Band in a Box Songs

Les accompagnements [Band in a Box] et Midi de nos morceaux préférés….. se trouvent désormais dans la librairie  cliquez sur le logo: BIAB

My Jazz World: Un Blog Soul, Funk, Groovy….

Je recommande à tous un Blog  fantastique, une ressource fabuleuse de LPs, vynils que l’on ne trouve plus, ou qui n’ont pas été ré-édités: Jazz Funk, Groove, Soul, …. des disques, des musiciens oubliés ou non, que des pros, la plupart de ces disques sont entièrement téléchargeables.  

Il y a des pépites, des pépites et des pépites!! :  Dr Lonnie Smith, Rusty Bryant, Stanley Turrentine… Howard Robert…. David Liebman… Cecil McBee… et bien d’autres.

—> My Jazz World

Le Brésil est également à l’honneur, de même que de nombreux musiciens japonais. A découvrir.

Bravo  & mille merci à Smooth qui met en ligne sa collection privée de LPs (plus de 2000!) jour après jour.

Monk Montgomery says…

ようこそ Hiroko!

ようこそひろ子。サックス奏者、ストレート神戸からやって来て、彼女は自分のエネルギーと喜びを、ジョークと神戸をもたらします…鍵、スタジオジャズ/ソウルで数泊…と、記憶喪失…再びようこそ

… Bienvenue à Hiroko. Saxophoniste, venant tout droit de Kobe, elle nous amène son énergie,et sa joie, et les blagues de Kobe… déjà quelques soirées à la Clef, atelier Jazz / Soul … et à l’amnésia… Encore une fois Bienvenue! 

JazzImproveTv

Need to check this more for the sax and keyboards, but already prett good guitar lessons here at JazzImproveTv, Kenny Burrel’s licks and Larry Carlton 335 Blues.

Concert – MJC Conflans Sainte Honorine, 13 Mars 2009

concert MJC Conflans Mars 2009

Le Jazz/Soul Atelier La Clef, au grand complet: Marie Bar au piano, Christophe Goe à la batterie, Ronan Len à la Basse, Alexandre Bra, Hervé Del et Jérémie Men au Sax, Stéphanie Desfon à la flûte, Heervee Lee à la guitare, lors du festival de jazz de Conflans Sainte Honorine, Mars 2009.

Jam session à Conflans Sainte Honorine

JAM Conflans Mars 2009

JazzenVille de Conflans St Honorine

Jazz au Confluent – 6eme Anniversaire

Happening Ely Ribéra 13/03/2009

Dans le cadre du 6eme anniversaire de Jazz au Confluent, et du festival JazzenVille de Conflans Sainte Honorine, Ely Ribéra réalise un happening, peinture à l’huile sur le thème du Jazz, en présence des nombreux participants et de tous les élus locaux, sur la musique du Jazz/Soul Atelier de la Clef, Le Blues du Pinceau. Paroles de Dan Duparc et musique création de Jacques de Lignières. Dan Duparc à la batterie, Jacques de Lignière au Sax, Marie Bar au piano, Heervee Lee à la guitare, et Ronan Len à la Basse.

Charles Mingus – Bio

One of the most important figures in twentieth century American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church– choir and group singing– and from “hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.” He studied double bass and composition in a formal way (five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese) while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters, first-hand. His early professional experience, in the 40’s, found him touring with bands like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Lionel Hampton.

Eventually he settled in New York where he played and recorded with the leading musicians of the 1950’s– Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington himself. One of the few bassists to do so, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. He was also an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. By the mid-50’s he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. He also founded the “Jazz Workshop,” a group which enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings.

Mingus soon found himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. His recordings bear witness to the extraordinarily creative body of work that followed. They include: Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Ah Um, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Let My Children Hear Music. He recorded over a hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores.
Although he wrote his first concert piece, “Half-Mast Inhibition,” when he was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. It was the presentation of “Revelations” which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day.

In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the same year his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, was published by Knopf. In 1972 it appeared in a Bantam paperback and was reissued after his death, in 1980, by Viking/Penguin and again by Pantheon Books, in 1991. In 1972 he also re-signed with Columbia Records. His music was performed frequently by ballet companies, and Alvin Ailey choreographed an hour program called “The Mingus Dances” during a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company.

He toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis. He was confined to a wheelchair, and although he was no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, his last works were sung into a tape recorder.

From the 1960’s until his death in 1979 at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music. When asked to comment on his accomplishments, Mingus said that his abilities as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God.

Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation (two grants). He also received an honorary degree from Brandeis and an award from Yale University. At a memorial following Mingus’ death, Steve Schlesinger of the Guggenheim Foundation commented that Mingus was one of the few artists who received two grants and added: “I look forward to the day when we can transcend labels like jazz and acknowledge Charles Mingus as the major American composer that he is.” The New Yorker wrote: “For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality, his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the twentieth century.”

He died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him posthumously with a “Charles Mingus Day.”

