Tonight practiced my sax for 2 hours, working minor scales and arpeggios, long tones. I love my horn. It's just what I want my tenor voice to sound like!
Spent another hour working on a piece the band has been playing, we just call it the No Beat Beat cause while there is a pulse, there really isn't a beat. It's probably our most 'jazz' piece we have. I struggle to write melodies. That's like the final frontier for me. Kinda relieved to be reading Coltrane on Coltrane and he says the same thing: he's a player, he came up just trying to play well and ignored melody till much later. Apparently he struggled with that as well.
Me? I can get lazy on melody. I tend to stick to the first thing I've written and be done with it. So a lot of stuff sounds the same after a while. Fortunately our drummist doesn't accept that and pushes me out of my lazy boy chair. So tonight I worked on an alternate melody. I like it. Has a nice build to it and I think one can sing along to it. When I do work on melody I like to write simple enough that a kid can sing it. More like folk melody than what we associate jazz with.
It's nice. I no longer seem to be writing music for musicians. Not that I don't love musicians. I just prefer to connect with those that know nothing about how music works as well as those that do. That's a challenge I can get into!
j
Spent another hour working on a piece the band has been playing, we just call it the No Beat Beat cause while there is a pulse, there really isn't a beat. It's probably our most 'jazz' piece we have. I struggle to write melodies. That's like the final frontier for me. Kinda relieved to be reading Coltrane on Coltrane and he says the same thing: he's a player, he came up just trying to play well and ignored melody till much later. Apparently he struggled with that as well.
Me? I can get lazy on melody. I tend to stick to the first thing I've written and be done with it. So a lot of stuff sounds the same after a while. Fortunately our drummist doesn't accept that and pushes me out of my lazy boy chair. So tonight I worked on an alternate melody. I like it. Has a nice build to it and I think one can sing along to it. When I do work on melody I like to write simple enough that a kid can sing it. More like folk melody than what we associate jazz with.
It's nice. I no longer seem to be writing music for musicians. Not that I don't love musicians. I just prefer to connect with those that know nothing about how music works as well as those that do. That's a challenge I can get into!
j
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