This personal jazz journal will continue now in a different format - as a weblog.
From 25th June, 2004, I will not be adding anything more here but will maintain the journal in weblog form at...

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2001

16th July
This jazz thing has been going on for some time already but I'm still at the beginning so I thought I'd better get writing before it became really too late to do it.
So, the background. Back in 1977 I borrowed an alto sax and started learning some scales. I wanted to play jazz but I didn't think it would sound right on the horn. The sax only lasted a week or two because the embouchure didn't come right away. I suppose I should have had a lesson. That was that. Over the years I did other bits of improvising, including a few albums involving four horns (all me), then two (with another player) horns, then three horns (with two others). None of this was jazz.
Then, 1988, or thereabouts, I had a jazz piano lesson with some bloke in Hampstead. He went on about learning all the 2-5-1 chord changes. I did it for a while but didn't get the point. I suppose it was my failure, but I don't think this person had any teaching skills - nothing he said seemed very stimulating.
Then, last year, Jim Rattigan, horn (French) player and friend got a CD out called "Unfamiliar Guise". Very nice, it was, and I interviewed him for the horn magazine, and gave him a really good review to help him shift CDs. It's a good recording but not what I would want to play. In fact, I don't know what I'm looking for, really. I just want to be able to play jazz. Simple.
Jim's album got me thinking about jazz, and the horn, and I talked with him quite a lot about how you learn it. He gave me some photocopied sheets of "all" the jazz scales and I spent hours during the summer of 2000 learning some of them. I also ordered an instrument from Yamaha - the "Marching French Horn" in Bb, on a hunch that this would make the perfect forward facing jazz horn for horn players. I have named it the "Frunting Horn" even though 18 months have passed and there's still no sign of it. The scales dried up and stopped flowing.
The next wave came during May of 2001 when I was on a short tour with Peter Erskine and the Creative Jazz Orchestra. I was one of three horns (French) playing written out parts of Peter's music. I heard Kenny Wheeler live for the first time and spoke to him a bit (he only lives a couple of minutes walk from our house). What he said was encouraging - for example, he uses the Aebersold books, still! He's 72 and still practicing and developing his playing. Incredible.
At last, I stopped waiting for the Frunting Horn to arrive and got out, instead, the beautiful little Besson cornet that Mum and Dad gave me for my 40th birthday and ordered a pile of Aebersold playalong books.

18th July
The cornet is going well. I think I have a useful range - fairly comfortable up to about top C - and the fingering is mostly sorted, although there's usually a glitch around high E (same as top A on the horn) where I'm trying very hard to remember to play it with no valves pressed down, whereas it's best on the horn with 1st and 2nd down.
I'm also gradually getting the register shift sorted in my mind. Although the fingering almost exactly matches that of the horn, if I think in horn pitch, I have decided to make the shift into thinking and reading in Bb as this will make reading music much easier in the long term. Thus I have to re-educate my pitch sense, when I am in cornet mode, to one fourth higher. I get lost sometimes - sort of a pitch whiteout where I have no idea what notes I am playing. My fingers and lips know but my conscious mind is nowhere. Granted, this has always happened when playing the horn, but now that I am formally learning jazz I really need always to know what notes I am playing, what chords, scales, etc... This is new for me. My previous improvisations have always been instinctive, with almost no role for the conscious mind. Jazz, however, needs the guiding keel of definite harmonic navigation. It's a discipline I'm trying to learn - determined to learn.
Oren Marshall is a brilliant and unconventional tuba player with at least one leg in the world of jazz, although I don't know how well versed he is in actual jazz improvisation and, for that matter, I don't really know what it is to be a jazz tubist. He visited me today, partly for a run over at the Hollow Ponds and partly to "do some playing" together. It was an interesting lesson for me. It made me realise that I was actually quite embarrassed to let go and play "jazzilly" in front of him. When I eventually did - on some blues in concert F - Oren said, in his usually flattering way, that I was loaded with all the right tools but that I didn't have the feel. Nice of him - and I suppose I kind of knew that. He also said a lot of interesting, thoughtful stuff about how it can be refreshing to hear someone new to jazz playing their own unique stuff and that the "novice" can have a certain amount of freedom that perhaps would be difficult for an experienced jazzer to express. A difficult concept to argue, I think, but it was very nice of him to be so encouraging. We played a few rounds of blues but I don't think I achieved much.
We talked about Derek Bailey a bit - I've done a fair bit of improvising (free, non-jazz) with Derek, donkey's years ago, and so has Oren only much more recently. It seems Oren was able to make much more sense of Derek's style of improvisation, which always had me confused. I told him about my general frustration with performing free improvisation to which he had some interesting responses.

19th July
Went to Wood Green, to the house of Noel Langley to try some strange horns. He had a Holton Marching French Horn in Bb, and a Conn Mellophone in F. I didn't like the mellophone - the F being, curiously for a horn player, rather an alien pitch for me. I came away with the Holton to try for a while. I might buy it, if the price is right, and do it up as it's in a pretty bad state.

20th July
I had a jazz lesson with Ken Bartels of Loughton. I got his name from Bernard O'Neill, the bass player from down our road, who said that Ken would be a very good teacher. He plays flute, single reeds and keyboards.
I think Bernard was right. I came away from the lesson with, for the first time, a clear route into jazz. Ken's got me playing from the Aebersold jazz book Vol. 42, Blues in All Keys. I had a minor breakthrough when he told me that the blues scale works, more or less, all the way through the blues so that, for example, if you are playing the blues in C, then you can get through the whole sequence using only the notes C, Eb, F, Gb, G, and Bb without having to change scale at each chord change. He explained that it is quite a good discipline to go through the whole book playing each blues song using only the blues-scale notes of that particular key. I feel sure this is exactly what I need. I learned from Oren that I have a tendency to overcomplicate things and try to play everything all at once, and Ken reinforced this.
When I have got the hang of sticking exclusively to the blues scales I have to go through the book again this time using only Aebersold's written black notes, that is to say, the simple chord notes for every chord as they change through the piece. I have to try to make it interesting, musical but without straying from the simple clusters of chord notes. he demonstrated this, on his clarinet, and was able to play really attractive, interesting stuff using the simplest of notes. It was amazing to hear how rich and complex it sounded given that he was using so few notes. He's good.
So, at last I have proper homework to do! Things should now move in a better, more methodical and systematic direction. No more groping in the dark. And I won't need another lesson for a couple of months because it will take me that long, I think, to get through everything we covered today.

