Monthly Patreon Livestream #66!
Thank you for tuning in to today's livestream! Here's the recording.
I started off with a brand new tune of mine called "Toninho", dedicated to the legendary Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta. Toninho has been in NY recently, and I had the privilege of playing with him a few times last week and was blown away by his brilliant musicianship and moved by his generous spirit. This tune is basically "through composed", and I talked a bit about how more written out music can actually allow me to be more spontaneous.
Then I asked for a request, and got a few great ones before I settled on "Time Remembered" by Bill Evans (which is actually one that several students of mine are working on at the moment as well.)
Then into some great questions:
First, about a chord progression from Hans Zimmer that he used in the X-Men: Dark Phoenix soundtrack. To me, it sounded like it used the "Neapolitan" chord sequence, that I explained a bit and showed some examples of. (Also, the person who asked this question just released a great ear training app called "Jazz Ear"! It's specifically about hearing chord progressions, check it out here! https://jazzear.com/ )
Then a question about comping - and some strategies for coming up with melodic comping, especially when there already is a melody. Basically, comping is about coming up with a "counter melody", and we have to know the melody very well to come up with a good one, and I showed some things to consider. This is not a new idea, and I remembered reading Chick Corea's "A Work In Progress: On Being A Musician", where he talks about this explicitly. Thanks to Michael for finding this example in the book and sharing a photo with all of us - I'll attach it below.
Then a question about triplets, and different ways to feel them. Of course I talked about my favorite rhythmic exercise from Ari Hoenig, that involves tapping subdivisions and singing (more here in this video!). But also dissecting the idea that triplets/triple meter have a different feeling than eighth notes/duple meter: perhaps this is because of the difficulty in diving a whole into three parts? In any case, triplets can be tricky, and I tried to unpack this.
And this led to a question of swing - how much is swing triplets, vs. varying degrees of "swing percentage"? I think that swing can be very triplet-y, but doesn't have to be. In other words, sometimes the grid can just be "swing 8ths", not "surgically" or "analytically" connected to the triplet, and that can be amazing too. An example of this I thought of was "Ben and Sweets: Did You Call Her Today?" - this is the definition of swing, undeniably, but I don't think it's because everyone is feeling triplets the exact same way, per se.
Thank you again, everyone, and see you next month!
Glenn
