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Sea Journey by Chick Corea

Sea Journey by Chick Corea - I remember hearing this great song way back when I was a student at Berklee. It was on Chick's solo album titled Piano Improvisations released in the 70s by ECM. It had a major impact. I was playing the album today and it still sounds fresh. The track is listed as Song For Sally on the album. I also vividly recall Gary Burton playing this with his band in the 70s. Seeing Gary play this also had a major impact. I remember sitting front row (every night he was there) about 5 feet away from the vibes with my Superscope cassette player under the seat. Ha!Ha!

"My Ideal"

“My Ideal” - One of my favorite songs composed in 1930 and played by one of my favorite pianists, Art Tatum. Art recorded it with Ben Webster as well as Coleman Hawkins.

Joy Spring -V

I was inspired by Tony's rendition of "Joy Spring" so I decided to try a a couple of choruses, concentrating on keeping the time, experimenting with different voicings, rhythmic comping and ultimately trying to swing! VERY Challenging with any solo bebop version. The reason I faded the track out is simply because I didn't like what I played towards the end. :-) Not terribly mysterious (Ha ha!)

Light, lighter, ultra-light!

I always wanted to test the material of plastic bottles (PETG) as resonance tubes. I have long searched for suitable material in the appropriate diameter grading.
Unfortunately, it is always the case that you have to buy a certain minimum quantitie per diameter. Since I finance all my handicrafts with my private money, I limited the test to only two diameters, but there are also suitable gradings for the tube-in-tube-concept with better fitting to the bar sizes.
The V5 frame with aluminum tubes weighs 20.3 kg, with PVC pipes 19.5 kg and with the PETG pipes only 15.7 kg.

"Desafinado" by Antonio Carlos Jobim

I was working on this song with my student this past week. We were talking about various techniques that can be applied in order to fill things out with the melody and improv. A few things we covered were counterpoint, comping underneath the melody and two hand lines with left hand jabs. All of these techniques will be covered in depth in the upcoming solo vibraphone playing book. Writing this stuff out is hard though. Ha!Ha!