21st July
I've been trying to think about what I want to achieve by learning jazz.
I think it's that I want to be able to analyse what I'm doing, as I do it, so that I'm always aware of what I'm doing. That is it, I think.
I don't want to plan everything I play, consciously - that would be dull, contrived and too slow a process to come up with anything but safe material.
On the other hand I don't want to let my unconscious autopilot do just anything it chooses, as I have always done in the past with my improvising. It's fine for free improvising but not much use for particular chord sequence.
It has to be a question of the balance between the automatic trawling for "licks", learned patterns and inventing brand new material or recombining patterns in new ways.
This is why I think Ken Bartels is right when he tells me that I should try to learn to play much more simply, using limited ranges of notes, for example only the blues scale (that's my first load of homework), and try to keep track of where I am all both harmonically and within the musical sequence.
What has always happened, whenever I launch into some blues for example, is that I would race around not knowing what notes I am playing - I suppose trying to go straight for the finished product without any considerations for the means whereby. Where have I heard that story before? Read some stuff I wrote for the Horn Magazine about the Alexander Technique. Click.

22nd July
But where has this urge to learn jazz come from? I think it's been there, just below the surface, for a very long time. It's come to the surface now partly because it's now or never - I'm 43. I have a slight sense of urgency and a feeling that at last I'm doing something I've been wanting to do for a very long time.
It's also a fascinating learning process and to a large extent it's uncharted territory for someone like me, already possessing a certain amount of technique from a parallel discipline but not the language itself.
Another aspect of this is that I'm finding the study extremely satisfying, musically. The way I'm practicing the cornet is completely different from any way I've ever practiced the horn. Yesterday, for example, I spent part of the evening going through all the modes in all keys, first saying the name (i.e. Db Mixolydian) then trying to play them by ear but also picturing the geography, as if written down, so that I'm aware of which notes I'm playing, this being the hardest part because I'm not used to holding the visual map in my mind while playing.
I've noticed a fingering difficulty emerging: during the modes practice it happened quite a lot that when going from 2+3 to 1 the 2nd finger would come up slightly later that the 3rd making quite a messy transition. I need to isolate this problem and work out some specific finger exercises to clear problem. I wonder why I find this compelling - exciting even.

25th July
We are on holiday in a quiet cottage in Essex. I did a lot of cornet practice today. Must have been at least three hours. I went from book to book (of which I now have many) fiddling around trying to find useful things to practice. Played through all the major blues in Aebersold Vol (?) using only notes in the tonic blues scale each time. Also I tried some of these using just the chord notes indicated in black by the Aebersold texts, as set by Ken for my homework. Later on I went through all the major pentatonics which seem to be coming surprisingly easily. I remember whoever it was playing sax in the Aebersold book sounding so fluent and easy and wondering how he kept track of which notes out of the major scales to leave out. Now that it's coming quickly I find it's, as much as anything, getting the sound of the pentatonic firmly established in the mind. Also it helped to discover that it's the fourth and the seventh which are missed out of the major pentatonics. I suppose these are the ones which hint in directions of modulation, sort of destabilising influences, and without them both the scale seems very well defined in its tonality. Having got this in mind it has got rapidly easier.
I still sometimes lose where I am, pitchwise, sometimes reverting to horn equivalents, though it's happening less often than it did at first.

27th July
Yesterday I didn't do very much blowing and I was worried that I'd burnt myself out with too much practice in the few previous days, but on the other hand my energy might have been low due perhaps to the double dosing of antihistamine I've been taking each day because of the close proximity of grass pollen all around our holiday cottage.
Today was better, though. We drove up from Essex to north Norfolk - moving to a different cottage for another week of holiday. On the way I did quite a lot of work in the Locrian mode, trying to familiarise myself with its sound. I had a small breakthrough in discovering that it has both a perfect fourth and a flattened fifth. With this I discovered that if I sung (in my head) the root, then the fourth, then a semitone higher (the flat fifth) I could then sing the scale up or down with all the right notes. Locrian is easy to check as you work on it - simply start on its second note and you should have a major scale. If you don't then that wasn't locrian.
Then, when we got to the Norfolk cottage, I tried it out on the cornet and found that with those three notes preceding each scale I could play all my locrians without fumbling around for the notes. All I need to do now is plenty of this, every day for a week or so, and then I should have freedom to improvise in all the locrians, which I believe covers the chords known as half-diminished.

30th July
The task ahead has got a little bit clearer now. I need to learn how to read from chord symbols. I should carry written sequences around with me and work on them in my head. Yes, that's a good idea. I could photocopy a few from the Real Book and carry them around with me. I don't necessarily have to have the instrument with me.
I think I need to learn to "see" each chord symbol as a harmony flavour and a scale - sort of a grid of possibilities within that flavour. Having learned that then I should learn how to imagine how the following one sounds while I am still playing the first. I think this ability must take a long time and a lot of work to acquire - and the method of acquiring this skill must be efficient. Working out methods is where I am right now.

5th August
I've discovered a useful way forward, for myself involving the use of the Aebersold books and both cornet and keyboard. I arrived at this idea by playing with some of the Aebersold "dominant seventh workout" tracks sitting at the piano, cornet in hand, playing alternately on each instrument and wondering if the constant transpositions from C to Bb and back again was going to help my "feel" of cornet pitch or just confuse me. I could see that this alternation of instruments was going to be very good for me, for a couple of reasons. One of the issues Hal Crook is very hot on, in A New Approach to Practising Improvisation, is learning how to leave spaces, i.e. not to keep playing all the time - a huge problem in improvisation. He devotes a large chunk of the book to saying over and over again how important this is and giving technical exercises to get used to leaving gaps in solos. At first I thought it was going to be easy, but now I can see why he attaches such importance to it - it's so bloody difficult to do it! I keep finding myself playing continuously, which doesn't give me time to think much about what I'm going to play and tires out my lip in no time. Alternating keyboard and cornet solves this problem easily, for both instruments, so that's two solutions for the price of one.
While alternating between piano and cornet I had the idea that it would be a lot easier if the keyboard was in Bb. Thus I rigged up the the little Yamaha DJX synth I bought last year (for the kids, ostensibly, but so far they only play the preset, which I always turn off) to transpose two semitones down and soon discovered what a useful tool this was going to be. One of the problems I still have is that my fingers and chops keep playing away but my mind loses track of at notes I'm playing. Alternating with the keyboard, with its visual reminder of exactly where I am all the time is going to be a brilliant trainer for me - I think. So, I feel this is a really positive step.

6th August
Ho-ho! Just bought a new toy on an impulse, while shopping in Chappells for music stands and an Aulos sopranino recorder for Zak (3). It's a Yamaha QY70 "music sequencer". A fabulous portable (tiny) box of tricks with which I can (when I've read he manual a few times) program accompaniments for my jazz practice. It was reduced in price by £150 with a "find it cheaper anywhere else and we'll kill you" pledge attached to it.
I also bought a very usful-looking book called "1001 Jazz Licks" Jesus, I'm spending a lot on this jazz lark! Thank goodness the cornet didn't cost me anything.

