Learn, play, and enjoy jazz piano.
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Graham English is a blogging jazz pianist and his web site (click here) has lots of tips and ideas about songwriting, music theory, and ear training.
Birds in the house
Peter Calandra (click to view web site), a composer from NYC, has posted a video of himself performing an improvised jazz composition. See below or click here to view.
Today, on the anniversary of the tragic September 11th attacks, I created a new track, called “Pop Interlude”. It expresses sadness and quiet reflection. Click here to listen. (Created using an acoustic grand piano and a Korg MS-2000B analog modeling synthesizer.)
My cousins, Jacob and Misha, have been working on directing a movie:
a documentary film about the aspirations, practices and ways of life of three young Westerners who follow three different eastern spiritual traditions.
I wrote an article on some of my thoughts on Learning Jazz Piano (click here to read).
John Pitcher writes an article about jazz pianist Cedar Walton in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (click here), regarding Cedar Walton’s upcoming solo piano appearance in the Rochester International Jazz Festival, this coming Saturday. From the article:
[...] Yet as a soloist and leader, Walton has always been unfairly underrated. Despite having preceded pianist McCoy Tyner in Coltrane’s band and having played with saxophonist Shorter during what is indisputably the greatest incarnation of the Jazz Messengers, Walton’s name rarely seems to share the same exalted space on the marquee with either Tyner or Shorter (both of whom, unlike Walton, are headlining Eastman Theatre shows at the Rochester jazz fest).Perhaps Walton missed his bid for immortality when he declined to play on most of the main tracks for Coltrane’s classic 1960 Giant Steps. Tyner, on the other hand, played on all of Coltrane’s 1965 A Love Supreme, and it cemented his reputation.
“I had to pass on a lot of the songs on Giant Steps because Trane was playing too fast and I couldn’t match him,” Walton recalls. “Trane worked like an obsessed man who was in pursuit of something, and in the process it turned him into a virtuoso.”
Gallery 41 has an online audio interview with Cedar Walton (click here), and Jazztimes has another online audio interview with Cedar, including a discussion of music clips (click here).
I was in a rather artsy mood and decided to create an online gallery of poems. However, these poems are the original work of a “poetry robot”, which I created.
Given a few words to start the poem, the robot decides what to write by looking at what people have written on popular & highly ranked web pages according to Google.
The words that are chosen for the poems are not random. Quite to the contrary, when people use the Google search engine to find something, they have come to expect a somewhat “intelligent” response. The ranking algorithms that Google uses give relevant results (in part) because they try to extract meaning and value-judgments out of the huge body of pages that make up the Internet. Google’s algorithms make use of the way pages on the Internet are linked together to determine which page ranks first for a particular result. By choosing words for a poem from top ranked pages on Google, I argue the robot is choosing words which Google’s algorithm considers “culturally significant”.
Anyways, enough discussion. Click here to view the poems!
I wrote a song called “Fat Jazz Variations” which expresses my sadness to be leaving the band Fat Jazz after 6 great years of playing with the group. It’s a 4 minute solo piano piece that’s kind of pop/classical. On the last chord I added a 6th to the major chord which I think is kind of like a wink or a nod (after all, it is a song about a jazz band….) [Click here to listen].
Yesterday one of my friends was run over by a car. She is OK.
In reaction to the whole event, I wrote and recorded a song.
