lowquality.net » Musician / Geek

Kermit and Harry The Hipster (precursor to Rowlf The Dog?) circa the 1950’s

There is something about John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” that just instills fear and respect among Jazz (and non-Jazz) musicians. Not only is the composition intimidating, but ‘Trane doesn’t make it easy for us when he navigates through the tune so effortlessly and beautifully. This tune scares the bejeezus out of just about every musician I [...]

Sometimes as a music teacher, one finds themselves falling into the familiar pitfalls of their students. I am the worst offender of the “do as I say, not as I do” teaching philosophy. I am trying hard to overcome my personal hang-ups in order to be more of the “lead by example” type of instructor, [...]

I just found a really awesome ‘online document’ by a guy named Marc Sabatella called A Jazz Improvisation Primer. This is an online version to a text that he sells privately, providing some broad insights to the ins and outs of Jazz improv without really zeroing in on one of the many methods on the [...]

I was just reading an excerpt from Anthony Vitti’s website about his transcription of a George Benson solo and how he likes to study non-bassists for soloing ideas. It seems like a pretty common sense thing but I don’t think it’s done often enough. There’s a contingent of bassists, especially here in Virginia, sitting around [...]

So, as some of you know, I’ve been listening to Wayne Shorter a lot lately. I’m not a Jazz musician, but I like to study it because I feel like it makes me a better musician when I play “easier” music. I think of it like training for a marathon, you practice with weights on your feet so you’ll be faster when you do the real thing. Jazz is like weights on me feet, at least academically.

But whenever I get into a musician or band– and this has been the case since I was a teenage metalhead– I like to know more about the people that play it. I guess largely this is due to the conception that knowing what experiences may have evoked the feelings captured in a song, or lyric or whatever, will make me perform the song better. I guess that’s mostly true. So, anyway, I got Kim to track down the Wayne Shorter biography at the library and I’ve been flipping through it here and there.

Wayne, apparently, likes to play word games with people in conversation. For example, when some of the members of the Miles Davis Quintet were discussing the measurements of some women who had passed by, Wayne started in about Astrophysics and planetary dimensions. Many of his bandmates thought he was crazy, it’s not that the associations are totally unrelated, but they’re kind of a stretch (and I don’t think a better description could exsit for the music he was making with the Quintet).

He does this to interviewers frequently, answering direct questions with references to broad cosmic philosophies and spiritual observations. He seems to leave the interviewer feeling somewhat confused and a tad overwhelmed but, as even Herbie Hancock says, it can have a quality of making a simple question seem so much more than it was intended to be.

Herbie also says Wayne plays the horn the same way. That he can make so much more out of a small idea…. and this is what I have been thinking about.