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.

Embarrassing revelations about my ear or lack thereof.

1) Apparently, I can't always tell the difference between sus2 and sus4.
2) Apparently, if I'm rushing, I sometimes confuse the sound of diminished triad and augmented triad.
3) Apparently, I need a LOT more basic ear training.

Eb major triad over C major triad: love it, love it

I'm in love with this particular bitonal tension. Here's something interesting. I could easily rearrange the notes in these two triads to make it conform to a C dominant 7 sharp nine (so-called "altered dominant") kind of thing, a very common jazz sound...and yet if I don't try to box it in like that, if I keep envisioning and playing and hearing it as two separate triads sounding simultaneously, the mood and feel is entirely different from altered dominant.

I've been playing with it this way: 'comping simply on the root position triad in my LH while noodling on the opposite triad in my RH, i.e., Eb major "over" C major for a bar, then switch to C major "over" Eb major for a bar, etc etc ad infinitum. It's fun. I highly recommend it.

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....

Bassist Amy Shook told me, "Listen harder than you play."

Amy Shook is this amazing DC-area bassist with whom I've had the pleasure of recording and performing from time to time. (She's several leagues above me in terms of accomplishment and experience; I call her when I've got a gig or a session date, but she would never really need to call me for one of her projects, there being many, many great pianists in this area...)

In a classroom setting I once heard Amy say, "Always listen harder than you play." During camp, Medeski and Martin and Wood (along with their friends Ribot and Bernstein and Scofield) continually reinforced that message, explicitly in what they taught, and implicitly in how they played and interacted with each other.

I figure listening is both an attitude and a skill set. I think I can rearrange my attitude readily to become a better listener, but it sure would help if I knew and thoroughly understood what I'm hearing. In that spirit, I've decided to start spending serious time again in ear training studies. I've got a great software tool for this but have been neglecting lately. I'd really recommend this program to anyone who wants to grow bigger ears: Ear Master Pro 5. Check it out.

I've got other tools--some of jazz educator David Baker's materials, as well as the relative pitch course from that guy who also advertises his "perfect pitch" course in all the music magazines--but for now I'll stick with Ear Master and try (slowly, steadily) to live up to its title....

Mance Lipscomb says religion is love

I grew up with the kind of people who use the Bible as a bludgeon--a blunt force instrument to keep curious young minds from asking too many questions or thinking too independently. So I can perhaps be excused for my allergy to religion.

But I couldn't help but me moved while watching "A Well Spent Life," director Les Blank's documentary about bluesman Mance Lipscomb, and hearing the sweet old man talk about religion (shortly after talking about how many parentless or might-as-well-be-parentless children he has helped to raise over the years). "Religion is just love," says Mance Lipscomb. If only more people thought that way, the world would be a different place...

Meanwhile, those of us without organized religion take our spiritual sustenance where we can find it. We build private virtual churches deep within ourselves.

During one week in the Catskill Mountains with the jazz/funk/free trio Medeski Martin & Wood at their first annual music camp, I sort of felt like we were all embarked on building a new religion...but specifically one in praise of music itself, without any particular creed, code, or body of legend that needed to be adhered to. Watching the Mance Lipscomb film late at night, after hour upon hour and day upon day of workshops and ensembles and performances from MMW, was like hearing a really great heartfelt sermon from the one preacher in childhood you could actually trust. Here's a guy with a resilience and good humor and gratitude about life even when it's grindingly difficult. A person who's learned to sing his blues rather than get bogged down by them. We would all wish for such grace.

Speaking of grace...after 17 years making music together, it turns out that John Medeski, Billy Martin, and Chris Wood are also graced with a gift for teaching. I could not get over how much they gave us and kept giving us during this weeklong musical adventure: their advice and ideas and musical philosophies; their cool stories; their innovative practice suggestions; their incredible, intimate performances in that beautiful little space at the Full Moon Resort; the extensive, eclectic, but very concrete songlist of music that had influenced and informed them...it went on and on.

Sure, this camp was a savvy business move for them. I am certain that with their kids growing up and they themselves reaching middle age, M and M and W are all looking for ways to make a living in music without being on the road constantly. And besides, they're just human beings. For all I know, John Medeski never pays his taxes on time, Billy Martin is mean to his mother's cat, and Chris Wood once did or said something that made his junior high school prom date cry in the girl's bathroom. None of us is a saint.

But for one week in early August in the Catskills, these fine gentlemen built us a little church of music and welcomed us in. It was a savvy business move but also an act of service, humility, and love.