Just a note. The other day I got a very nice email/note to my Jon Raney website email from a pianist fan from Boston, MA. I reviewed it and was about to answer it the following morning, but somehow the email just vanished. It was nowhere to be found. I asked the admin at 1&1 email to try to recover it but they could not. So, to the fan out there hailing from Boston, MA thanks for the note and sorry for misplacing your email and I hope you visit again to the blog or jonraney.com. Sincerely, Jon Raney
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Creating Jazz Lines
(by Jon Raney © 2008) Modern Jazz lines are frequently comprised of a combination of 2 to 3 elements in a phrase unit consisting of: scale fragments arpeggios and/or harmonic intervals auxiliary tones (neighbor & passing tones, turns) Scale fragments are typically these types of 4 note constructions, consisting of either 4 consecutive notes or 3 with a skip: 1234 1235 1345 They can be applied modally: 3456 5672 7123 Can be root-reinterpreted (really the same thing as a mode):1235 in C = 3457 in A-7 Can be varied in terms of: direction: 1235 = 5321 note order: 2135 intervallic construction: 3 (6th down) 5 6 7 Or any combination…
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Hangin’ with Mike Kanan pt 2
For those of you digging on some of Mike’s little gems of advice you will have an opportunity to receive them yourself in person if you are in the New York area on Sunday, October 19th. The Art of Accompanying and the Art of Being AccompaniedMaster Class with Alexa Fila & Mike KananJoe Solomon Studio 1133 Broadway, 6th fl (at 26th St) Room 621, NYCphone: 212 741-2839email: joesolomio@yahoo.com Brief description: …“A Full set with these two wonderful artists will be followed by 30min Q&A. The final set will offer an opportunity for vocalists to sit in with Mike. If he or she wishes, each singer may solicit commentary and guidance…
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Hangin’ with Mike Kanan, partI
Mike Kanan is a great accompanist. But he’s pretty humble about his achievements in this regard. I personally find accompanying a vocalist extremely challenging and was definitely primed to get some first-rate advice from a pianist gigging with some of the major vocalists out there. But surprisingly his whole approach is very down to earth and his philosophy about it is very practical and has been arrived at by working things out over time, as well as through discussions and experiments with fellow musicians (to be referred to in follow-up parts). As some of his comments might suggest, one of his most important assets may be his grounded personality. Even…
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Hangin’ with Mike
It wasn’t my intention to interview Mike Kanan per se as pick his brains about piano. But given his greater stature in the music biz the questions just flowed on my part and with my my new toy the Zoom digital recorder in tow, I was able to capture the whole event. I had first seen and heard Mike several years ago on a TV broadcast of vocalist, Jimmy Scott, where he performed his accompanist role and feature solos letter perfect. I was very impressed with his professionalism. He has since made several records with star jazz vocalist Jane Monheit. His work on her last album, Surrender is spot on…
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Across the Barline and Beyond (another Jimmy Raney book preview.. Still workin’ on it!)
One of things that I must repeatedly emphasize about Jimmy Raney is his unique improvisational abilities as it relates to rhythm, and in particular his mastery of the more subtle and beautiful asymmetrical rhythm. It’s mind boggling how his monumental achievements in this area could’ve gone so largely unnoticed. I have noted in prior blogs his mastery of 6/4 and 5/4 phrases over 4/4. See here: Jimmy Raney’s polyrhythmic concepts part1 and here: Jimmy Raney’s polyrhythmic concepts part 2 In this blog’s example, 5/4 and 6/4 are used in combination, which is definitely more complex(!), but Jimmy Raney handled such things with ease. The example is a phrase from Jimmy’s…
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Man Vs. Machine
Do you have a love hate relationship with computers and technical gadgets? I know I do. At times it seems like the gadgets have their own spirit and intentions and in some cases (as in below story) openly defiant. And forget about the manuals. I want to constantly shoot the authors of them. And gadgets always screw up at the same time don’t they? Which is contributing to my personal persecution theories… Case in point. I bought a Motorola 2.4 ghz cordless phone w/ answering machine. I was happy with the purchase and got it for a good price. But for some reason it would not correctly update the day…
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When At a Loss for Words…Post Pictures
In the absence of any substantial thoughts/ideas on my part, click below MySpace link where pics were posted recently: Jon Raney MySpace page. Guess which ones are camera phone shots…uggh. Some great old photos of Dad as though. They are snapshots of the originals which were auctioned off by EBay. Read prior blog about EBay. Click the “pics” link below the sidebar photo when you get to MySpace page. (Sorry, you need to login or sign up for MySpace in order to see the photos)
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Communication in the Internet Age
The pre-e-mail and Internet world is difficult to imagine now after years of its entrenchment in our daily lives. I was musing about when the first rudimentary email was launched at my former employ, the now defunct Guggenheim Museum Soho. E-mail and Internet communication occupies this vast space between mailing written letters and yakking it up on the telephone, along with everything in between: chatting, both written and voice enabled, message boards and… oh yeah blogs with reader commentary. With the addition of graphics, audio and live hyperlinks to other sources of related interest, electronic correspondence is a whole new accelerated communication paradigm. It’s simply different when you “speak” to…
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The Recording
Tne J-maan… makin’ records…The Rainster… playin’ tunesOf his own..with a band…the BAND-maanHavin a hard timemakin’ recordsplayin tunes..of his own…with a band…He’s a complainsterThe J-maan… 90’s SNL characters aside. I was discussing on my forum (in my usual self-critical fashion) a recording done with bassist, Ed Fuqua and drummer, Eliot Zigmund. Sax and trumpet were added on 3 tunes: father and son team Dan & Tatum Greenblatt. (See also Charles Monteiro video snippet of session). I also enlisted old pals, bassist, Mario Rodriguez, drummer, Todd Isler and guitarist Billy Newman on a couple of more latin oriented cuts. So how did it go? For starters let me say this: I was…
