Marimba

This is a very interesting and demanding interlude,written by the great composer/arranger Frank Zappa.It is a incredible exercise on playing a single line melody,using uncommon intervals.
This version appeared on the "Apostrophe"album,as part of a tune called "st Alfonzo's pancake breakfast".It begins approximately at 1:09 and it was performed by the great Ruth Underwood.

It is a standard piece in the Zappa repertoire,and it was played by all the percussionists that played in the Zappa band.

In the past year, it's been a project of mine to get to a place where I can play as effortlessly over odd meters (11, 13, 15 and 17) as in 4, 3, 5 and 7. This is the result of having checked it out for a few months. So this vid dates back to about March of 2010. Since then, it has become like second nature. In fact I enjoy playing over those extended odd meters more than anything else. I have my good friend Katisse to thank for getting me involved with this stuff. If you have any questions as to how to practice this or some thoughts of your own, please feel free to post.

Live from the Red Sea Jazz Festival

Hey guys,

This is a GREAT exercise for writing, improvising, and tune learning. The idea is to write a new melody over the chord changes to an old standard tune. You can alter the harmony a little bit here and there to fit your new melody but the idea is that you could call a standard tune everyone knows, but it will sound completely different.

Hi everyone, I'm attaching a pdf hand out I used recently for a clinic. In it I go through an example of how one might use a combination of Cells and Upper Structure Triads to create tension and release for playing melodic lines and phrases through your improvisations!

If there are any questions please do not hesitate to ask!

Enjoy!

Here's a new piece that I composed.

It's called "Warrior"

The piece is in 4 movements connected together.

I.Love
II.Hope
III.Pain
IV.Revenge

Hope you like it,

The piece is still highly improv based but I've started to notate it.

Hey everyone, please welcome Casey Cangelosi. We're hoping Casey is going to be our marimba specialist on the site! Here's his first test video. It's not perfect but I thought I'd post it anyway!