After his death, the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus foundation called “Let My Children Hear Music” which catalogued all of Mingus’ works. The microfilms of these works were then given to the Music Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently available for study and scholarship – a first for jazz. Repertory bands called the Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Big Band continue to perform his music. Biographies of Charles Mingus include Mingus by Brian Priestley; Mingus/Mingus by Janet Coleman and Al Young and Myself When I Am Real, by Gene Santoro.

Mingus’ masterwork, “Epitaph,” a composition which is more than 4000 measures long and which requires two hours to perform, was discovered during the cataloguing process. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a concert produced by Sue Mingus at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death.

The New Yorker wrote that “Epitaph” represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the “most memorable jazz events of the decade.” Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work “Epitaph,” declaring that he wrote it “for my tombstone.”

The Library of Congress was presented with the Charles Mingus Collection in 1993, including autographed manuscripts, photographs, literary manuscripts, correspondence, and tape recordings of interviews, broadcasts, recording sessions, and Mingus composing at the piano.

Reprinted from More than a Fake Book © 1991 Jazz Workshop, Inc.

Wikipedia entry

The Jody Grind (Horace Silver)

Silver’s bands, like Art Blakey’s, served — and is still serving — as one of the great training grounds for young jazz musicians in the ’60s. “The Jody Grind” features a youthful Woody Shaw joining his brash trumpet sound with the fiery James Spaulding on alto and flute and the forgotten (unfortunately) Tyrone Washington, who contributes a hard-edged tenor. Silver, as usual, composed all the tunes, and nearly all of them are memorable.

Silver is a master at stripping melodies and rhythms down to their essentials. But that doesn’t mean that his tunes are simplistic. For example, the great “Mexican Hat Dance,” as the title suggests, cooks up a spicy Latin beat that is very hummable. After you listen to it a few times, though, you realize that the infectious melody is composed of some tricky twists and turns that the horn players negotiate flawlessly.

Good Bye Pork Pie Hat (Charlie Mingus)

Analysis: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Goodbye Pork Pie hat is a 12-bar form consisting of three four-bar phrases, in the key of F minor. The melody tends to outline an F blues scale. when viewed as four-bar phrases, the first and second phrases of the melody are not as similar to each othar as you’d expect in a traditional blues.

I think it’s open to interpretation, but you would probably not be wrong to look at this as a basic blues form with unusual turnarounds. The first chord of the first phrase is the i (minor). The first chord of the second phrase is the iv (minor). Where we go wrong is on the thirs phrase–instead of arriving solidly at the V on beat on of bar 9, we detour through two other chords to arrive there at the top of bar 10. But that does set up tht return to i in bar 11, which is quite blues-like. I think that in spite of the chord complexity, the phrasing of the melody argues in favor of blues.

So let’s take this apart one phrase at a time…

| F7 Db7 | Gb B7 | Eb7 Db7 | Eb7 F7 |

The usual turnaround for a minor key would be i – III7 – ii – V or possibly some tritone substitutions for some of those chords. The turnaround in the first two bars is similar, but different. The motion is still circle-of-fifths (Db Gb B), but the B chord is a tritone sub for i rather than for V, which is what makes this odd. The motion from B7 to Eb7 probably can’t really be called a cadence–up a third is just about the weakest possible root motion. I think it’s right to look at the second turnaround as setting up the iv chord in bar 5. The first chord (Eb7) is problematic to analyze. The melody in the third bar is extremely close to the first bar. Eb7 as a sub for F7 is unconvetional, but one possible interpretation. So, to place these two turnarounds above each other, we have

| F7 Db7 | Gb B7 |

| Eb7 Db7 | Eb7 F7 |

They are similar, but the second one subs Eb7 for F7, and Eb for Gb (a minor third sub for a dominant chord is more familiar, Coltrane did it a lot). The F7 sets up the iv chord in bar 5 very strongly.

| Bbmi7 Db7 | Gmi C7alt | D7b5 G7 | Db7 Gb |

Standard blues would have two bars of iv followed by two of i here. Mingus gives us the iv, and sets us up to expect the i, not just with the C7, but the melody also really sets up a cadence that we get denied. What we do get in bars 7 and 8 is circle of fifths root motion, and some parallelism (bar 8 echoes bar 7 down one half-step, very familiar in Charlie Parker’s blues changes).

| B7 Bb7 | C7 Eb7 | F7 Db7 | Gb B7 ||

This is truly the difficult one to justify in traditional theory terms. What a traditional blues progression would have here is V, iv, then two bars of i. Mingus delays the appearance of the dominant one bar (that’s one way to look at it). He does deliver us a “cadence” sort of by having Gb in bar 8 resolve to B7 at the top of bar 9. But I sure don’t “hear” that as a cadence. What I think is going on instead is a reversal of the iv and V chord. To me the last four bars function like

| iv | V | i | i ||

Viewed this way, the B7 is a dominant sub for the Bb (iv). Eb is a legitimate sub for C7 (Coltrane-style), and we do land at the i in the right spot, and additionally revisit the first turnaround from the first phrase. What I don’t have a great deal of comfort for is the B7 -> F7 “cadence” from the bottom of the form to the top. That would be weak in most cases. It seems to work out okay here though.