Two whole months have passed since Camp MMW, can you believe it?

I know a lot of my fellow campers have been feeling quite dramatic changes in their playing, their practice, and their attitude toward music since we were joyously immersed in the MMW worldview this past August. For me, the changes have been pretty subtle, I think...part of a long-term, cumulative journey toward artistic and spiritual plenitude. But I will say this: almost immediately after that unique experience in the Catskills, I noticed a small but definite new boldness in my playing. A deeper sense of freedom when creating. I think it comes in part from watching John Medeski up close for so many hours over just a few days. It's sort of miraculous to see how...unseparate he is from his keyboards. He's got everything integrated, knows his music and his technique and his different instruments so thoroughly that there's not even a hair's-breadth gap between intention and action. He sings through his hands.

There are days when I get a glimmer of how that feels...when I achieve that unseparateness, that integration, if only for a song or a solo or a few phrases at a time. Sheer bliss.

Re-befriending the blues scale.

I have to confess something. By the second or third day of Camp MMW, it was starting to drive me crazy listening to so many pianists play almost nothing but blues scales. Or am I exaggerating? I suppose it just seemed to me that every time I wandered by a jam session or even just one of the many wildly out-of-tune old pianos scattered around the resort, somebody was hammering out some classic (perhaps even cliche) old blues licks. It struck me as weird and funny, although perhaps that's only because when I started to learn how to improvise, my first jazz band teacher pushed us hard to play/solo on the actual chord changes of the 12-bar blues form, rather than just bullshitting blues lines all over the place.



(For those without a whole lot of jazz theoretical knowledge, I'll explain: Let's say you're playing a 12-bar blues that goes from F7 to Bb7 to F7 to C7 and back finally to F7--or some variation thereof. You can actually muddle your way through by playing the F blues scale (F-Ab-Bb-B-C-Eb) the whole way through, without worrying about the underlying chord at that moment. But to move past that basic level and into a more sophisticated jazz sound, you actually play the F dominant scale over F7, then move to the Bb dominant scale over Bb7, and so on....)



So I suppose my jazz snobbery was asserting itself a little bit. But then something happened. In keeping with all the other transformative moments we each experienced over the week, I had a little epiphany about how John Medeski manages to play things that are at once so "out there" and yet so grounded, and it has everything to do with the blues... Not only the blues scale, of course, but the whole sound, feeling, vibe of classic blues musicians.... And suddenly I realized that all those pianists playing blues licks were helping me reacquaint myself with a sound I'd been avoiding, for no good reason.

True, I think as a developing musician I was fortunate to have teachers who challenged me to learn other harmonic ideas, to KEEP learning and filling up my musical vocabulary, and not just get stuck in familiar sounds.

That said, I've been having so much fun practicing the F blues scale lately so I can wail on it in my new song, "Monster." On the piano, F blues is so easy, so comfortable under the fingers. A lot of my other tunes incorporate more modern chords and trickier, unexpected progressions...and I love playing on those, figuring out how to voice-lead on those, devising beautiful melodies over surprising harmonic movement. But last night we rehearsed "Monster," which is the closest thing I've ever written to a true headbanger rock song...and it's clearly going to be a great set-closer for us when we play 49 West in Annapolis and the Streetbeat Festival in Baltimore next week.

What fun it will be to send our love out to the audience one last time, and get down and dirty with the blues.

Steal from the best!

So....as I've mentioned, and as Cameron and a few others witnessed firsthand at camp after the very first master class, I got a little obsessed with John Medeski's explanation of how he plays C blues licks over alternating "inside" and "outside" harmonies (Cm and EMaj) on "The Lover."

Well, it's a little less outside than that, but I've been fooling around with playing F blues in my RH over an alternation between Fm and BMaj. F blues scale contains a lot of the notes of B Major 7, so as I said, it doesn't sound quite as dissonant and surprising as C blues over E Major, but it still has a kind of cool "wrong-but-right" flavor to it, especially if I catch a C natural in my RH while playing B in my LH. In any case, this "inside/outside" harmonic structure has become the bedrock of a brand new tune, called "Monster." I'll give you just the first part of the lyrics....

