The Allman Brothers Band celebrated their 45th anniversary in 2014, retiring for good with one final series of concerts. Along with the Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers Band was one of the most influential groups in bringing extended, jazz-like improvisation to the world of rock music.The ABB Brothers were heavily influenced by Miles Davis (a previous topic of this page) in particular and his landmark modal-jazz album Kind of Blue. The early years of the Allman Brothers Band featured two keyboardists who are now legends in their own right: lead singer and organist Gregg Allman, who founded the band with his brother Duane in the late 1960s, and Chuck Leavell, who was brought in after Duane's death when the group decided that it wouldn't feel right to replace Duane with another guitarist. However, this is one of those days when I feel like talking about another (former) member of the group: founding guitarist Dickey Betts. In my mind he holds two distinctions. He is a consistently interesting and highly melodic soloist, and one of the great instrumental composers in classic rock. Dickey Betts epitomizes a couple of things that are familiar if you spend enough time studying the great composers and soloists. He uses the same materials (scales, arpeggios, rhythms) as everyone else, but he finds a way to make them sound fresh and personal. He is also a model for the use of motif and repetition as a soloist. Dickey's solos are the same mix of major and minor pentatonic scales as most rock and country guitarists, with blues scales and diatonic scales (major and minor) mixed in where appropriate. When you listen to his solos though, the first thing you should notice is how all of them start with a small, usually catchy melodic idea. Rather than just drifting from one line to another, Dickey will repeat this two or three times before moving on to a new idea, usually an expansion (branching the last repeat off into a new line) or alteration of the previous one. The same ingenuity that turns up in his solos also informs Mr. Betts's compositions. His themes are a mix of soulful melody and lively rhythms, repeated and varied in a manner similar to his improvised solos. Dickey has said that Django Reinhardt is one of his biggest influences, and that "Jessica," probably his best-known composition, is a direct tribute to Django Reinhardt that was written using only two (index and middle) fingers on his fretting hand. Dickie's personal style also includes the use of some lovely 7th and 9th chords, no doubt drawn from his love of jazz. For an introduction, I recommend "Jessica", "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", and the under-appreciated "High Falls." I would also recommend his songs "Ramblin' Man" and "Blue Sky," both of which show the same melodic craftsmanship and ingenuity as are found in his instrumental compositions. Lessons to take from Dickey Betts: when improvising or composing, don't be afraid to repeat an idea two or three times before moving on to the next one. Furthermore, make sure that your idea or lick is catchy in its own right, rather than just randomly running up or down a scale and then repeating it. Feel free to mix in country, blues, and hot jazz lines over modern jazz chords if it makes sense to *you*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBFEyf-N9Pw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rQWh62VUHE When learning to play things correctly from the beginning, it's important to not only learn the correct notes, but also to establish a consistent fingering that is both comfortable and efficient for those notes. I have a student who was able to play the C major scale but did so by learning to play the first 5 notes in with the five fingers of her right hand, and then flipping her hand over to continue playing them with her middle ring and pinky fingers for the last 3 notes. The fact that she could play that pattern in such a fluid manner was impressive, but it's also a perfect example of a motion that would become more and more difficult at faster tempos due to the excessive hand movement.
