Well, haven written about how daunting it can be to get into the music of jazz, I thought I might use this blog to talk a little about the strange lingo, the colloquialisms, the vernaculars, call it what you want, basically the inside language that exists in the world of jazz.

Let’s start by de-mystifying the header shall we?

Cats = musicians (though most of you probably already knew this)
Horn = instrument (even if it’s now a horn!)
To Woodshed = to go and practice. This comes from the fact that some musicians have been known to go and practice in the shed in the garden. Most likely because practising can be quite a horrible cacophony for anyone to be subjected to.

So one could imagine a conversation between two jazz cats going something like this:

Cat A (Steve McQueen): “How’s your chops”
Cat B (Miles Davis): “My chops is beat”
Cat A: “Two bad - too much time in the shed?”
Cat B: “Naah, too much blowin on these gigs lately”
Cat A: “Oh yeah, been tryin’ out your new licks?”
Cat B: “Uh-huh, got some bad new hot licks!”
Cat A: “Good gig, was it?
Cat B: “The whole band was in the pocket”
Cat A: “Sweet, the whole bad was in the crease”

{…}

In plain English:

Cat A: “How is your playing” (chops could also refer to the lips of a brass player - they tend to get fatigued easily)
Cat B: “I’m worn out / I can’t play well / My lips/fingers etc are hurting”
Cat A: “Too bad - have you been practising too much?”
Cat B: “No, too much soloing/playing on these gigs lately”
Cat A: “Oh yeah, have you been trying out your snazzy new preconceived musical phrases (=licks)?”
Cat B: “Uh-huh, I’ve got some really good, fantastic new phrases” (bad=good)
Cat A: “Good gig, was it?”
Cat B: “The whole band was really playing like a unit, really grooving”
Cat A: “Sweet, the band was playing really well)”

Luckily our two jazz musicians decided to call it a day there, or we could have gone much longer…

As you can see, a bit of jazz language has actually found its way into main-stream language such as “cats” (musicians) and “bad” (good). Phrases like “The Big Apple” (New York), to “dig” (to like), “cans” (headphones) are said to have come from the world of jazz, though this is of course impossible to prove.

Regardless, there are of course many more expressions, so if you are interested in the meaning of such terms as:

• Comping
• Turnarounds/Turnbacks
• Head
• Trading Twos

… then please go to our Jazz Terms Glossary, where you can find even more jazz terms, including more technical expressions (with all the explanations) and all-round jazz madness!

Dig it.

The image doesn’t always help either: middle aged (nothing wrong with that!) guys in berets smoking their Gitanes cigarettes whilst knowingly nodding to the strange exhortations of the band, while you feel like the only person in the venue who does not have a clue what is going on.

It can be intimidating. But then so can guitar shops :-)!

But have you been to a jazz gig recently? Certainly here in London town smoking in any indoor venues has been out for quite a while, so you can now at least breath! Berets don’t seem to be “en vogue” anymore either - so things are clearly looking up.

That just leaves the music. If you want to get into jazz, picking out a random gig is probably not the best way to go about it: you might have selected the latest avant garde cutting edge Bass Clarinet Cross Over Project, or Craig’s Octogenarian Dixieland Swingers - but you won’t really know until you’ve turned up.

So here are three albums that I would recommend as a great starting point for getting into the music called jazz. None of these are going to hurt your eardrums, nor your pocket (the itunes links go to the uk store, amazon links to the .co.uk site):

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis (often referred to as being one of the best music albums ever, not just for jazz). Stand-out tracks:
All Blues
We also have the Miles Davis Tumpet Solo on All Blues
So What
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

Getz/Gilberto - Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Stan Getz. This is the album that introduced Bossa Nova to the world and launched the evergreen “Girl from Ipanema”. Stand-out tracks:
The Girl from Ipanema
Desafinado
Corcovado
One Note Samba
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

Time Out - Dave Brubeck. Columbia records had to be convinced to release this, yet it had the jazz hit Take Five on it. Stand-out tracks:
Take Five
Blue Rondo A La Turk
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

I could extend this list further, but I can say without doubt that these three albums, after much consideration, and having introduced them to many a non-jazz lover, are the three most sure-fire ways to introduce the most sceptical person to jazz.

Now go out and buy, and dig them :-)!

So a big welcome to our new users in Sweden and Holland, even if this blog is in English :-).

Soon we will also add Danish and Norwegian (as well as the local currencies to go with these new territories), which means we will have added a total of 7 new languages in the space of 13 months.

What else has been happening? Well we have been preparing the new videos that we have promised you in previous blogs, so get ready for more regular videos, blog postings and fascinating downloads that will open up the world of Jazz to you in the new year.

And finally we’ve also been celebrating our 4th birthday in October. The site went live in October 2005 in English and German with just a 1,000 arrangements. Since then we have grown to over 30,000 arrangements and have welcomed users from another 5 new languages to our site.

So to finish, who better to play us a little Happy Birthday tune than Wynton Marsalis and his Septet:

I often get requests from students to play Gershwin pieces. Rhapsody in Blue is however, hard to play and very long, though we do have it on our site here.

So I thought I might write a little piece in the style of George Geshwin that is easier to play, and not too long. We have two arrangements of this piece, one an easier level in G major, and the original version in Ab major. You can see me playing it below, and check out the sheet music here.

