Home

Monthly Livestream #64!

Thanks for tuning in to today's livestream! Was a long one, and we went to a lot of interesting places. Here's the recording.

Started off with a tune: "Triste" by Jobim. This was on my mind because earlier last month I traveled to Brazil to play a memorable duo concert with the great Cecile McLorin Salvant, so I wanted to play a Brazilian tune. One of the songs that Cecile and I played in that concert was Jobim's "Retrato Em Branco E Preto", so I shared some trivia about where I believe the melody of that song comes from. (By the way, happy that someone captured about 30 minutes of this concert with Cecile and put it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SbEpRgg85MY?feature=shared )

Then I decided to share a few of the miscellaneous things that had been on my mind over the past few weeks:

  • First - a new orchestration of the famous "Clare Fischer" exercise that I'm always talking about! This led to a breakdown and discussion of this exercise. (For more about this exercise: My favorite piano exercise! and An Application of Clare Fischer's Harmonic Exercise)

  • Second - a new (to me) application of Barry Harris' "6th diminished scale", where the borrowed diminished note is in the bass. (For more see An Application of Barry Harris' 6th diminished scale)

  • Finally - an idea about dynamics: actually deciding on a dynamic for every single note you play, instead of just leaving it to chance. This is actually so obvious it's almost embarrassing to admit that this is not something I always had been doing.

Then into some great questions:

  • Advice on practicing the Clare Fischer exercise, and being able to transpose. For this, I shared an important technical idea in piano playing that the great Taylor Eigsti showed me in a lesson about 20 years ago (yikes time flies by!) Also led to an important idea about practicing that I learned from one of the greatest educational videos ever, "Chick Corea Keyboard Workshop".

  • About harmonizing melodies, and the power and usefulness of thinking about "blocks" of notes. Also how thinking about blocks of notes can even improve the way we play single note melodies.

  • Then a question about a trio recording of "Teo" that I posted here on Patreon a few weeks ago (Glenn Zaleski Trio - Teo) - and led to the idea of keeping a RH part constant and improvising with your LH.

  • A quick aside about "thinking" while playing - should we be "thinking"? (Basically I think some ways of thinking are necessary, while others are definitely bad.)

  • About practicing chords, and whether we should practice chords on their own or always with a melody. (Always with a melody I'd say!)

  • And finally a question about memorization, and some strategies I like to use to memorize material.

Thanks again for an inspiring afternoon, and see you all again soon!

Glenn