MONSTER by Sandy Asirvatham BMI (c) 2008 all rights reserved..

[verse 1]
I built a monster in my basement
and tried to teach him how to talk
But he never managed more than
an unintelligible sqawk.
I sent him up to the state college
to earn his history degree
But what he learned there was so gruesome
Back to the basement did he flee...He say,

[chorus]
Words, they fail me, they fail me, they fail me, he say,
Words, they fail me, they fail me.....every time.

[verse 2]
I got a parrot for my parlor
And waited long for her to speak.
But she preferred to perch in silence,
Patiently burnish her mystique.
I wondered if she was a goddess
Reincarnated here and now.
Does Polly really want a cracker,
Or does she want me to kow-tow? She say,

[chorus]
Words, they fail me, they fail me, they fail me, she say,
Words, they fail me, they fail me.....every time.

...more to come!

We'll be rehearsing this in my Sandcastle meeting tonight...after I put the guys through some heavy stridulations!

Everybody's driving the bus, and to the same destination.

I wish I could remember which song John Medeski was talking about when he proposed one of the most important ideas I heard all week at camp....I'm pretty certain it was the VSOP band (Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter) but don't remember the track. In any case, Medeski made this beautiful set of gestures with his arm to convey his idea, and it stuck with me. He compared a traditional jazz standard performance by sweeping his arm up and down and up and down in small arcs, like a roller coaster's motion. This represented each soloist taking his turn to tell his own story, then stepping back to let the next soloist take his turn. A fine way of doing things, not to be belitted when it's done well in a casual setting like a jam session or informal pick-up gig, or as a step in one's development as a soloist.

But the arguably greater achievement of a band like VSOP was something Medeski represented with a single big sweeping arc of his arm. He used that gesture to emphasize that each tune is a singular journey--one in which an individual soloist doesn't just get his chance to say "his thing" and then step back...instead, each soloist uses his time to add to the overall narrative arc of the whole tune, to push the band further into the groove and higher into the specific feel and sound of the tune.

Obviously, this is exactly what MMW does so well, and to some extent it may be obvious, and yet I really appreciated John making the idea so explicit and clear.

It's something I think we manage to do fairly well in a natural way with both the bands I run, but now that I've had it illustrated and pointed out so well, I'm going to try to focus on it the next time we play. (Sandcastle actually played last night and I do remember moments of thinking, 'Wow, we're doing it, we're really achieving that collective thing.')

If anything, the goal of a single narrative arc pushed along by everyone in the band may help me from getting hung up on the "false goal" of playing a great solo. It's not supposed to be about ME so much, even if it's my turn to take over the steering wheel for a few choruses. It's still and always about US and getting us all to the other side in the same big beautiful vehicle... I like that.

Can't get MMW "The Lover" out of my head.

I'm completely obsessed now with the tune Medeski and the boys broke down for us on the first full day of camp: "The Lover." It's the one where he's playing C blues scale in the right hand over an alternating left-hand vamp of C minor 7 to E Major 7. I know a lot of pianists who can credibly go "outside" the changes of a tune from time to time and make it work, but this usually involves taking the RIGHT HAND improvised line far away from the steady chord progression. It works especially nicely on changes that are very well known...."All the Things You Are," for example, which is one song John M. played during his talk on "The Ins of Taking It Out." But what I DON'T hear often is this concept of keeping the RH line playing the same scale (in this case, C blues) idea while the LH works alternatively "with it" (C minor) or "against it" (E Major). If I get a chance, I'll have to ask John whether he knows of other artists who've done that kind of thing, or if it's his own concoction. Maybe it's an organist's way of thinking? Please weigh in if you happen to know....