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Hi Knotty
Thanks for asking about Sonny, I've just come back. Sonny has never played better.

1. Patanjali - one of his most recent compositions. This was my favourite of the 8 songs. Typical of Sonny, the head is simple and he refered to it numerous times during the solo. He was in such a good mood that he even referenced a nursery rhyme in his solo.
I lost count of how many bars he held the last note. Maybe 12 or more ?

Your band would love the strong rhythm of this fun song.

When he started on this uptempo song, I knew he would play killer all night.

2. Blue Gardenia - the Nat King Cole ballad.
Three of the eight songs were ballads.
He's lost none of his poignancy from his Way Out West days.

3. An uptempo composition I didn't know.
He was so into it that at the end he was playing his sax with one hand, and conducting himself with the other.

After this song, I knew he would not allow himself nor his quintet nor his audience a break.

4. Global Warming - a great Calypso composition.
Your band would like this composition too.

5. Serenade - a ballad folk song

6. A ballad I didn't know

7. An uptempo one I didn't know.

8. St Thomas

And then the Australian national anthem !

Sonny's sound was full of energy but never shriekish nor aggressive.
Some of his arps in his uptempo solos were so amazingly out yet beautiful, they always came in at just the right place.

He played for 2 hours straight.

You should have been there.

The quintet included electric bass, drums, percussion and electric guitar.

Cheers
cus

>> You should have been there.
Cus,

next time Sonny calls me, I promise I won't decline.

Sounds like you had a blast! Good stuff.

Does anyone else find they wake up singing stuff from the day before?

Edit: I'm glad we sorted out the one about swinging triplets. I wasn't looking forward to being the one to ask about it.

Hi Knotty
Thanks for your kind offer to listen through these examples of swung triplets.

1. Lesson 2 The Joy of C: the triplet in 6th line last bar first beat.
(Yup 2shlow, I remember this one now ! btw what lesson are you up to ? )

2. Lesson 27 Apple Scraps : B section 2nd bar in E min7

3. Lesson 27: B section 5th bar in D min7

I am only in Lesson 4, where there are two more examples of this "special triplet", in the middle of the 2nd and 6th lines of Precipitation. By the way, because my piano technique is so limited, I am proceeding very slowly (about 4 weeks to a lesson, so far, which is not according to Dave's advice). But I am used to being a slow starter, and so in the end I am confident that I will be able to play and improvise nicely with JOI's help; my slow hands will catch up to my ears, if I just do not give up.

In the matter of these so-called swing triplets, the ear is far more important in the matter of timing of jazz than the written notes, so we should first always play what is on the CDs and not what is written in the book; later we can take liberty with the tunes, if we like. This is truly obvious, but it needs to be repeated, lest we forget it. I listen to the CDs and midis endlessly, and find more and more fine details that I at first missed. The notes in the book are a reliable guide to WHICH keys to press, but not WHEN to press them or HOW LONG to press them.

>> 1. Lesson 2 The Joy of C: the triplet in 6th line last bar first beat.
It's not notated correctly. I would write 1/8th, followed by a 16th triplet starting with a rest.

But it's much easier to read as an 8th triplet. So to some extent, you could call it correct. If you were transcribing Parker for example, you might choose to write it like that so it's easier to read later. You'd probably remember the rhythm.

Hopefully that answers the other 2 also. If not, let me know, I'll check.

Play the trips in the hanon straight.
Same if you improvise with a 8th triplet line. Play straight. But the 16th triplet effect is very nice and idiomatic. Bird uses it all over the place. On a horn, it's really easy to do because one can trill with exactly 1/2 the effort as on a piano. One note up, one note down, while the piano only produces sound when you press down.

Custard - wonderful description, sounds like you had a ball!

2 Shlow - great to have you on board! I wouldn't worry about doing things 'slowly'. In my experience, anything to stick at, you get eventually. These tunes do present a fair few technical challenges.

Shamed to admit I rarely listen to the CD. My CD player is so ancient it won't let me skip tracks (at least nor reliably), so I would need to listen to the preamble every time. I do have the tracks on my computer. Perhaps I find it a little tiresome to listen right through the track, including the hanon, to get to the bit I want. The lesson I'm on now (eyes have it, lesson 11) is the first I've felt I really needed to put in Transcribe and do it as suggested in the book. It has several triplets, some of which are even and some are played quaver-semi-semi. So for this I did need the recording, but mostly I do get them from the book.

Note that once you have ripped the CD to your computer, as you have already done, you can load individual tracks in Transcribe! and mark sections to save as individual files with the "Export split sound file" function (you can thus just leave in the Blues and the Song as two files and cut the rest)! Transcribe! is one of my favorite programs that does so much more than just help one transcribe. The saved files are .wav (at least on my Windows machine), but you can convert them to .mp3 as I do to save space.

Thanks Knotty for listening to the example.
I love those Bird triplets. When I look at the you-tube videos of you doing Bird, I still don't know how you manage to get your fingers around those Bird triplets.

Hi 2 shlow
Yes I remember when Ten was singing Precipitation, she highlighted those kinds of "triplets".
I admire your perseverance. It's good to have for a systematic and comprehensive methodology such as JOI.

Thanks Ten !
It's great that Sonny is always so fresh. I didn't expect to hear Tenor Madness songs. Composing constantly is a great discipline IMO, it must keep him inspired.

How's everyone doing? What are you all up to?

Hi knotty, funny, I was about to ask every one else that!

