Lesson 6 for Take the A Train

Earlier today I was recalling my experiences with French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelly. I made one recording with Stephane and while it is far from earth-shattering, it remains a sentimental favorite of mine. I met Stephane rather serendipitously at a Newport Jazz Festival, and at the time I knew very little about him. I associated his name with the Hot Club of France, a legendary French jazz group led by guitarist Django Reinhardt, a group that came to fame in the 1930's and ended in 1939 because of World War II .

Where: 250 South Broad Street Room 604 (but double check with the guard)
My cell number is: two six seven nine seven three seven nine three eight

Take My Cell Number With You!

Watch the vibe hang Sunday 3pm-5pm (East Coast time). All the attendees will play plus Joe, Tony, Dana, Mike and Probably Randy and I think Behn might even stop by!

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We are having a great time at the workshop!! Watch us today at 3pm Eastern U.S. time.

John Daly who is one of my online students from Ireland (and a great drummer) asked me to write an etude based on what we were talking about in our lesson.

This etude has several parts to it. First there's the melody. The head at the beginning is a chord melody and the head at the end is more a melody accompanied by a line.

The solo section starts off as a chord melody solo. The second chorus, a very simple accompanyment with a line and the 3rd chorus is just a line.

In a way you start off with chords and by the end of the tune, you are playing just a line.

So I've played for a few years and never had a problem breaking strings (although I've only been doing professional gigs for about 8 months). I got a set of Albrights recently and have broken the string on the vibes 3 times in the past month. I had a gig last night where we played 4 sets and I was using a set of med soft albrights. they are pretty soft so I have to hammer the notes out a bit, but not ridiculously. During the second set I realized that the string between my F# and Ab was near failure.

Yo guys,

One of the requests I get for the vibe hangs is that I'll devote time and answer some questions that people might be having.

I'm thinking about setting up some times 'office' hours. I can go online live for an hour here or there and if you guys have any questions we can talk about them. for now, i'd probably do it like the vibe hangs and you guys would have to type the questions. But I think we could get 3 or 4 of us on skype and try it like that sometime.

I play in a band called Monkadelphia and we're making a new CD. This is one of the tracks that most likely will not go on the cd because it's on our last one. Although I want to put it on this one also. The last one was actually a melody.

What I like about this tune and the way we're playing it is that this is one of those tunes where you could just go out and play 'anything'. We all really attempted to play on the changes.

I started working on One Note Samba by Jobim. I am happy with my arrangement of the A section, but the bridge is 8th note scales and sounds thin. On the first note, I play root/5th to fill it out a little (where the 5th is the first note of the melody), but from then on it is single notes. Is that OK? Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Barry

John Brought this video up in another Warren video I just posted.

Check this out. This is a cool video. Warren is on the street, jamming. 2 mallets and he plays like he's on stage somewhere.

I think the playing is really good, and I'm floored by how he uses the 2 mallets. I dig this guy!