Take care

Lincoln

If you are living in the UK, then you would have be hard-pressed to miss the furore about Susan Boyle, the 47 year old contestant on the TV talent show Britain’s Got Talent. For anyone who did miss, here is a link to youtube.

Even for someone like myself who has no interest in TV Talent show this is worth watching, as it’s great tv/theatre and a great story. It’s also a great lesson that you cannot always judge a book by its cover. The quick run-down is that the 47 year church-going Boyle, who has a very friendly, unpretentious, but also un-flamboyant appearance, walks on stage to general sniggering of the audience.

The panel also looks distinctly un-impressed. But then she sings, with what is a truly angelic voice, and seeing the reaction of everyone in the hall is priceless. If you’d like to emulate Susan, then you can get hold of the sheet music for I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables here.

Take care

Lincoln

Just a quick reminder. I had given this one bar example, where there appear to be too many notes (6 beats worth) in the right hand:

:

The reason why this works is because there are two separate voices in the right hand.

This is the first voice:

And this is the second voice:

As you can see, there is a two beat rest at the start of the bar in the example above. Normally you would show this when adding the two voices together:

However, as you can see this means that the rest would have to hang in between two staves, which does not look very neat. As the second voice does not enter until the third beat of the bar, it is therefore fine to omit the rest at the start of the bar, as it does not lead to any rhythmic unclarity.

***

The second, more complicated example I gave looked like this:

Again, there are two voices, here is voice one:

And here is the second voice:

As the piece (Debussy’s Claire de Lune) consistently uses triplets, it is quite common the omit the triplet sign, which was done here. Furthermore the notes on beats 2 and 3 have been written into the right hand stave, indicating the the left hand part may be played by the right hand. So the entire left hand part written in the left hand would look like this:

And finally, as the two voices share the same note on beat three (G Sharp), you have to take the note head of the longer value as done here, or write the notes next to each other, which the editor did not choose to do. Had he done so it would look like this:

Hope that all makes sense.

We have just made a little video about the special piano arrangements we have for Everybody Hurts by REM. I play an excerpt of the hardest level/arrangement for piano (it’s a long tune). We have easier versions on the website, so be sure to check them out, as well as our Piano/Vocal/Guitar versions, should you be looking for versions for those instruments.

You can download Everybody Hurts sheet music from our site.

Hope you enjoy the video

Lincoln

We have just added a Pink Panther Tutorial for the piano to accompany the sheet music we feature on our site. I explain how to play the all important left hand in detail and give a few hints and tips, including how to add a few extra bits that aren’t included in the score and what the Pink Panther Theme shares with the James Bond Theme:

You can download the Pink Panther sheet music from our site.

Hope you enjoy the video

Lincoln

Welcome to our official blog launch.

We want this blog to be about you, the customer. We invite your feedback and active participation, be that in suggesting new ideas for tutorials, guides, sheet music, videos, or in answering your (sheet) music specific questions.

We already have a few plans in mind with regards following on from our videos on our youtube page.

Our Jerry Lee Lewis Boogie with it’s tutorial and videos has proved extremely popular:

Click here for the sheet music.

Following on from that we added a Rock’n’Roll licks collection with 4 video tutorials and accompanying sheet music download, here is the first of those four videos:

Click here for the sheet music.

We are planning on doing more of these instructional videos that include accompanying pieces/guides as downloads.

We have already had the suggestion to create a piece from the Rock’n’Roll licks collection (thank you Hendrik).

Further ideas include a guide to how music works - but not your usual boring theory guide, but a more practical view on harmony, and how you can use this knowledge to fully understand music (it’s easier than you think). This series of guides would enable you to work pieces out from your ipod yourself.

Other plans include guides on improvisation, walking bass lines, time signatures, etc, but of course we will try to make these fun.

We’ll also try to answer any questions, and have regular Q&A sessions. To get things started, here is a little teaser question. You often come across bars of music that seem to have many more beats in them, than the time signature suggests. How is this possible?

Here is an “easier” example to solve; there seem to be eight beats of music in the right hand, when there should be four:

For the more seasoned pros, here is a more difficult one. There appear to be two beats missing in the left hand, and extra quavers (8^th notes) in the right hand, but 6 of them, plus a minim (half notes) and some strange note that seems to be a minim (half note) and a quaver (8^th note) at the same time on beat 3:

Now it’s over to you, suggestions on upcoming guides, videos, sheet music and answers to our little teaser question are very welcome.

Take care

Lincoln

The subject of sheet music can be quite wide ranging and I intend to cover a fair amount of ground in the coming months.  This will include the history of written music, a discussion on sheet music software and file formats as well as how these could be developed by harnessing the power of the Internet to use collaboration and  ease of use to allow new music to be developed without having to master complex and expensive packages. I will also cover the interesting world of Public Domain and Copyright and how it effects how sheet music can be offered to you and how it is still dependent partially on where you are downloading it.

Of course the purpose of sheet music is that it is played and we will cover various genres and instruments and how they may be adapted to create interesting new pieces.  

So the next post will have a little more depth and detail to it and I am eager to get feedback and comments.  Please note that if you login at GreatScores you will automatically have an account on here so you can post comments.

Grahame