August 9th
The QY70 is great! I've learned how to program it to change chords through a specific sequence and I spent about 90 minutes late into the night, cup mute firmly in, playing Locrians scales over all the X flat minor ninth chords. The Bossanova setting is really nice, but there are loads of different ones I can use. It's going to be a doddle to use. All I need now is loads of time - the problem is that it's school holidays right now and it's very difficult to find time to practice, apart from late into the night.

10th August
Here's another useful exercise I just arrived at after some work on Aebersold, "Blues in all keys". Having learned what the the chord notes and scale notes are (track 11, Blues in Ab -for trumpet) because Aebersold writes them all in for you, I found it hard to ignore them and tha I couldn't avoid playing simply chords and scales. So I wrote just the chord symbols on a post-it and stuck it in the page - effectively taking away one of the crutches.. Then I found that because I still kept drifting away from knowing what notes I was playing I needed a way of making me focus this in relation to the given chords, so I went through the sequence playing just the thirds of every chord.
This is a great exercise for me. I must go through the entire book(s) doing this. It will be a great help.

23rd August
Having got back from holidays with cornet I had to check my hornplaying was still working before heading off to Edinburgh with the Britten Sinfonia, to play some stuff by James Macmillan. This would be followed by a week of film sessions (Peter Pan) for Joel McNeely. To my great relief the horn playing seemed hardly changed. Perhaps a little unfocussed in the high register but elsewhere, if anything, improvements had taken place. How completely brilliant! I really didn't know what sort of damage I might have done so I was very relieved.
What struck me most of all was the difference of practice technique. With the cornet I had been playing scales and arpeggios and improvising bits of melody and jazz licks. With the horn, on the other hand, I found myself playing long tones with crescendi and diminuendi and bathing in the sheer loveliness of the sound. The cornet is nice but it really doesn't have that fascinating, hypnotic timbre. I don't think I could have spent thirty years practicing long notes on a trumpet like I have with the horn.
Another difference which became obvious was that rotary valves sound very different to pistons. I had no idea about this before learning the cornet. It's not just a left hand versus right hand thing, it's a different mechanism with a different sound effect. The rotary valves of a horn are capable of giving a very quick change, more like a switch than a valve, whereas the piston can be moved slower if required and the half-valve sounds are more useful and easy to use than those of the horn. I wonder now what a modern piston horn would feel like to play. I must earmark that idea for a future project.
I'm still working at Locrians (Ø), diminished whole-tone scales (C7+9), and Diminished (beginning with the semitone) (C7-9).

29th August
On the way back from taking the kids to nursery this morning I bumped into the great Sir Kenny Wheeler - who lives just around the corner. It was a great bumping into. As soon as I got home I wrote this letter to him:

Dear Kenny,
It was great to see you this morning.
Here, as promised are the two minidisk copies of the concert at "The Wardrobe" in Leeds with Peter Erskine and the Creative Jazz Orchestra, 25th May 2001. It's as good a recording as one can get, I think, being digital copies direct from the master. It was very kindly copied for me by Steve Shepherd of "Somethin' Else" who engineered the recording for the BBC. I pestered the poor fellow for weeks, by email, until he finally cracked under the nervous strain and sent me a copy.
For me, that little tour was a great musical event. It's not often one gets to play with ones musical heroes (that's you, and Peter and John Taylor) so I couldn't rest until I had a copy of the recording.
And talking of pestering…
You did say this morning that I should come over sometime and play with you and we talked about arranging a date in October. I'm back from Japan around 4th October and I have put a note in my diary to phone you up and harass you until we fix up a date. I've been doing a lot of practice on my cornet and things are beginning - just beginning - to take shape. I'm very much a novice, though and I hope you won't be too appalled at my efforts, or my shaking legs (I'll probably be very nervous).
I'm very serious about learning to play jazz. I've been hard at it for a couple of months now, on my cornet (and I've ordered a flugelhorn) and my fingers are getting to know the scales. Luckily, it hasn't completely screwed up my horn-playing embouchure, or confused the fingers of my other hand. I wrote a letter to you a few weeks ago but in the end never sent it because I thought it would be too much of an imposition on you, that you would be too busy, etc. What my letter said was that I'd love to have a jazz cornet lesson with you sometime and was wondering if you ever did any teaching and if you would consider taking me on, even for just one lesson, etc…
So you can imagine my delight on seeing you this morning and hearing you actually invite me over to play. Incredible!
Today, I will do sixteen hours of practice.
I hope you enjoy the recording - and I'll give you a call in early October.
All the best,
Pip Eastop

29th August
Now that I think about it a bit, I realise I'm rather scared of going to Kenny's house and playing jazz with him - him on the piano and me on the cornet. He's probably brilliant on the piano - I mean, he's the most modest and self effacing man on the planet, and he says he can "play the piano a little bit". This probably means he's brilliant.

5th September
My second lesson with Ken Bartels. Unsurprisingly we started where we had left off and this felt like me showing him my homework - a strange feeling as it's some 25 years since I left school. The homework was playing through the Aebersold"Blues in all keys" first sticking exclusively to the blues scale of each key, secondly using only the given chord notes to build the tunes. I told him I had worked on it for quite hard for a couple of weeks but then had got "sidetracked" by such erotic as Locrian modes and diminished whole-tone scales. I was crap at my homework - which was a bit embarrassing - and the end result was that the same homework still stands for the next lesson. Groan.
For the second half of the lesson we did some keyboard work which was very interesting and my keyboard homework is to learn my 11-V-1 progressions, in all keys and in both hands. It's a lot of work. He also recommended a couple of books, which I have ordered - John Mehegan's "Contemporary Styles for the Jazz Pianist", and Mark Levine's "The Jazz Piano Book".

7th September
The Frunting Horn has finally arrived. What a long wait! Just about two years, I reckon. Anyway, it's lovely. Nice and light, quite horn-like in its sound but not in its articulation, which is smoother and more vocal thanks to piston, rather than rotary valves.

Actually if feels more like a low cornet than a horn. Interestingly, the top C (concert F) only works when you play it loud. When quiet the note isn't really there. Bummer. However, I might be able to fix that by putting a false hand or something like that in the bell. It might look stupid but it may be worth it. Hell, what am I saying? It will look stupid! I'd better not go too high on it.

15th September
Just started reading "Harmony with Lego Bricks", by Conrad Cork. It looks to be an extremely well thought out and insightful manual.

