Comment

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on September 11, 2022 at 11:13pm

Music is the language of the spirit.
It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
– Kahlil Gibran

Comment by Rev. Dr. Bobby Fulton, Ph.D. on July 26, 2022 at 5:57pm

Amen!!!

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on July 25, 2022 at 8:32pm

“There’s a lot of ways to be a typewriter,” because a lot of people chase chord changes. But harmony and chord changes are just there as collateral. They tell you what group of notes might be valid for the moment, but they don’t tell you what’s the best note for the moment. Your eyes can tell you right notes if you know harmony, but your ears — if you got some — will tell you the best notes out of the many right notes. It’s up to the melodic ear to eke out the greatest four or five notes for the moment. That’s when the phrasing and rhythm comes in.

And this is one of things that the younger children of the bebop guys did not really understand from the real founding fathers of bebop. The younger players could get wrapped up in treating complex chord changes as the greatest thing of all. You gotta realize that the founding fathers of bebop — Bird, Dizzy, Monk, and the rest of those guys — they basically were just the younger swing musicians. They’re just the younger guard, they’re just a little bit younger than Harry Edison or Lester Young. Kenny Clarke is just a couple of years younger than Papa Jo Jones. They got all of the lessons from the great swing players, and the greatest of them were virtuosos. People like Don Byas, man, come on! Harmonically Don Byas is off the charts. The younger guys learned everything from people like Lester Young and Don Byas and had their own natural talent, and that’s how you get a Bird or a Dizzy. But Bird and Dizzy played so well and so correctly that it was very easy for the younger players to start treating chord changes as the greatest thing of all. There’s a danger there because chords are not the “reason why.” Chords shouldn’t be the jumpstart of your creation. Your jumpstart of creation is your melodic ear and rhythm.

The chords are there, they’re like parts of speech. Nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, adverb phrases: they’re meaningless on their own, but they’re there to create sentences, paragraphs and stories. But parts of speech are not the reason for your creation. When you get ready to speak your thoughts and express your feelings, you’re not saying, well now let me use a noun or a verb or an adverb.

It’s the same when you play an A minor seven. An A minor seven has no dignity unto itself. It just is what it is. The A minor seven is just acting as part of speech, helping you express your emotion. A lot of the players after bebop on became top heavy with the harmony. Now we have a bunch of players who will basically chase chord changes, that’s all it is. If they’re grammatically correct, they think they’re great, you know? And that’s part of it, of course. At least you’re in the ballpark if you outline the changes. But that ain’t the main event!”

---Charles McPherso

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on June 10, 2021 at 3:12am

For so many amateur musicians, the pattern of criticism and the hierarchical relationship of the teacher-pupil relationship can be crushing. The student becomes disengaged from music but more importantly from themselves. I’m reminded here of Joni Mitchell’s experience of piano lessons. In a New York Times article, Lindsay Zoladz recalls Mitchell saying: ‘I played … for my piano teacher, who slapped me across the wrist with a ruler for playing by ear … she said: “Why would you play by ear when you have the masters under your fingers?”’ The young Mitchell (then Joan Anderson) replies: ‘Well, the masters had to play by ear to come up with that stuff.’ That was her last piano lesson.

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on June 3, 2021 at 1:49am

"Pure genius #Jazz is manifested when he & the orchestra runaround the room screaming." - Charles Mingus

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on May 24, 2021 at 2:05am

♪♫ "Good #Jazz is when the leader jumps on the #piano, waves his arms & yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars & collapses on his hands & knees." - Charles Mingus

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on September 12, 2020 at 4:25pm

[New York drum teacher] Charlie Perry pointed that out. When you see yourself doing the act and your brainwaves send out a signal to that part of your body. You don’t actually follow through with it, but the message is sent there already. So it’s already programmed. So when you actually sit down at the instrument you’ll find that you can play it — once you develop a certain amount of dexterity and proficiency on the instrument.

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on September 12, 2020 at 4:24pm

Charles McPherson: “If you’re going to be a musician, you must not have any mental blocks. We, as musicians, can’t afford not to hear those who came before us. A layman, on the other hand, can listen to whatever makes him feel good, because he is not as wholly involved as the musician.

“A musician should go as far back in his listening as he possibly can, ignoring all the little segregated categories that the writers and critics like to put music into. A musician’s scope should be wide; he does not have the layman’s privilege to be narrow. That is, if he wants to be great, if he really wants to become an artist.“

Comment by Dr. Nelson Harrison on September 8, 2020 at 10:01pm

In his biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, Will Haygood said Miles, who idolized Sugar Ray, came to Pittsburgh for Sugar's last pro fight in 1965, and, along with everybody else, told Sugar he should retire for good. Sugar did.  

Comment by Roger S Day on August 24, 2020 at 2:46pm

The tl;dr is this:  "leave it to the ignorant and stupid who judge by counting only the faults. I can be grateful, and so must you be, for even one note, one wonderful phrase."

But the story is worth your time.

Here is an excerpt from Piatigorsky's book, in which he writes of an encounter with Pablo Casals, that reveals Casal's prodigious memory, attention to minute detail, and human warmth:"

My great wish was to hear Pablo Casals. One day my desire was almost fulfilled and I met him. But ironically, it was I who had to play. It was in the home of the Von Mendelssohns, a house filled with El Grecos, Rembrandts, and Stradivarius. Francesco von Mendelssohn, the son of the banker, who was a talented cellist, telephoned and asked if he could call for me; they had a guest in the house who would like to hear me play.

"Mr. Casals," I was introduced to a little bald man with a pipe. He said that he was pleased to meet young musicians such as Serkin and me. Rudolf Serkin, who stood stiffly next to me, seemed , like myself, to be fighting his diffidence. Rudi had played before my arrival, and Casals now wanted to hear us together. Beethoven's D-Major Sonata was on the piano. "Why don't you play it?" asked Casals. Both nervous and barely knowing each other, we gave a poor performance that terminated somewhere in the middle.

"Bravo! Bravo! Wonderful!" Casals applauded. Francesco brought the Schumann Cello Concerto, which Casals wanted to hear. I never played worse. Casals asked for Bach. Exasperated, I obliged with a performance matching the Beethoven and Schumann.

"Splendid! Magnifique!" said Casals, embracing me.

"Bewildered, I left the house. I knew how badly I had played, but why did he, the master, have to praise and embrace me? This apparent insincerity pained me more than anything else.

"The greater was my shame and delight when, a few years later, I met Casals in Paris. We had dinner together and played duets for

two cellos, and I played for him until late at night. Spurred by his

great warmth, and happy, I confessed what I had thought of his

praising me in Berlin. He reacted with sudden anger. He rushed to

the cello, "Listen!" He played a phrase from the Beethoven sonata.

"Didn't you play this fingering? Ah, you did! It was novel to me...it was good...and here, didn't you attack that passage with up-bow, like this? he demonstrated. He went through Schumann and Bach, always emphasizing all he liked that I had done.

"And for the rest," he said passionately, "leave it to the ignorant and stupid who judge by counting only the faults. I can be grateful, and so must you be, for even one note, one wonderful phrase." I left with the feeling of having been with a great artist and a friend.

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