all-levels

Guys, this was recorded from a concert we did in Gloucester, MA this past Friday. The band features Matt Marvuglio on flute, Nori Shiota on bass and Jazz Robertson on drums. Nori and Jazz are Berklee students and Matt is the Dean of the Performance Division. The idea was to get a group together featuring faculty and students. Matt called me to see if I would be interested and I said sure. It was for a great cause. The concert was the first concert of a 10 concert series in Gloucester that is raising money for a scholarship fund at the school. We had a fun night with a sold out crowd.

Just blowin' on a blues of mine entitled "Hemming and Hawing"
This is from a gig I did out in LA a couple years ago.
-Tyler

Here is take two of Autumn Leaves with some thoughts on improv. A simple technique is to play a motive and move it around the scale. The strength of the motive allows it to be played out of the scale of the underlying chord or used over a reharmonized chord. I'm doing this at the beginning of my solo. The motive is a simple three note scalar motive that I'm moving around. When it sounds out, I'm playing A, B, C# during the measure of the A-7b5. The dissonance creates the interest. If everything is always perfect and played in the scale with a minimum of tension, it can get pretty boring.

Here's a clip of Billy and I playing the classic Autumn Leaves. We did two takes. This was first tune of the day that we played. The topic of comping has been popular on the site with Behn doing some nice lessons. This clip shows some various comping possibilities.

Some of the techniques include double stops, single note walking type bass lines, pedal point (on the bridge), reharmonization, use of guide tone lines, stacking voicings, open versus closed voicings, chord arpeggiation, counterpoint with the soloist, etc.

This is a clip of Billy and I playing a nice ballad, Hoagy Carmichael's Skylark.

Guys, here's another version of Basin Street Blues for comparison. There are some different left hand comping techniques in this clip versus take one.

Some of the techniques include single note guide tone lines. For example, on the second last bar of the tune (Bb Bb7 Eb Eb-), I'm bringing out the line of Bb, Ab, G, Gb to F going into the last bar of Bb. Using the guide tone lines, we can play fairly sparse while still sounding the changes.

Guys, here's the videoclip of Basin Street Blues from our Sunday session at the house. The audioclip of this track was previously posted. More clips of the session are up on my YouTube channel. If anyone has any questions about what I'm doing on these clips in terms of techniques, what I'm thinking about, improv techniques, etc., feel free to ask. Ed

Hi guys, here's the videoclip of Jobim's Triste. I had previously posted the audioclip of Triste from our session. There are some more clips of the session on my YouTube channel including two takes each of Autumn Leaves, Basin Street Blues and Irving Berlin's Isn't This A Lovely Day. Ed

Check it