Memorizing an inefficient fingering, or memorizing different fingerings because a passage is played multiple ways by the student when they practice it, will inevitably lead to extra brain power being devoted to playing those passages when they are played in performance. This goes double for situations where the student is improvising, or a passage is being played at faster speeds and there is very little time to think twice about which finger should be playing which notes. If your piece has a fingering written out, I would stick to it unless it is uncomfortable for your hand size or there are clear problems with it that have slipped by the arranger or editor (this can happen). If you need to determine your own fingering, find a pattern that requires the least amount of crossing and lateral hand movement. The basic major and minor scale fingerings are a great place to start. Don't be afraid to experiment or alter the sequence if a weaker finger is doing too much work, but make sure that you decide on something and stay with it unless you discover problems later on. It may take a little while at first, but once you learn the basic principles and determine what works best for your hand it will go much more quickly in the future. [Improvisation is the one exception to this rule. Ideally, you'll have practiced set fingerings for lines and patterns that you plan to use as the basis for your improvisations. However, if you're playing one of those lines in connection with different material, or improvising new material from scratch, you'll have to adapt on the spot. Free improvisation is a great exercise for training your fingers to keep up with your brain. ] Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis is 80 years old today. In addition to his outstanding skills as a singer and stage performer, Jerry Lee practically invented the school of Rock and Roll piano playing from a stew of blues, boogie woogie, country, western swing, Tin Pan Alley, and gospel influences. He doesn't sound like anyone else (other than his piano playing cousins Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley) because his style is all his own. The movie Great Balls of Fire claimed that Jerry Lee had a "black left hand and a white right hand," but that's oversimplifying things. Jerry Lee took all of the aspects of the music he loved and played in his youth and unified them into something new. The fact that he sounds so original probably has as much do with the relative isolation of growing up in Louisiana in the 30s and 40s as anything else without formally trained teachers or more than a handful of local musicians to tell him that he was doing things “wrong.” By the time he stepped into Sun Studios in 1956 at the age of 21, his style was fully formed and showed no signs of bending upon exposure to the wider world of professional music. You could put someone in a room for 20 years with a piano and all of the same music that Jerry Lee heard growing up, and you would probably still never end up with someone who plays exactly the way that he does. But, you might end up something equally interesting. Jerry Lee Lewis is a perfect example of what can happen when someone freely throws their influences together without concern for stylistic purity. By focusing on the things he liked and dropping whatever the didn't (for example, he rarely plays more than 3 chords in a tune, and tops out at 5-6 max) he ended up with something entirely unique. Students can replicate this process using similar methods: make a list or think about the aspects that you like most from your favorite players or styles of music (no matter how off the wall, cheesy, or un-hip) and think of interesting ways to combine them, the stranger the better. You'll eventually make connections that will make sense only to your particular taste, and over time these will form the elements of your individual style. Let's wrap up with the man himself. This is Jerry Lee on the Steve Allen show in 1957, playing the scandalous “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On” as his national television debut. Note his legendary left hand providing a gospel-boogie foundation and doubling as “bass player” for the band. Also note Steve Allen (from off camera) getting so excited that he throws his chair across the stage at 1:40. :) This is a guy that I just heard on the radio a few weeks ago. I absolutely love his sound. The classical and jazz influenced keyboard playing is wonderful on its own, but the arrangements are the real standouts, with film score quality strings and ambient electronics contributing equally at different points. One of the lessons that I take from Bill Laurance is to avoid being constrained by narrow stylistic boundaries. While the music is obviously connected to his parallel gig as a film composer, there's also influence from non-Western/World music in places as well as fusion, electronica, and his equally eclectic membership in the band Snarky Puppy. I can honestly say that his album doesn't sound quite like any other jazz album that I've heard in recent memory. While teaching my lessons this week, I've noticed that many of my beginning piano students are all running into the same problems. Many if not all of these can be traced back to the way they are practicing their pieces at home (or not practicing them as the case may be). The good news is that many of these habits can be replaced via the same method that cemented them in the first place: repetition. This week, I'll be talking about some common roadblocks in learning and polishing new pieces, and ways to avoid or replace them.