2002

17th April
Hmmm... It's been 7 months since I entered anything here. What happened? I think I got a bit bogged down and lost my momentum. I had my third keyboard lesson with Ken, in October, and we decided I would come back for another one when I felt needed to rather than book up the next lesson there and then.
Kenny phoned up and left a message with Carrie asking how I was getting on and if I still wanted to go and have a blow with him. I was finding it a bit difficult to pluck up the courage to call him so it was great he called or perhaps nothing would have happened. I went around to his place on 18th December. I was quite nervous and worried about having to play something to him. Would he laugh at me? I felt a bit silly with my cornet and unable to ask him the right sort of question. He's a bit of an awkward fellow too, which didn't help much. Eventually I found myself asking him what goes on in his head when he's reading chord symbols, improvising over them. He really wasn't able to tell me but something useful did come out of our meeting: I discovered what for me was THE crucial thing, which was that he always knows what note he's on and what the "flavour" of the chord is. I had already come to this realisation for myself but Kenny kind of hammered it home and a result of this was that I set my resolve to light up the part of my mind which monitors what notes I am playing, the actual names of them and/or their positions on the stave. A consciously visual, non-aural analogue of the pitches I am playing.
He put on one of the tracks from the Bill Evans book in the Aebersold series and got me to play along with it. He seemed pretty impressed with my "ear", and somewhat mystified when I told him I had no idea what notes I was playing. We both came to the conclusion that I had to find a way of knowing what notes I am playing. So from that moment - an important one, which got me working at the jazz again - I put a lot of energy into that.

Kenny Wheeler very kindly lent me one of his flugel horns. It's a beauty with a gorgeous copper bell section and an absolute delight to play - made by Kanstul. It's incredibly well in tune. Here's a photo:

13th April
Unless I was dreaming, today I played at the Vortex (a jazz club in London) with Kenny! He was making a guest appearance with the Evan Parker Trio and asked me to come along. At first I thought he meant for me just to listen but it turned out he wanted me to actually play! I was stunned and amazed, and I only agreed to join him because he said we would be playing "free" jazz rather than jazz jazz - so it would be relatively easy.
The first thing we played was a duet - just Kenny and me, in two sections - Kenny on the trumpet, me on flugel, followed by Kenny on flugel, me on horn. It's hard to say if it was any good or not but it was certainly interesting and great fun. We made a lot of noise. Needless to say, Kenny was great - firing off powerful torrents of scaleic and arpeggiated notes, all fascinating. I made various squawks and rips and noodled around trying not to get in the way too much and mess things up.
Nearly all of the free jazz I've done before has been with non jazzers so this was very different to the kind of stuff I used to play with Derek Bailey back in the eighties, for example.
After that we played for 40 minutes or so with Even Parker's trio. My abiding memory is of the sensation of playing the flugel, standing up, the sound firing outwards in the direction I was facing - something of a novelty for a rear-facing (French)horn player.
After that I drove Kenny home.

10th May
Played a gig at Westminster Abbey with London Brass. I knew John Barclay would be playing so I took along my SmithWatkins to see what he thought of it. He liked it. It's a good setup.
He couldn't have been more encouraging. This is what he said: "If you do another year on that [practicing the trumpet] you'll be as good [at jazz] as anyone". That's so nice of him, even though it is wildly inaccurate.

24th May
Went to The Valve (great shop) today, to look at cases and buy a harmon mute. I ordered a "triple" case which will hold both a trumpet and a flugelhorn. Should take a month or so to arrive.
I found myself looking at mouthpieces and bought a very intriguing one made of transparent polycarbonate. It's unbreakable, won't get stuck in the leadpipe and always feels warm to the lips. Here's a picture of it.

27th May
Amazing - Carrie (my wife) went around to Sir Kenny Wheeler's house and bought one of his trumpets from him for me, it being my birthday today. It's a SmithWatkins - a very wonderful instrument. It has a large bell in quite thin yellow lacquered brass and a choice of six leadpipes for me to experiment with. They seem to make quite a difference to the sound and to the intonation of the very high notes but it will probably be years before I know which one is the best all-rounder for me.

Thanks, Kenny, for parting with this lovely trumpet (for such an insanely low price) - and thanks, Carrie, for such a cool birthday present!

(This instrument has some weird bits stuck on. Please ignore them. I'm not ready to go public with these just yet!)

28th May
Valentin Garvie came to visit today for a jam. He's recently landed a great job - principal trumpet with Ensemble Modern, based in Frankfurt. He's a wonderful trumpet player - from Argentina - and a really simpatico bloke.
The first thing I did was to get him to listen to me playing on a Vincent Bach "ordinary" mouthpiece and then switch to the transparent polycarbonate one for comparison. Amazingly he knew straight away that one of them was a plastic one - and knew which one it was!
However, he did concede that it is indeed a very good mouthpiece.

Valentin Garvie, May 2002

24th June
Trying to get a bit of practice in every day. More books and playalongs have arrived, so no shortage of stuff to work on. The trumpet and the flugel are hanging up next to the piano, and the cornet (and mute) are upstairs next to the bed. Most of the playalongs and tons of other jazz recordings are on minidisc so I've always got stuff to listen to or play-along with. Also, my Revo has an ever increasing selection of "Grigson" grids to study.
It's going quite well, although I detect a certain reluctance to get stuck into any standards. I'm not sure quite why this is but I'm hoping that Kenny might help me work this out when I go to see him this afternoon. He's reluctantly agreed to see me for some kind of "lesson" although it's clear he doesn't want to be a teacher. I think what I should do is ask him to help me work on Stella - I think I have a bit of a foothold in that one.
What I really need is a tame pianist to help me work on some tunes. I'm going to phone Julian Jacobson in a few weeks, when he's back from a cruise, and I'm hoping we can work up some tunes together.
The "LoadsOfModes" is working well. I think I'll know them all in a couple of weeks and then I'll just have to start speeding them up.
There is a tonguing difference between the horn and the trumpet. It's a larger mass of air inside the horn so starting it and stopping it takes a bit more clout and steadier air pressure. This is the dreaded "support" but I hate the term it means totally different things to different people. I don't think the trumpet needs any less of it than the horn but the tongue has to be used in quite a different way. I'm hoping that I'll be able to switch tonguing styles as I switch instruments - rather like people who play both violin and viola have to learn to switch gears as move from one to the other.

27th June
I went to The Valve and bought a very nice case for both the flugel and my trumpet. I'm going to Mallorca in a few days and I want to take both with me, as well as my horn. It's a Marcus Bonna case. Very strong and lightweight.

8th-11th July
A couple of concerts in Mallorca. I was in a new group - a brass sextet called "Tuba Mirum". the instrumentation was like a regular brass quintet line-up but with an extra trumpet part. The players as follows:

Trumpet: John Wallace
Trumpet: Andreas Koenig
Trumpet: Valentin Garvie
Horn: Myself.
Trombone: Leon Ni
Tuba: Oren Marshall.

