At the risk of being redundant, I am mercilessly pursuing a final version of Merciless. This particular edition contains forays into the verse/mid-section looking for the right chords and not finding many of them and ends inconclusively. The first chorus-verse-chorus section is holding together. Trying to evoke a gospel-inflected vibe. Good things come to those who wait.
. . . my friend Bob, also a musician, alerted me to the fact that some jazz players, mainly pianists such as McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea, voiced chords in unique and interesting ways, a fact with which I was quite unfamiliar. At the time mind you, I was entering the twilight of my years of accordion lessons and listening to art/prog-rock bands like Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant. The lessons providing invaluable theory experience and an unrivaled discipline in practice and dedication; the art/prog providing tremendous inspiration and motivation to create; although at the time, I was quite unable to create the kinds of things I would very much have like to created. Nevertheless, this unique voicing of chords, one tactic of which Bob was very explicit, was the use of fourths - resulting in a slightly non-conventional, yet pleasing and ever-adaptable sound as opposed to a major triad or some inversion of same. In any case, although I didn't fully grasp the enormity of this discovery at the time, I did attempt to employ it and have incorporated it into my musical thoughts and deeds ever since. One such composition that utilizes the concept is, as of yet tentatively titled, posted here in all its undecided and raw, new-born glory . . .
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NOTES! . . . actually. They are the notes forming intro and the turnaround, which fuels this medium-slow tempo tune, devised to promote improvisation on the descending chord pattern of D minor, C major and B flat major. The pattern allows a formidable amount of freedom yet restricts just enough to encourage melody within the structure.
My latest solo offering, No Frills, is now available at - No Frills
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
(from http://www.monkzone.com/monkzone.htm)
Minton’s, legend has it, was where the “bebop revolution” began. The after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s, along with similar musical gatherings at Monroe’s Uptown House, Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, among others, attracted a new generation of musicians brimming with fresh ideas about harmony and rhythm—notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, Max Roach, Tadd Dameron, and Monk’s close friend and fellow pianist, Bud Powell. Monk’s harmonic innovations proved fundamental to the development of modern jazz in this period. Anointed by some critics as the “High Priest of Bebop,” several of his compositions (“52nd Street Theme,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy” [co-written with Kenny Clarke and originally titled “Fly Right” and then “Iambic Pentameter”], “I Mean You”) were favorites among his contemporaries.
Yet, as much as Monk helped usher in the bebop revolution, he also charted a new course for modern music few were willing to follow. Whereas most pianists of the bebop era played sparse chords in the left hand and emphasized fast, even eighth and sixteenth notes in the right hand, Monk combined an active right hand with an equally active left hand, fusing stride and angular rhythms that utilized the entire keyboard. And in an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence. In addition to his unique phrasing and economy of notes, Monk would “lay out” pretty regularly, enabling his sidemen to experiment free of the piano’s fixed pitches. As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new architecture for his music, one in which harmony and rhythm melded seamlessly with the melody. “Everything I play is different,” Monk once explained, “different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other. . . . [W]hen the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through . . . completed.”
2012 marks 50 years of the Beatles. On Jan. 1, 1962, the Beatles flunked an audition at Decca Records in London. Label executive Dick Rowe’s brush-off: “Guitar groups are on the way out.”
Tommy Dorsey claimed, "Bebop has set music back 20 years."
Louis
Armstrong complained that beboppers were playing wrong chords.
A
prominent New York critic said, "Bebop sounds to me like a hardware
store in an earthquake."
"He plays like somebody is standing on his foot." Miles Davis on Eric Dolphy
One critic said that Monk's music was "like missing the bottom step in the dark."
Critics called Thelonious Monk "the elephant on the keyboard."
Emperor Joseph II on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozars's The Marriage of Figaro, "too many notes, Mozart"
Diana Krall is this decade’s Harry Connick Jr., Krall is popping up everywhere these days at festivals, in clubs and on CD sales and airplay charts. An adequate pianist, she’s a tentative, dry-voiced vocalist whose torpid, sorority-girl versions of classic songs barely measure up to hotel piano bar standards. Her eminence must seem like a slap in the face to vastly more gifted and creative singers, like Rebecca Parris and Ian Shaw.
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