For example...Rule number one: practice efficiently. When working on a new piece it's very tempting to play through the sections that you can already play well and/or sections that repeat frequently. Or to play through the whole piece over and over again, stumbles and all, hoping that if you do it enough times it will eventually reach perfection. This is not an effective use of your time. The number of sections that actually give you trouble, assuming that the piece is somewhere near your current level, should only comprise 10 to 20% of the piece, at most. In the beginning, that 10 to 20% should receive 100% of your time when practicing that particular piece. To determine this: first identify any sections that you can already play with both hands together at the final tempo. These require the least attention. Then eliminate any passages that you can play at tempo with hands separate. There may be passages where one hand is solid but the other requires some or significant practice; you may only need to work on one of the hands in a given section. Your attention will be focused on whatever is left: sections that you can not play at tempo even with separated hands. To narrow things down further, ignore any passages that repeat earlier material verbatim. You now have a "laundry list" of passages and sections that you should be working on. This is one of my favorite recordings of the last 10 years, and it's one of the main reasons why I love Brad Paisley. What other country star releases a mostly instrumental album (Play) at the height of their popularity? This is also one of the only mainstream recordings to feature metal solos on pedal steel guitar *and* violin, and (to my ears at least) the clear influence of the Mega Man 2 soundtrack. (I have no idea if the last one is actually true, but I *do* know that Brad Paisley's latest tour features both clips from Duck Hunt during one song and a fan being invited on stage every night to play Wii onstage during another song.) Similar to the compositions of Southern Rock pioneer Dickey Betts, Paisley crafts a memorable, multi-part theme that sounds deceptively complex but actually comes straight from the pitches of the standard C# Minor/E Major scale. As for his solos, Brad shows off a unique synthesis of "hot" country playing combined with allusions to 80s shred licks and soaring guitar a la Joe Satriani. I don't think I've heard anything else quite like it since. In 1977, Elton John recorded several new songs with Philadelphia Soul producer, songwriter, and arranger Thom Bell. One of these, "Mama Can't Buy You Love," reached #9 and #1 respectively on the Hot 100 and Adult charts when it was belatedly released in 1979. It also has the distinction of being one of Elton's most rarely performed hits, only played during the American leg of his solo piano and percussion tour. In addition to being one of the more under appreciated songs in his catalog, Elton's live performances of this song tackle an interesting problem: how do you take a lushly orchestrated song and make it "work" with just piano? In this case, the solution was bypassing much of the original arrangement altogether. Rather than try to recreate the string lines and harp glissandi, Elton kept the basic rhythm while substituting a heavier downbeat in the left hand and adding funky chords in the right to turn the song into something closer to his own Leon Russell-esque "Take Me to the Pilot" rather than the soul/disco of the original recording. Of course, the rearrangement's success is due equally to Elton's buoyant original melody still remaining front and center. [Sorry for the long delay in between posts. End of summer travel, the school year starting up, taking on new students, and writing out personalized arrangements (a perk of studying privately with me :) ) are all gobbling up time like crazy.] When playing solo piano, it's important to remember that you also have complete control over silence. Sometimes it's tempting to play throughout a whole song, especially if you're playing a busy arrangement that's meant to replicate the sound of a full band. But then you lose the power that comes from a sudden stop, or an unexpected, unaccompanied solo voice. While it may not be as dazzling as keyboard pyrotechnics, strategically placed silence can add that much more emphasis to the sound around it. It also can help to differentiate repeated sections from one another. Listen to Ben Folds's use of silence in his solo arrangement of "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces." The first verse, portions of the piano solo, and last chorus all stand out due to the use of the techniques mentioned above. When it comes to learning music, it always helps to look beyond your own instrument for perspective. There may be certain phrasing, scales, or even limitations that are characteristic of particular instruments (example: bagpipes) that sound interesting when applied to a different instrument. Also, a great musician is worth studying regardless of what they play. Our first case in point: Miles Davis, the hippest man on the planet. Miles was not a virtuoso horn player, especially when compared to contemporaries like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Miles, however, was a master of note choice, phrasing, and space; he only played as many notes as he needed to, and he always made sure that he left enough silence for you to appreciate them. Whatever he played, Miles always sounded like himself, though "sounded like himself" was apt to change on an a yearly basis as he constantly explored new sounds. When it comes to Miles Davis, the ideal introduction is 1959's Kind of Blue, one of the greatest jazz albums ever made. Start with the groundbreaking opening track, "So What", with a model two-chorus solo by Miles and piano accompaniment by the great Bill Evans. Lesson for today: if you're playing keyboard in an ensemble, you don't always have to play. If you listen to "Carry On Wayward Son" you'll notice that the organ doesn't play through the whole song. In fact it probably plays on only half of the recording. Why? Generally, having an distinctive instrument like the organ playing all the time transforms it into sonic wallpaper. The less you hear of it, the more of an impact it makes when it's featured. For further studies on how to play less, listen to Benmont Tench with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
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