What a fantastic four days! We had the luxury of two whole days for rehearsals before the concert days and the group really worked well together, right from the start. It was quite a varied and dangerous program. The audiences were very responsive and the atmosphere was great as a result. John, Oren and I played solo pieces, which were possibly the most challenging for our audiences. Mine was called "Lost In Space" - a 7 movement improvisation involving the use of a flugelhorn on the opposite side of the stage, linked to where I sat with my horn by a long length of hosepipe.
Valentin did brilliant arrangements of a couple Tangos for the group and nobody seemed to mind me trying to do some jazz improvisation in the extended take-it-in-turns middle section. I swaggered out to the front, aimed high and blasted out my stuff as loud as I possibly could. It must have been a complete load of rubbish! Still, it was fun - and at least it felt like jazz. The trumpet felt really comfortable and natural in my hands.

31st July
I'm on holiday with Carrie, Cai and Zak in a cottage in Sherringham Park, Norfolk. Nobody lives anywhere nearby so I can practice at anytime and most of what I've done so far has been outside.. I've brought Kenny's Benge pocket-trumpet with me and I'm doing irregular bursts of modes and jazz-chord arpeggios (from an exercise I've written called "Lodes of Modes" which I'll post here one of these days [DONE IT click here!] (and then click here) and the odd stab at repeat tonguing in the high register - something I find rather difficult. So, I'm not really being very systematic but then this is a holiday. I guess what I'm doing adds up to about 90 minutes or so each day. The little Benge is perfect for a holiday practice trumpet. It takes up almost no space - it even fits inside my regular horn case - and, most importantly, it's a serious piece of gear - an excellent instrument by any standards. With a cup mute in it's nice and quiet so it doesn't disturb the kids trying to get to sleep.

This evening, I've just discovered a good way forward. I sat down with Aebersold's Turnarounds book and CD (volume 16) and tackled the progressions for what are called "Turnarounds No 3". It's basically this progression: DM,F7, BbM,Eb7 repeated three times followed by a variety of unsubtle modulations into another key - and through all the keys. I started off by playing along with the CD but soon realised I was just deepening previous grooves I had made rather than finding new pathways. I turned off the playalong and started to play just the chord notes of each chord symbol. Difficult! Ken Bartells was right - I must learn to know what notes I am playing and learn play ones I choose rather than playing exclusively by ear. So here's a new personal axiom for me:

The ability to play by ear is certainly useful but it's not enough for jazz
and can even be a drawback when it diverts me away from the
thorough learning process which I really must go through.

1st August
Following on from that I thought I would try some serious practice of what Ken Bartells taught me (a year ago!). In my Psion Revo, a pocket computer, I keep many useful files, one which is a spreadsheet in the form of a randomised row of chord symbols. There are 11 chord types for each of the twelve notes - thus 132 in all. Here are the some of them to give an idea of their randomness:

BbM +4, C7 -9, F7+, Bb mM, D mM, A, A7 +4, AM +4, CØ, E7+, C# mM, F mM, B°, Eb7 +4, G7 +4, FM +4, G°, B7, Ebm, D7 +9, EbM +4, BbØ, DØ, Bb7, C7, Db7 -9, Bb7 -9, BM +4, C7 +9, DM +4, Fm, FØ, F7 -9, D, EbØ etc...

Taking the first string of four chords from this random row: BbM +4, C7 -9, F7+, Bb mM. I played through each one in turn. First up and down the chords, then as scales, trying to hear the next one coming before actually playing it. After beginning to get the feel of this I programmed the sequence into the Yamaha QY70 and got it to repeat the four chords around and around in a variety of stimulating styles such as "Bossa Nova" or "Cool Jazz" (better described as tepid). Good fun and, I think, very stimulating of the right kind of neural links for hearing the flavours of chords just by looking at their written symbols. Progress, I think.

4th August
Today I read something great. It is a quote from the pianist Howard Levy:

"Really, the best way to learn is to take tunes off records, because you're utilizing your ear. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to be able to do this, but it becomes so easy to hear pieces in their component parts if you actually do the work yourself. Then you start trying to write the changes out by ear. In the beginning, you're going to write out things wrong. You're not going to know what's right for the first few years that you do this. But in the end, you see your mistakes and you really learn it."

( I found this quote on page 93 of Paul F. Berliner's wonderful book, "Thinking in Jazz - The Infinite Art of Improvisation". It's a massive scholarly book, full pithy wisdom and mind- expanding quotes by all sorts of famous and not so famous musicians. Published by The University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-226-04381-9 )

8th August
I wrote out all the chords from Coltrane's "Giant Steps" and turned them all into a useful chordal study which goes through every key. Felt quite pleased with myself. It's a bit of an ear bender, so learning to play it in every key might take some time.
I've also extracted a useful exercise from Clifford Brown's amazing "Night in Tunisia" from an album called "The Beginning And The End". It's based on a whole tone run and it's very tricky and makes a challenging study for the ears and fingers. Something to put into my workout.

13th August
Becoming a bit frustrated by not getting enough study time. We are on holiday and the kids need occupying, taking out, playing with etc. for many hours each day. On top of that I have get my horn chops working because I've a couple of hard gigs at the end of the week, in Germany and Italy with London Brass. As usual with that crowd it's a new pad (to me) and I have precisely three and a hours of rehearsal time in which to learn how to play Richard Bissill's stupendously difficult horn parts. (For the record I will say, with a casual confidence, that Richard Bissill is the best horn player in the world).
The scraps of trumpet practice I have managed in the last few days have been on arpeggios and scales. I really need to start learning some standards and trumpet solos from recordings.
I've been running quite a lot (something else which shortens my available practice time) and I always listen to music on minidisc as I run. Due to a mix up last week I found I had inadvertently kept a disc which John Barclay lent me. After an hour or so of listening I found he had recorded it in LP mode, which means you can cram more music on the disc. He had used not just LP mode, but LP4 mode, which give an available 300 minutes (5 hours!) of music on just one disc. The quality is not so good but it's really not bad and certainly good enough for the vintage jazz recordings which John had copied. I confess I didn't really notice the poor sound as I was running.
The amazing thing is that John has recorded himself playing along with some of the tracks, so every now and again another trumpet player pops up - in a different sound, in a different acoustic. John, a closet jazzer, is very good! He's got a wonderful sound, a great understanding of jazz harmony and bags of style. What's funny about it is that even though, I guess, he recorded the stuff on his own at his home without any idea that someone else might one day listen to it, he still sounds apologetic, as if he's poking his head around a door and saying, "hello? does anyone mind if I just squeeze in here and play along with you guys - just a few quiet twiddles - don't mind me, I'm only messing about..."
Such a superb musician - he's obviously going to be a great jazzer (the world awaits) but such a humble soul. Oh yes, and he just happens to be one of the funniest men I have ever met. John and I have a plan to spend some time together thrashing out some jazz. I'm expecting to learn a lot from him - but I can't imagine he'll learn anything from me.

