Getting a set of music together and made a little playbook on who solo’s where. And a nice arrangement on Mr. Knight from John Coltrane. We have one more week to clean things up. Looking forward to hear the workshop […]

Today the Bebop to Hard Bop Workshop had Andrea Veneziani subbing for Mark Sherman. We worked on the tunes are going to be played at Smalls. We decided endings and introductions and worked a lot on interplay and the melodies. We also […]

Today the workshop was focused on the 5 tunes that we are going to perform at Smalls, so we tried to simulate the performance, deciding the order of the soloist and the exact arrangement of the tunes. Playing everything without […]

Another great workshop. The two hours literally flew bye. We worked on Rain, a tune writen by Miles Okazaki, and specifically looked at 23232323/222/32233223/22/2323 in triplets, sixteenth and quintuplets. We also checked out a new tune written by Olivia and […]

After a small holiday break we are back on track and getting ready for the performance at smalls on the 29th. We warmed up with sight-singing diads, played through some ii V melodies in all keys, warmed up with the […]

On Saturday the students came back after a two week hiatus for the holidays. We started playing over F blues and worked on transposing the changes from Bb. Everyone soloed over the form along with trading four’s with Luke, our […]

In this first class of 2012 we focused on a nice arrangement of Night in Tunisia by Dizzy Gillespie and rehearse the horn backgrounds under the guitar and piano solos, to be sure that everything sounds good and thigh for […]

This  week the Bebop Workshop worked on an arrangement of Dolphin Dance that will be played at Small’s, we spent a good hour on it reading all the charts and the second hour we played the rest of the tunes […]

We warmed up with two and three whole note interval eartraining, equivelant to major 3rds and sharp 4ths. From there we moved on to a ii V sequence through all keys, sightsinging, chordtones only. We explored different options how to […]

We had a very intensive class, working mostly on original material written by the students: a tune in 7/4, quarter notes and halftime, a tune with a cycle of 3/4 – 4/4 – 3/4 – 5/4 plus a metric modulation, […]

Yesterday in the Standards Class the students came up with an arrangement on “All Blues.” It was great to hear all the ideas and then make a decision on  a cool intro and ending. I hope to do more of that […]

At our session yesterday we had a new drummer Eric Puente, and Mathew Mayers on saxophone along with the rest. We played Charlie Parker’s Quasimodo playing the head many times to really try to get a handle on it.  Of […]

Mark Sherman and David In the first session we worked on Quasimodo by Charlie Parker, which is one of my favorite lines. We discussed how Bird used to take well known standards like Indiana and use the form and changes […]