It's been a busy week for music - my jazz band performed three times in eight days. One tune especially satisfied the requirements of this blog quite nicely: "Inchworm." Jazz aficionados will recognize this tune as a Coltrane standard.

But I never liked the fact that Coltrane only played one of the two counter-melodies in the song, which originated from the movie musical "Hans Christian Anderson," starring Danny Kaye. The song starts as children in a school house chant addition in a rather haunting melody, which Kaye then sings against as he watches a caterpillar crawling on a plant. (See the scene on YouTube here, and the more complete version of the song with the muppets - including muppet inchworm - here.)

So, I did a new jazz arrangement that includes both melodies. In addition to the sung counter-melodies, there is a third counter-melody in the strings that I decided to add to the jazz version as well. Thus, with three saxes and two vocalists, we covered it all.

"Inchworm", by the way, is the common name for moths in the family Geometridae, of which some in Hawaii are sit-and-wait predators. But the family is cosmopolitan, and recognizable in the caterpillar because unlike other families they only have prolegs at the back end of their abdomen, resulting in their distinctive inching walk. Many species are also known as "loopers" for the same reason.

Labels: cool bugs, insects, jazz, music

Time for a rare music post, and opportunity to promote a fantastic jazz group, the Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio. I've been lucky enough to hear them play three times in the last few years, despite not getting out much, because they are based close by, in Bozeman, Montana. Jeni Fleming is the vocalist of the group, with her husband Jake Fleming on saxophone and guitar, and with Chad Langford on acoustic bass.

The trio has two main reasons why it is great: the perfect unity of Langford and Jake, and Jeni's voice. The bass and guitar are as tight a unit as they can be, playing classic and more novel jazz rhythms. Jeni uses the solid backing to free her voice to do what it does best. Her voice is everything a jazz singer's should be - mellow, controlled, fluid, and with an expansive range, both dynamically and vertically. They win converts from the ranks of people who don't like jazz. One person I know said, "I don't like jazz, but this is great." Another was less willing to budge from his anti-jazz preferences, but admitted that he could listen to Jeni talk all day.

They mix original jazz tunes (primarily Jake's), classic jazz such as "'Round Midnight" and "Garota de Ipanema" (yes, the Portuguese version), a wide range of pop tunes including "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Time After Time", and both old and recent show tunes, such as "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) and "Stars and the Moon" (from Songs for a New World). At a recent concert, I heard a fantastic jazz rendition of "She's Leaving Home," the Beatles' classic from Sgt. Pepper's. This is the third major strength of the band - its willingness not to be limited by the original genres the tunes came from. As Jeni Fleming says herself at performances, a good song is a good song, no matter where it came from.

They are comfortable and interactive with listeners both in the more intimate setting of a bar, and onstage in a large auditorium. The only real criticism I have of their live performances, which isn't much, is that they spend a little too much time explaining the genesis of their original numbers. Because Jake and Jeni are husband and wife, some of the personal anecdotes definitely border on TMI. I'm there to see great musicians perform, not to hear their life stories. But this is a case where too much is probably better than too little, because they are humorous and establish a good rapport with the audience, making us feel as though they've let us in on some creative secrets.

Check out their music page or iTunes to listen to clips. Although recordings never do a good live band justice, Jeni Fleming's vocal ability will come through loud and clear. (Four tunes, including one of their signature originals which is highly representative of their sound, "Once Around the Sun", can be heard in its entirety on the band's MySpace page.)

One additional sideline of note: Jeni and Jake Fleming have collaborated with the family of Greg Mortenson to produce the song "Three Cups of Tea," available as an accompaniment to the book (below) about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (also based in Bozeman, Montana). Mortenson's young daughter Amira is an aspiring professional singer and sings with Fleming on the song. Some of the proceeds support the CAI, which funds school building in remote regions of middle eastern Islamic countries. The CAI is particularly devoted to providing education for both boys and girls in countries where they have previously grown up in ignorance. Although the book is padded with quite a lot of gratuitous material about Mortenson's personal life, especially early on, it is worth a read by Americans who support bombing and destruction as a means to combat terrorism.

Labels: education, jazz, music

This past weekend was the Montana state jazz festival. I didn't get to enjoy the music as much as in previous years, because I had the fam in tow, but it is always fun to play there and give my students a chance for a broader audience than they get on our small campus. Here's our mp3 of "Black Orpheus," for the more than passingly interested.

Plus, we all get the benefit of a half hour with a professional jazz educator who hones in the band's strengths and weaknesses and gives some great tips for taking our playing to the next level.

Those of us who play jazz consider it one of the purest forms of music, because of its emphasis on improvisation. It's tough sometimes to be directing students because of the difficulty of convincing beginners to go out on a limb and try something new. I used to have one trumpet player (sadly just for one year) who was a great player, but did not like to solo because she felt it had to come out sounding like Miles Davis on the first try. She's a Type A, overachieving excellent student, but performance is not like other disciplines. You cannot learn what you need from a book and do it perfectly the first time; or, even acknowledging some trial and error is necessary in fields such as molecular biology, failure is not a public exercise, and a perfectionist can accept that it will take a few tries to get it right because there are no public consequences.

Obviously I get the other type of student too, who is willing to take a risk. Those students improve a lot over time, because the only way to practice soloing is to do it there, with your whole band standing around you. About 80% of soloing is confidence, I think. Sure, we don't really want to hear you if you have no sense of rhythm or melody or don't understand jazz chord structure and scales at all, but that's the stuff everyone picks up as they go, even in the big bands in which they don't solo (that is if they are all interested in continuing to play, and are not there just because Mom and Dad made them). But all the wrong notes really start to sound wrong after awhile, and as time goes on everything you hear flows to your fingers, which start doing more and more of the right thing. Then you reach the point where "wrong" notes actually have a place in the structure of your solo.

This is why I love listening to Ornette Coleman. His solos stretch the form to its extreme, because he employs so many notes that are not in the chord changes, but fit in perfectly because of the way he sets them up. (This is not really an uncommen idea - most of the melody notes of the bridge of "Girl from Ipanema" are not actually in the chords, making it difficult to sing, but incredibly rich to listen to.) Coleman's classic album "Free Jazz," for which he is the most famous, explored the idea of improvisation in its purest form, by having two quartets play together without any structure at all for both sides of an LP. Each performer takes his solo in turn, and it is up to the other musicians to respond to what he is doing. Jazz is all about communication, which is why it is so fun to play when the band really clicks.

Unfortunately, at my school, it is difficult to keep students in the jazz band for longer than a year or two, so they never get the chance to see themselves really improve, and see how this connection works among musicians used to playing with each other. There tends to be a high-school mentality here that music is uncool and partying is really where it's at - all but one of my 8 or so freshmen that started the year dropped out within a few weeks, and this mentality clearly played a role. It's a shame of course, because understanding the fundamentals of music is a basic part of a liberal arts education, and because training in music is something that is much easier to keep with you throughout your life - which is what tipped the balance for me to become a biology, rather than music, major. It worked out, because I'm going strong in both fields, and realized I have only scratched the surface of what I could do in both of them.

The infinite possibilities of jazz make the same tune exciting to play over and over. Even when you have the head of the tune mastered, you can always stretch a little and try something new on your solo, with the rest of the band trying it right along with you.

Labels: education, jazz, music