17th August
In Udine, the day after a London Brass concert. Gareth Small very kindly lent me his Bb trumpet for the morning - and I had remembered to take my trumpet mouthpiece with me. I did at least 90 minutes of really useful practice. Lodes of Modes and that Clifford. Brown wholetone exercise. No distractions - I really enjoyed it.

20th August
Just got home back from the London Brass concerts and started practicing trumpet again. It was great to be away with London Brass, partly because John Barclay was playing. Hearing him warming up (not that he bothers with that much) and noodling jazzily around - to say nothing of the several brilliant solos he played in the concerts - was all very inspiring.
Looking in the diary I seem to have plenty of free time over the next couple of weeks so I should be able to get plenty of practice in.

21st August
Since reading that the best way forward is to learn solos from recordings I've embarked on some study in that direction. The PC has turned out to be a great help. I ripped a Chet Baker track, "Bea's Flat" (1953) into the PC and then opened it in a .wav file editor. The trumpet solo is very fast and at normal speed it's extremely difficult to hear the individual notes so it's wonderful to be able to slow it down and yet keep the pitch of the original. Normally, if you half the tempo of a recording its pitch drops by an octave but the computer works its magic to compensate precisely so that the correct pitch is retained. With this wonderful tool, within half an hour or so I had untangled the first few bars of the solo and even learned a bit of it -much quicker than I could have done just using a CD player. Still, it's going to take some hard work to get my playing of it up to Chet Baker's very fast tempo.
The PC has just opened up a whole new way of studying jazz for me.

Later today I met up with Julian Jacobson, a wonderful pianist based in London. I used to play with him quite a lot in the early eighties in a chamber ensemble called "Capricorn". We always used to mess about together in rehearsals by playing scraps of music completely out of context - we couldn't stop ourselves; most of what Capricorn played was so boring and difficult that we needed plenty of light relief to keep us sane. With this in mind and thinking Julian must still be some kind of a closet jazzer, I rang him a to see if he could help me. It was a positive hit - we made a date and that date was today.
On his suggestion we met up at the Royal College of Music where he and I both teach. We were both a little awkward to start with and after a bit of a natter we got down to some playing. We started with some blues and then played Stella and a couple of other tunes I didn't know and couldn't read. I must admit I was pretty shockingly bad but honest about my current limitations and my intentions and, amazingly, he seemed keen to do some more so we are going to meet again in November having, we hope, found a drummer and a bass player. This is a very exciting development for me!
I need to learn some tunes!

23rd August
I was in Waterstones browsing the jazz books today when I discovered this quote from Kieth Jarrett from "Jazztimes", May 1999

"Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms!"

Amen.

27th August
Right now I'm well stuck into some "turnaround" exercises. The one I'm currently chopping away at is one of the simplest from Aebersold's book of turnarounds (Volume 16, Ex. 3). Basically, this is a four chord repeating sequence, for example F#M, A7, D7, G7, which needs transposing into all keys. It's making me do what Ken Bartells told me to do a year ago, which is to try to be conscious of which notes and what chord I'm playing. I still find this really difficult but I'm confident that I'm going to crack it eventually.
Another landmark I've passed recently, I now realise, is what might be called the acquisition of "trumpet finger pitch". Ever since I can remember I've had "horn finger pitch" meaning that I only have to imagine I'm holding a horn and make a certain valve combination for the note I'm wanting to hear to pop conveniently into my mind. This is an extremely useful thing, particularly for playing atonal music - in fact I don't know how anyone could play the stuff without that having this facility.
Although the trumpet is in Bb, just like the French horn, the hornplayer reads and thinks in F. Thus, while the trumpet fingerings are quite similar between horn and trumpet (although one octave apart) the notes have completely different names. On one level, then, trumpet fingering is completey different to horn fingering - which is, I think, why hornplayers and trumpet players are now an entirely different species and generally do not interbreed. I must be quite a rare "sport" or crossbreed.
Now that I can "activate" my right hand and imagine certain trumpet piston combinations to get any pitches I want in my head I think I can say I have got "trumpet finger pitch". It's taken longer than a year to acquire this, and I wasn't sure it would come - in fact I was actaully slightly worried that if it did come it would mess up my horn pitch. Luckily, trumpet fingers and horn fingers, being on different hands, don't seem to conflict at all. Phew!

27th August
Spent a while ripping some carefully chosen Aebersold tracks into MP3 files in my PC. I've done this so that I can open the tracks up in special software which enables me to slow all or part of the tracks down, loop them or transpose them, or do all those things (Don't worry Jamey, I'm not going to make them available on the www - they're for my own use only!). I've found it's a very efficient way of disecting jazz solos for learning them by ear.

29th August
Valentin Garvie came around this evening. He had phoned up to say he was in London for four days between a tour around Sweden and a pile of work with Ensemble Moderm in Germany, so I invited him around straight away. We played through a few blues pieces and one or two standards, all with the Aebersold playalongs.

To summarise what came out of the evening:

1. I've improved a bit since the last time we tried this together, which is encouraging in itself, but in addition Valentin was particularly encouraging. He's very good at delivering praise and encouragement wrapped up neatly with some constructive criticism. (If you are reading this, Valentin, THANKS!)

2. My polycarbonate mouthpiece is really not bad - we did a sound test and the differences were not quite so obvious as they had seemed last time we compared it with his metal 1.5c.

3. Valentin is a really good jazzer! I don't know why he hasn't been doing more of it. As we got warmed up he got much better, very rapidly, indicating that he has been very good at jazz improvisation in the past but has let it get a bit rusty. After half an hour or so he was producing some amazingly impressive stuff and by comparison I felt I was sounding worse and worse. The most noticable thing for me was that I don't seem to have any sort of style, rather I play in what might be called the "Blandissimo" style. The gin didn't help. For a moment or two I felt like giving up but then Valentin managed to find yet more encouragement, somehow.

4. He agreed wholeheartedly with "Really, the best way to learn is to take tunes off records..". (see full quote, in green, above).

5. He thinks that rather than trying to learn all the turnarounds, all the two-five-ones, all the blues progressions in every key etc. (not that I have been, entirely...) I should I should stick to the simpler more common keys only and concentrate my efforts more on learning a big repertoire of patterns, licks, riffs, whatever they are called, extracted from recorded solos. I must find a ways of chaining chunks of this sort of remembered material together in my improvisation. Hopefully, this should to prevent me meandering around aimlessly, which is what I tend to do when I'm reading chord symbols.

Now, that's a lot of learning in one evening - and all it cost me was the preparation of a bowl of stif-fried vegetables with rice and a gin&tonic!

(6. I must persuade Valentin to come over more often.)