It has been a while since I posted. The truth is I have been terribly busy family-wise and music-wise but not done an awful lot of JOI. I knew this was going to happen and had abandoned all hope of getting lesson 11 done in a week. I have however kept going whenever I could and today made a couple of recordings. Here is lesson 11 blues:
http://www.box.net/shared/amgvr4xixi

The jazz tune I can only do slowly, and will bring it up to speed over the next few days:
http://www.box.net/shared/9jag14pupd

Hopefully it's fairly accurate to Dave's playing. I've tried to copy as accurately as I can. Only in the last bar of the third last line, I stacattoed both hands, while I meant to hold the LH chord down. Dang!

I really like this jazz tune. Hope they're all this good from here on in.

At the weekend I had over my uncle and aunt from Canada I hadn't seen since I was 7. My brother niece also came over (my brother was always the pianist in the family). All day I had been itching to play the piano, but I just felt it was too anti-social. So we're all in the living room and my brother says to me, Laura, how's your scales? I replied I hadn't been doing scales much, but some exercises for jazz. Well, lets hear them, everyone says. You really don't want this, I replied, they're not that nice to listen to (no offence, Dave). Well, they forced me. And they got what they wanted. All 12 keys. Metronome, singing, the works. Started out HT at 100, and ended up RH only at about 170. After just a couple, my husband begged for mercy. I put the practice pedal on, and carried on.

It was honestly a bit of a conversation-stopper.

How's everyone else doing? Absorbing lessons from the master-class?

Hi Knotty
Yeah I know I've been quiet. I've been working hard at improv from the Skype masterclass.

1. Trying to get the LH chords into muscle memory.

2. I'm slowly getting the hang of the LH disciplined pulse - RH creative flow co ordination. Dave's suggestion to pre-record the LH chords for the initial stages was really helpful.

My sentences have tended to sound predictable and symmetrical.

So I'm trying to mix it up more by inserting commas. When Dave referred to "sticking in the lance" in your Skype Section 3, did he mean commas or full stops ? Sometimes when I play with different sentence shapes, this mucks up my LH pulse which means I haven't internalised it quite yet.

Cheers
cus

don't worry so much cus. Keep the LH chords on the beat, flow the RH and sometimes do longer and sometimes shorter phrases, don't worry if it's not so interesting now. Just go through this level fast and get to playing on the tunes.

I'm preparing for a performance at Iridium on the 26th, I'm trying to get this outside composed piece into my fingers, I'm so slow at it! Wish I could get stuff into my fingers faster, bought a video and book about memorization, maybe that will help:)I'm old already...

Over the over the same weird piece week after week, a little progress only day to day. My wife is lucky she's in Israel at the moment. The guy upstairs has been on the ledge above 52nd st. since last Thursday!

Keep swingin all:)

Dave Frank

hahahhh Dave, so you actually have neighbours I had thought that you and your wife had the whole block to yourselves in 52nd St so that you could do the burners all night !

Thanks for your encouragement. I'm actually kinda glad you have troubles too, so that you can relate to how hard I'm trying

The Iridium concert sounds very interesting, you are very ambitious to learn the piece by the 26th - not to put the pressure on, but it will be a sell-out !

Cheers
cus

10,
Sounds really good. I had somehow forgotten that one. Very nice.

Cus,
Can't wait to hear the result of all the hard work.

As for me, we played last week a repeat of what we did a month of so back. Got something for the PGA coming next week. The PGA is a 5 min walk from the house, but the gig is in a restaurant close by. 2 weeks after that, we have a thing at an audio trade show.
It's been hard finding a solid group. Especially a good horn for some reason.

Other than that, I'm struggling on an arrangement of Smile. 30 minutes noodling, nothing I like, repeat the next day. Very slow progress. At some point, I just gotta write it down and end it. I can't hear reharm well enough yet, so it's hard to find the sound I want.
Then of course I'll have to learn it ...

Playing the blues, still. That's fun.
Basslines, slowly but surely.
Learning to sight read, also slowly.
Cherokee, faster and faster. It's actually getting insanely fast.
Playing Bird's Yardbird suite solo. One of the easiest, but sounds really good. I'm almost ready to record that one.

Oh and I'm preparing because my son's got his recital coming up next week also, and guess who's the accompanist?

Knotty
That is awesome, I had no idea the US Open would be so close to your house.

Is your son going to play Handel ?

Knotty and Dave
Here is an improv in Bb maj_G min from today.

http://www.box.net/shared/8fagrto5u0ulue5nrhj8

>> That is awesome, I had no idea the US Open would be so close to your house.
Yeah, in fact, they're putting no parking signs everywhere. It gets crazy.

>> Is your son going to play Handel ?
No, Hunter's Chorus, C.M con Weber. I'll record a duet for you.

Cus,
The improv sounded great. I thought you incorporated the 3 concepts very well. Nice deep breath after a nice long flowing lines. Followed by short repetition. That was really good.

What tempo was that? You can bump it up a few clicks so long as it stays comfortable.

Thanks very much Knotty for your feedback.
Now my improvs are starting to tell a story; before they were kind of like exercises.
I love improv even though my brain gets tired afterwards.

It was 63 bpm. I haven't tried a faster temp while trying to incorporate the 3 concepts.
I think I will try the new Eb maj - C min progression at 66 bpm.

What did you think of my counting in 4s ?

I'm so looking forward to your son's duet, I imagine he's even more confident now