lovable Resonance FM, London arts radio whose Boxing Day programming more than summed it up, by offering a full reading of Christopher Smart's long and crazy poem "Jubilate Agno," and following it with two hours of bumbling hipster arseholes playing the theme-tunes to 70s children's programs (the music to the long-forgotten "Screen Test" -  one of the countless hours of shit I regularly watched after school - made me scream inside.) Stepping onto less psychologically sensitive ground, I've also been enjoying pop from Tanzania on Bongo and, of course, a wide variety of jazz stations, including those based in Argentina and Berlin, and a swing station from Switzerland.

Santa brought a couple of CDs too - Joe Pass' Portraits of Duke Ellington and Jim Hall's Jazz Guitar, a Japanese import of straight-ahead tunes in which you can really hear (deliberately, I think) the extent of Charlie Christian's influence. Novelty jazz cd of the year goes to Fellini Jazz, a jazzed-up selection of tunes from the great man's movies played by monster players - Charlie Haden (bass), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet), Chris Potter (saxes), and Paul Motian (drums).

Inspired by this performance, here is my holiday gift to you -- all the ingredients you need for your own Fellini film, in no particular order:

1. An amazing party, packed to the gills. Setting: a well-appointed apartment in Rome. Everyone dressed cocktail dresses and dinner jackets and looking far too old to be drinking so heavily. Add a couple of European models -  Anita Ekberg and Nico will do - and some misogynist intellectual types with thoughts on the novel and rebarbative glasses. Drunk and lascivious behaviour must be given a free hand. Bacchanal should be emphasized through the liberal use of close-ups of gaping mouths in the act of debauched laughter or spilling over with half-chewed food. Dress the set with a couple of wasted sailors cuddling beneath the chaise longue, and another groping some primitivist art. Fast, poppy jazz should be playing, punctuated by the occasional guitar twang that suggests the unstoppable march of rock n'roll.

2. A religious festival that takes place on what appears to be waste land. The dangerous throng of the crowd, their tears, lamentations, and intense piety, combined the dead-eyed woodenness of the saints they worship and the geriatric crustiness of the priests, are all intended to align Catholicism with voodoo. Juxtapose fevered religiosity with some obvious symbol of modernity, eg. a helicopter.

3. An empty nightclub with a fantastic band and culturally-confused decor, part Mayan, part South Sea Islands. A pair of grass-skirted African women dance to slow and unsettling bongo music. A smattering of fat pimps drink in the show while the bouncers look really hard.

4. Circus or carnival: bearded ladies, dancing horses, an alcoholic strongman, small dogs in ruffs - basically anything that suggests the tinsel and wonder of fantasy torn away to reveal seedy reality, human dereliction and fabrics that will give you a rash.

5. Depending on where you are in Fellini's career: a) Staring into the sea at Rimini, studying the train timetable and getting all hot and bothered about Mama; b) Driving around flat, fly-blown landscapes dotted by hovels, looking to fleece some poor peasant weeping over a dead donkey; c) a dream sequence featuring elephants in togas and elaborate technicolour tableaux.

6. Adventure at night. Choose from: a drunken jaunt around an abandoned castle; randomly arriving at a film star's house; your neighbour's cocktail party, passing from room to room discovering couples in spastic trysts; an attack of impotence that finally proves all those things you've been trying to deny; trawling through the squares of Rome and happening upon a poet, a visionary, and a matronly tart with forgiving breasts.

7. A missed opportunity: affluent, depressed professionals smoke heavily until eventually confessing something profound at the exact moment their partner is distracted and has stopped listening. Think "fuck it" and ravish her in the condemned latrine of a social housing project, then ride home on Beppe the window-cleaner's moped with nerry a thought for how he's supposed to get to work in the morning.

8. A theatrical performance: symbolically speaking, not that far away from the carnival, although it should feature one of your main characters actually appearing on the stage (where up-close the tinsel and wonder are revealed to be seedy, dilapidated, etc.), thereby placing them within the proscenium frame as a means of demonstrating that life is just another performance and our "characters" merely the product of an on-going attempt to shield ourselves from the scrutiny of the world (aka "the audience").

9. The hangover - the most rancid, hateful, cut-off-my-head-to-stop-my-thoughts, kill-me-now-to-spare-my-embarrassment, hangover anyone has ever had, ever. Having staggered from the detritus of the night before, brushing the confetti from your stained lapels and blinking into the Roman sun, you should probably light a fag while staring emptily into the eyes of a deformed beggar or rotting squid and wondering why the hell you feel so bleak even though you just spent a raunchy evening with that hot dancer from the tiki joint downtown.

10. Eventually, it all gets too much and it's time to roll around in the mud or gravel. We're way past talking at this point. Have a really good roll. Get lots of filth in your hair, mulch on your clothes, and leaf-mould between the teeth. Continue with hysterics for a good ten minutes while the camaraman goes off for a canole. Conclude scene by either dying or dissolving nervous breakdown into epiphanic burst of laughter than says: "Ecco - the redemptive absurdity of my life." Walk off into sunset (more probably, sunrise), followed by dog in ruff, matronly tart, and a mime on a bicycle, smiling wryly to oneself safe in the knowledge that you are destined to marry virginal heiress and have a wonderful career in public relations, while continuing to go enormous weekend benders that she can't do anything about (this is Italy, after all.) Link arms with tarts, mimes, jack russells, characters from various flashbacks (including a pissy old uncle from Ravenna with huge pantomime hands), and dance in a circle of jubilant ecstasy beneath the vast fuselage of a satisfyingly tumescent rocket.

11. FINI.

Arranging Chord Melodies - for Charlie

I haven't been playing AT ALL, though I do occasionally check in to marvel at the irreversible drainage of time that prevents me from picking up a guitar. Last time I was here, I noticed that Charlie had left me a couple of nice comments (thanks, Charlie), and a question. He's interested in chord melody and wants me to describe the approach I take to finding appropriate chords. This is very flattering as it suggests I have the first shagging clue about playing guitar, which of course I don't, but never being one to let ignorance get in the way of an opinion, I'll have a shot at answering it.

The first thing I'd say, is that chord-melody playing is not a system, or rather, I've never seen an approach to it decently systematized. Think of it instead as a grab-bag of solutions to discrete problems of arrangement. Really good players seem to have an unending supply of these piecemeal solutions that they can apply to produce really polished arrangements. That's why a lot of the books are unsatisfactory from a student's point of view: there's really no assembly-line approach.

But here we go: you don’t need to learn a ton of chords, just so long as you know how to spell them. In fact, learning loads of grips, or memorizing the contents of a chord dictionary is a big waste of time. Instead of thinking about chords as a set series of shapes, think about them as individual notes, temporarily placed together.

What's most important is that you know what all the notes are in the chord. So if you're trying to spell Bbmaj7th, you know that the 1^st is Bb, the 3^rd is D, the 5^th is F, and the 7^th is A.

When arranging a chord melody, you basically want to play the melody note on the top E or B string, and the rest underneath. It is preferable (though not essential) to have the root of the chord as the lowest note.

Remember that the chart is only a guide, and you shouldn’t be afraid to change it. A lot of charts have ridiculously fancy extensions that you should just reduce to their basic tonality. Fmaj7b5#9, for example, is just Fmaj; Gm7#11 is Gm7 (often, these big extended chords are pertinent only to piano or big band. As guitarists who can only play four or five notes at a time, we only need to know the basic tonality on top of which we’ll add the melody note.)

The most important notes in any chord are the 3^rd and the 7^th. They are the notes that tell you whether the chord is major, minor, or dominant. You can sometimes leave them out (adding a 4^th instead of a 3^rd for an ambiguous suspended sound, for example, or replacing a 7^th with a 6^th for a different kind of major sound). As long as those notes are at the core of your chord, you can build all kinds of other things around it.

If the melody note is not a note in the basic chord, then you add an extension: 9, 11, or 13. If there’s suddenly too many notes in your chord, the first note to drop is usually the 5^th (but see below).

If the melody note is not in the basic chord, and not even in the scale, then you need to make an alteration: b5, #5, b9, #9, #11th, b13th etc.

If you just can’t seem to make the melody note fit with the chord, or else it just sounds bollocks, consider playing the chord elsewhere on the neck, or using one of the many available reharmonizations -- substituting the written chord and putting another in its place (also see below).

All this means that you really need to know your fretboard. If the chart says play Bbmaj7th with the D on the E string, then you have to look around the neck and find all other notes in a usable fingering: Bb is on string 4, 8th fret; F is on string 3, 10th fret; A is on string 2, 10th fret; D is on string 1, 10th fret.

Alternatively (or even better, as well as), you can learn all the inversions on the various different string sets, especially those most useful for chord-melody, the inversions on set 1-2-3-4, set 2-3-4-5, and set  2-3-4-6. This is excellent practice, but in the end, without understanding what you're spelling, then it's still just learning a load of grips. Spelling the chords out note-by-note will not only help you find those inversions, but it will actually teach you what it is you really need to know by showing you how the chord is built. It's grammar rather than mere vocabulary. Does that help at all?

Extensions
Adding extensions to chords can leave you with too many notes in the chord. Here are some rules for dropping them:

• When playing a 9th, you can lose the 1 (unless you need if for your bass, in which case, lose the 5th).
• When playing a 13th, you can lose the 5th.
• When playing a #11th, you can lose the 5th.
• When playing a 6th, you can lose the 7th.
• When playing an 11th, you can lose either the 5ths or the 3rd.

Common Substitutions
There are lots of substitutions you can make. Here's a few for each chord:

• For the I chord: Chords I, iii, and VI can be used interchangeably; use V#9 in place of I.
• For the ii Chord: ii and IV can be used interchangeably (ie. replace Dmin7 with Fmaj7); In a ii-V progression, change the ii chord to a dominant chord (ie, Dmin7-G7 becomes D7-G7). This creates a “V of V” as D7 would be the V chord in the key of G; In a ii-V progression, the ii chord can become a min7b5 chord (ie, Dmin7-G7 becomes Dmin7b5-G7). As long as the 5th (A) is not the top note, you may flat the 5 in any of the above D minor chords.
• For the iii Chord: I, iii, and vi can be used interchangeably (eg, all Emin7s with C on top are in effect C majors).
• For the IV Chord: ii and IV can be used interchangeably.
• For the V chord: V and vii can be used interchangeably; As a diminished chord is similar to a V chord with a flat nine, play diminished whose root a one step higher than the V chord, ie play G#diminished for G7; Add colour tones and alterations such as, b5, #5, b9, #9, #11, sus., sus.b9, etc.
• For the vi Chord: I, iii and vi can be used interchangeably; vi chords may also be converted to Dominant 7th chords, adding colour tones and alterations.
• For the vii Chord: Substitute vii for V.

Must Try Harder...

Got my notes back from JB regarding the "Satin Doll" exercise. Not bad, he says, but with a tendency to play too low down in the register, and could make more effective use of half-step chromaticism. Perceptive insight, the former, as I'm inclined to start lines on the bottom two strings because that's where I know where all the roots of arpeggios are. It's a habit I'll have to work to break as it not only makes for gloomy, repetitive playing, but one shouldn't always start from the root anyway. So, guess I'll have to practice starting from different notes in the arpeggio, especially the 3rd, as well as playing them backwards, and starting my lines on either the d or g strings.

For Little Jim - a Misty Chord Melody

My poor friend Little Jim has been laid up with a recurring ailment that for years has baffled scientists and charlatans alike. If I remember correctly, the best explanation is that he has somehow inherited a genetic mutation from shipwrecked survivors of the Spanish Armada -- what you might call the Duke of Medina's revenge. Unfortunately, he has to ride it out, so here's a brisk and breezy rendition of "Misty" to help cheer him up. (There's for too much reverb on it, in fact, but I'm banking on Jim being so dosed up he can't tell the sun from the moon.) Get well soon, little feller.

Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute

Hello again! Still busier than a Glasgwegian chip shop, but at least my hand is better. I think I know what it was -- pillows. I can't stand thick pillows. Indeed, I like pillows that are little more than a pillow case with four or five socks chucked in, and as a result, I think I've been lying on my wrist and cutting off the circulation with the weight of my mighty head. I woke up the other night and my whole hand had gone completely numb and I had to slap it against the wall for ten minutes to get the feeling back. In the midst of morphic slumbers, I remember thinking that this is what it must be like to play ping pong with a fist full of whitebait. Obviously, I'm going to have to start wearing some sort of foam helmet to bed. Just after I've finally managed to give up the boxing gloves as well.

Moving on, I went and joined the Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute about two and half months ago, though what with my hand and all, I haven't had a good opportunity to really dig into it until recently. Basically, you all know that I really like Jimmy Bruno's educational materials for his refreshing committment to music and clarity, and the site is a continuation and improvement on them except with lots more content.

Taught through a ton of short videos, ear training is the heart of the course, the foundations of which come from a thorough knowledge of Jimmy's five shapes - a modification of his "Six Essential Fingerings" idea from earlier. The absolute fundamental is to learn these shapes (or "pitch collections" as he prefers to call them) in all keys and all positions in order to internalize the sounds to the extent that you're hitting notes instinctively without having to figure out where you are all the time. Only then - and I guess that's going take quite some time - does he encourage you to start thinking about experimenting with outside notes. It makes sense. Why dick around with altered tones when you can't yet hear the diatonic ones?

There's also an interactive aspect. Send in a video of yourself playing one of the assignments or standards from the tune section, and a few days later, he posts a a response. Those of you who like your guitar teaching to stamp on your fingers and spit in your face will be disappointed, as Bruno's teaching style is genial and encouraging rather than punitive. I expect it's easier to keep his customers than sending an electric shock through the keyboard everytime you play a wrong note, but it would be good to have just one video somewhere where he says "call that playing? You're a worthless piece of shit" for those times when you need a good talking too. That said, Bruno hears all and can see right through you, so there's no flannel, and the advice is all good.

Here's a video I just made as my homework. I had already done a solo over "Satin Doll," and Jimmy said (quite rightly) that he suspected me of having holes in my knowledge of the fretboard. My next assignment was to improvise over five choruses of the tune, staying in one position for each chorus. As the tune moves from C to D to G to Gb, then F and G in the bridge and back to C for the last A section, I play through the changes without shifts save for the necessary single fret shifts from G to Gb. I get all sloppy in the last position because my concentration was going, and it also has shitty sound from the (free) webcam's on-board microphone, but you get the idea at least. It was a very instructive exercise, and it's very motivating to have Jimmy Bruno tell you you've got good time. I'd join if I were you. After all, a three month subscription to JGBI is less than you paid for all those Berklee method books, and you've never even looked at them, have you?

And the Diagnosis is....

...bubkiss. No carpal tunnel, no RSI, no nothing. Quite a let down, as mentally, I'd prepared myself for disfiguring surgery that would make me even more of a hit with the girls. I'll definitely be seeking a second opinion, as not only does it seem to be getting worse, the doctor was in full autistic, man-of-science mode, too busy playing with his electronic pencil to look me in the eye and unable to comprehend the fact I play neither golf nor tennis. When he told me to search the internet for wrist exercises and I said "how do you think I got this condition in the first place?", he just stared at me blankly and started pawing a leaflet from WebMD. Why must one suffer so intolerably?   *Sigh*

Enforced Rest

This one's a little frustrating. Just as I was enjoying being back behind the guitar, I suddenly started getting cramps in my left hand. Soon it turned into something like tendonitis from the wrist to the elbow. I kept on playing, but now it's much worse. It aches all the time and the hand feels like it has constant pins and needles. Bizarrely, the knuckle of my left thumb is tender and keeps clicking. Is there such a thing as hand gout? I stopped playing on Thursday but it hasn't gone away. I've made the appointment.

I'd be willing to bet any money that guitar playing is the last thing to have caused this. Not only do I fret with the friable brush of a humming-bird's tongue, but I type all day, and when not typing, I'm generally squeezing lemons, serving aces, wringing out thick, wet towels, and garrotting my enemies. Where to begin?

That Synching Feeling

Zoetropic Images! A technological first! Press the button below to watch me perform my own (very basic) arrangement of "Cry Me a River." Apologies for the poor picture quality, but most of the budget went on hair and make-up. Not my hair and make-up, obviously.

Agreed, it's next to useless as you can't see my left hand (although it's a fine shot of my manly jaw). I'll put up a transcription as soon as I get over the thrill of it all.