30th August
Valentin's visit has made quite a difference. This morning I made an assault on Chet Baker's amazing solo from "Bea's Flat". I spent an hour or so looping sections of it at half-speed and trying to capture every not and every nuance. It's coming along quite well, I think - I've learned about 75% of it (at half speed). Another hour on it and I should have it, and then I can start speeding it up.
After that bit of work I opened up a blues file in the same key, C, in my computer and was delighted to find I could fit bits of the solo from Bea's Flat quite nicely here and there. This ties in very immediately with something I read last night in Paul Berliner's book. Here it is:

Rhythmic ingredients can also constitute the fundamental idea for original figures. Walter Bishop Jr. says that after absorbing Bud Powell's phrasing he "began to thnk like Bud" so he could abandon Powell's precise lines and create his own "in the same idiom, playing with the same kind of feeling and intensity". Arthur Rhames views the process as analogous to emulating personal styles of speech. Because all artists speak with "their own natural rhythm and sequential order." it is possible to "emulate a person whose speaking you like, using his same effect - how he comes into a sentence or the way he constructs his things" - but without saying the "exact same thing". That is how Rhames learned from John Coltrane.

"Without directly copying his melodic line, I tried to get the feeling of the line, the phrasing, which allowed me to understand how Trane was talking when he played. What I wanted was the form, the basket that he was using, but the contents I wanted to fill myself. I knew that I had something to say, and I wanted to deal with that. So what I copied was the way John constructed his phrases and their rhythmical base, the stems without the notes, and I put my own noes and harmony - the things I thought about - on top of it."

20th September.

I spent a bit of time over at Jim Rattigan's house yesterday. We did some rather basic work on 2-5-1 progressions. Exactly what I needed. Then we worked a bit on "All The Things You Are". Here's a lead sheet.

2003

17th March (bit of a long gap!).

Still practising!

Here's an excersise I'm working on a bit now. The idea of it is to get me right into the feel, into the nitty-gritty, of the melodic minor by getting used to some awkward angular intervals contained within it. The melodic minor (up) or MinorMajor scale is so useful because its modes yield a lot of common jazz scales, such as the altered "Alt" scale (7th mode) or the half-diminished scale with a raised 2nd (Locrian #2).

I'm going to try to learn this in all twelve mM scales. It's very awkward, particularly in the keys furthest away from C. Gulp!

20th April 2003(another long gap!)

Still practising! I've been working on John Coltrane's essential standard, Giant Steps. It's a real earbender, but I think I've found a way in - an initial way of taking the fear out of it.

It's a colour coded grid of the chord changes. Pretty self explanatory. It shows that the whole piece can be done, as if by magic, using only the notes of three major scales - in this case Db major, A major and F major. The three colours correspond to the three chords so you get visual cue to change chord. Please take a look.

Please note it's for Bb trumpet. I use it with the excellent slow Aebersold playalongs to Giant Steps found in volume 65, "Four and More".

2004

1/1/04 (another, even longer, gap!)

New year's resolution: to get this diary/journal going again after quite a long period of neglect (look at the date of the previous entry).

A large part of what stopped me writing was that every time I thought of doing so I felt the time would be better spent practising the trumpet. Also I lost the sense of importance of keeping a progress record. One of the things I like to do is to teach, and it's not inconceivable that one day I might teach jazz, perhaps specifically to people who are already "classically" trained. If I do, then a well-kept journal, of my own trials and tribulations, could be a very useful teaching resource for me. Not only that - I do think that what I'm attempting is unique; I've never heard of an established horn player switching not only instrument but an entire musical discipline before. I feel something of an explorer, and I suppose a good explorer makes maps as they go along.

Apart from a period of some four months last summer during which I worked quite intensively for the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Glyndebourne Opera, I have been working pretty hard at my jazz. I'm still a long way from any kind of public performance but I've not lost any of my enthusiasm or energy for the task of learning. .

During the period since my last writinng here my collection of playalong recordings has enlarged quite a lot and nearly all of them are Jamey Aebersold's excellent books. Also I've found another absolutely great tool to help me learn. It's a software program called The Amazing Slowdowner (available to download from www.ronimusic.com ). This extremely clever software will get hold of the CD player in your PC or Mac and make it do the most amazing things. It can play a track - all of it or just a section of it - looped if you like if you like if you like if you like - at any speed without altering the pitch. This is incredibly useful in itself but there's more - it can transpose the pitch of the track up or down by any amount you want - semitones or fractions of semitones or combinations thereof - up or down. The great thing is that pitch and tempo can be chosen independantly of eachother. It's an incredibly easy to use, no frills, sensibly written program. Congratulations to the author - a jazz musician himself, for turning my PC into the most useful learning tool I could imagine for my jazz.

I keep finding new ways to use it but here's one way, just to help demonstrate how useful it is: say I want to learn a solo by Clifford Brown - from one of his recordings. I'll put the CD in (or I can rip the desired track to an MP3 file and store it in my computer for ease of access - The Amazing Slowdowner works just as well with MP3 files, or other types of audio files on hard-disk, as with a CD spinning in your drive) and find the start of the actual solo and set it to loop the first bar or two - a chunk small enough for me to learn without breaking it down still further. I'll slow it right down so I can hear every little detail and then commence trying to play it. When I've got it, I'll start to speed it up a little and move onto the next chunk.

It's the ability to play around with the speed of the playback and the length of the loop which is so wonderfully useful. It's hard to imagine a more efficient way of learning something by ear. And I'm now certain that "by ear" is the way to do it. I've a book of Clifford Brown's solos transcribed and printed. They certainly look nice but if you play them "from the dots" they come out sounding stilted and mechanical. I reckon the only way you'll get it to float, fly and dance like Clifford Brown is by copying him directly. And that's why we learn solos, isn't it? Jazz is supposed to be an aural tradition. I want to learn Clifford Brown's rhythms, grammar, syntnax, accent and dialect - and I can't do that from a book. My best chance is with the great man's recordings and the Amazinng Slowdowner. This is the way it's always been done, incidentnally. It used to be constant repositioning of the needle on a 78 record - and I've heard it said that many jazz musicians used completely wear out their records learning like this!

The Amazing Slowdowner is much more efficient - and you can learn it in a differnet key from the original, if you want.
A lot of the Aebersold playalongs are still too fast for me to get my head around the chord changes. With the Slowdowner I can highlight any tricky bits and run them as slowly as I like until I've got the hang of it, then speed it up bit by bit.

Incidentally, I've been very surprised and humbled by putting Clifford Brown's solos under the microscope in this way. One would think that the more you slow it down to disect and investigate it the more minor imperfections of rythm and intonation would show up until, at high magnifications, it would start sounding rather ragged. Wrong! What has been a most amazing ear-opener for me has been the discovery that the more I dissect and magngfy the more detail and accuracy is revealed. Hats off to the incredible Clifford Brown.

9/2/04
I've just spent a week in Antwerp, Belgium, playing Schubert's 9th Symphony with the Flanders Filharmonic orchestra (KFOV) and stayed with an old friend and fine photographer, Miel Pieters, a fiddle player in the orchestra. Here's are some pictures he took of me practising my Benge pocket trumpet. It's perfect for travelling as it fits in my horncase - and there's still room for the horn.

16th February 2004
After a long period of fairly intense study I'm now having something of a lull in the trumpet practise due to being busy every day recording from dawn to dusk at Abbey Road Studio One, the film score of Troy, playing the bigger, curlier thing in F (go here if you want to see some pictures of that).
This does not mean total cessation, though. Far from it; I am lugging around with me a new book by George Bouchard.

I've been studying this on my fingers and in my head in the studio and on the underground and have found some very intrigueing stuff about use of what Bouchard calls the "Altered Pentatonic" scale. The notes of this scale, if it starts on C, are C, D, Eb, G ,A. This doesn't look like much but it's a huge chunk of learning. I want to learn them in all keys, first of all, and then learn use them out of their root keys in the clever way Bouchard describes for use over dominant, altered and half-diminished chords. For example the C pentatonic shown above will sound great played over B7+9 or over Aø.
This is poing to be a big job for me, particlarly as I'll have to learn to play a scale with a C "feel" over a B "feel" harmony. I haven't tried this yet but I as can't hear the damn thing in my head yet I know it's going to be problematic. A very good challenge, though, and Bouchard is pretty insistent that it sounds great.

I can't tell you how good I feel about being "intermediate". It's a such a great leap up from being a beginner and I hope to remain here for a very long time, and make the absolute most of it.

To finish today's entry, here's a photo taken last night at Abbey Road, during an "overdub" session for the film, Troy. It's an impressive brass line up but the two biggest highlights are my jazzdaddy and teacher, John Barclay, 2nd trumpet from the left and, far right, England's greatest living lead trumpet legend, - and designer of my trumpet - Derek Watkins.

Incidentally, this overdub session gives a total weight of brass, for some parts of the score, of 16 trumpets, 16 trombones, 16 horns and 3 tubas. Utterly awesome!

9th April 2004

Before:
I've been practising pretty regularly and, I feel, steadily improving but increasingly feeling myself to be in a music vacuum. What I need now is fresh air, not my own stale stuff to breathe; so with that in mind I've arranged to have a lesson with Martin Shaw, who has been enethusiastically recommended by both John Barclay and Derek Watkins.

I'm taking a trumpet and a flugelhorn but no books or printed stuff of any kind - jazz is supposed to be an improvisational musical form - plus I don't want to be in a position of telling Martin the way I want the lesson to go.

What do I want? Not sure, but I'd like him to get me loosened up my playing and then gently guide me towards better ways of doing it. The fact is I don't know if I'm any good at any aspect of it. John Barclay has been vey encouraging, even flattering, and so have Valentin and Dan Newall, but I don't really know if I'm heading in the "right" direction, hence the need for a lesson ...or several.

After:
Well, that was amazing. Martin Shaw is a great teacher, and very generous with his time. He gave me two hours! It felt like half an hour. It seems that I'm basically on the right track and he was very encouraging about my attempts - after hearing me struggling through All The Things You Are, although a few things came up which I'm writing down now to remind myself about.

1. General articulation: I'm doing it too softly! My tonguing needs to be more positive, or harder, less "classical" - this surprised me but he demonstrated the difference and convinced me. It's part of coming from my highly classical horn technique and rounding the starts of the notes. "It's a beautiful sound but not right for jazz trumpet", I think he said. So I must try to remember that.

2. Learning the modal flavours: Up and down scales thinking in terms of raised and lowered 2nds, 3rds, 6ths etc.. Make cards or use Psion... Go to the ninth and back down each time. Then learn them from the ninth down then up. Then in broken thirds, fourths etc...

3. Playing Aebersolds using only the chord notes. Up, then up and down.

4. Playing Aebersolds up and down the straight simple scales notes - so, for example, when encountering the altered scale Calt, just stick to C7 (for now).

5. Same as above but improvising using only the scale notes first in minims, then in triplet minims, then crotchets, then triplet crotchets then quavers, then, triplet quevers etc...

6. Don't use double tonguing in the fast stuff - it's almost never done in jazz. The fast licks seem to all be slurred pairs or threes, across the main beats.

7. Learn the closed-tongue Clifford Brown thingy sound. Like muting the sound by putting the toungue against the teeth so the air has to squeeze around the teeth to get through. This is a new departure - something unheard of in classical technique and I don't think it's been analyzed yet by jazz trumpet players. They just do it.

8. The timbre can be less bright - Martin's was considerably smokier, or more lush than mine. No idea how to do this.

9. Chromatic scales: very useful and need to be clean and accurate and fast. Good for warming up. Use a more postive finger action - slam the valves down a bit more !

Thank you Martin!

6th May 2004

I've had another amazing lesson with Martin Shaw.

We spent quite a long time looking into what we have agreed to call "Ghost" tonguing. Having done a bit of work on it since the last lesson and got somewhere (though by no means anywhere near it yet) it's now got a little clearer exactly what I have to do. So now I have an exercise I will put into my work-out to teach my tongue to jump in and out of that precise position on my upper incisors which damps the sound. It's a great effect and I'm chasing after it seriously.

The second half of the lesson was spent trying to find a way of using the ghost tonguing in context. Martin wrote out a couple of little riffs for me, which would work over a 2-5-1 sequence and which contain obviousd places to do the ghost notes.
We talked quite a lot about how dificult it is for me actually to hear some of the things that Martin does (he does play really beautifully) well enough to even try to copy him. He worked through a variety of ways of slowing it down, with me listening and copying, but not getting anywhere near it. Mine always sounded clumsy and awkward - his always fresh and alive and perfect.

I think next time I'll have to bring the minidisc recorder so I can better analyzing exactly what's going on. I need to do this not just with the ghost notes but with many other aspects of style.

My articulation still needs to be blunter, firmer and more immediate at the front of the notes. I still sound too much like a horn player - shaping everything. Despite this being quite a profound change in style, I'm completely confident it won't mess up my horn playing , as it seems to me that people who learn to speak French don't lose their Engish accent in the process. I'm sure it's exactly the same thing. The parallel with learning a foreign language is very clear to me

Martin also said I need to listen to tons of Clifford Brown. Fantastic! I'll try to learn some more of his solos.

Homework:
1. Continue the chromatic runs and practise ghost tonguing as workout exercises.
2. Practise the riffs Martin gave me.
3. Study "Confirmation" by Charlie Parker - from the copy Martin lent me with articulations and other useful pencil marks added.
4. Get hold of David Baker's book on Clifford Brown in the Giants Of Jazz series.
5. Get hold of the Charlie Parker Onmibus.
6. Tongue firmer all the time.
7. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown.