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Playing "outside"


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Posted

Here is a simple idea you can use for playing cool "outside" sounding licks. You step away from the usual pentatonic scale, one half-step up, or down.

 

Check this out.

 

[video=youtube;XavyoR7ExwM]

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Posted

Nice.

 

Another thingie is to use Super locrian over ANYTHING 'cept where it is supposed to go. Speshilly a minor chord. Speshilly speshilly speshilly over a major chord.....Deelicious clang everywhere......get's em off the stool and to the car quick!

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Posted

Refresh my memory please - what is super Locrian? lol

 

Also, you can let the shifts hang outside because the comping will hold the tonality.

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Posted

Refresh my memory please - what is super Locrian? lol

 

It's the locrian above locrian! :lol:

 

I wrote a tune once called 'Argument' with all major chords and the long slow melody using super locrian over each chord. The melody was in 4 and the chords were in 3 and the drums were in 5.

 

Fresh off an nice roof raiser with my wife....

 

It is either the best thing I ever wrote or the worst. I can't figure out which.

 

Prolly the worst.:lol:

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Posted

It's the locrian above locrian!
:lol:

I wrote a tune once called 'Argument' with all major chords and the long slow melody using super locrian over each chord. The melody was in 4 and the chords were in 3 and the drums were in 5.


Fresh off an nice roof raiser with my wife....


It is either the best thing I ever wrote or the worst. I can't figure out which.


Prolly the worst.
:lol:

 

You know what they say about free jazz...sounds better making it than it does listening back to it.

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Posted

Refresh my memory please - what is super Locrian?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's - Superlocrian!

His special power is being able to diminish anything. Give him a dominant 7 and he'll alter it out of sight.

:D

His arch enemy is E Z Listening.:facepalm:

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Posted

You know what they say about free jazz...sounds better making it than it does listening back to it.

And the reason they call it free jazz? Because no one will pay you to play it.

 

"Hey, I'm gonna play outside!"

"Fine, there's the door."

 

:D

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Posted

 

Here is a simple idea you can use for playing cool "outside" sounding licks. You step away from the usual pentatonic scale, one half-step up, or down.

 

 

I sometimes do that anyway after a few beers, but not intentionally.

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Posted

And the reason they call it free jazz? Because no one will pay you to play it.


"Hey, I'm gonna play outside!"

"Fine, there's the door."


:D

 

That is a good one!

 

I know after some beer, it can happen unintentionally....

 

Anyway, I find that it's good to work on these types of things regularly, because you make your fingers go in patterns you normally don't do. I think that's a good thing. :)

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Posted

butcha know....

 

Playing outside is waaaayyyy different than free jazz.

 

Playing outside implies a tonal center that you play outside of; free jazz, avant improv, downtown, or whatever you want to call it, uses "different" concepts and structures.

 

Uri Caine did a great album of Mahler stuff using 'new music' structures in an improvised setting...upsetting and uncomfortable at first and yet increasingly breath taking upon each repeated listen.

 

The whole album might SOUND outside, but it isn't.

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Posted

And any more explanation than that will require a round of beers from the next questioner.
:lol:

 

Sorry man...theory jokes are a sign of douchebaggery. My freaking bad. Sometimes I just need to stop typing.:facepalm:

 

The super tonic is the second degree of the major scale. Etymologically the term super in super tonic means 'above'. Therefore, the super tonic is the note 'above' the tonic.

 

Thus the joke about super locr....dude I'm sooooo sorry. Really.:facepalm::lol:

 

Ima quit music. It's making me a moron...jokes about theory and listening to free jazz....what an ASS I've become.

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Posted

And the reason they call it free jazz? Because no one will pay you to play it.


"Hey, I'm gonna play outside!"

"Fine, there's the door."


:D

 

Whoa, whoa, wait, I do get paid to play it. Our moto is, don't play free for free ;)

 

I have tons of outside things I could show, playing "free" is a whole other concept :p

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Posted
I have tons of outside things I could show, playing "free" is a whole other concept
:p

Absolutely! (I just couldn't resist the gags ;)) "Outside" implies there's an "inside". In free jazz there is neither.

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Posted

I guess I look at things at as outside, freeform or free jazz is you will, but then also just free. Free includes inside, outside, and freeform as well as anything else you can throw at it, and all on the fly, in the moment, no looking back or forward really. Just going for it with confidence and exploration.

 

I posted a thread a while back about playing free, which is hard to explain, so I show examples through music. Others responded and posted stuff too. I'll bump that and see if we can get others to post up stuff where they leave knowledge behind and get into the music and find where the unlimited and exploitable areas are in something.

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Posted


You know the one I mean! It somehow manages to make sense in the context of the song while sounding like a Steinway tumbling down a spiral staircase. I wish I could play stuff like that, but you kinda need to be able to play "inside" first, I guess, so I am still working on that.
:o

 

Seeng as I love Tom Waits so much (I've honestly never a band whose sound I like more than that), here's that lick. I'm not sure if he actually played it in this position (I can't play it easily anywhere myself), but these are the notes:

That's in 8th notes starting on beat "1-and", over a Bm chord, as it moves to a G7.  (And yes, he's targetted a C natural on the G7, the classic jazz "avoid note" - he strangles it with vibrato and holds it, so he definitely means it. The vibrato does push it up towards a #11 - a good lydian dominant note - but not quite far enough *.)

 

Asd for making theoretical sense of it... let's give it a go...

It opens with two chord tones (D F#). OK. Then we get G# - maybe a dorian 6th, but also maybe thinking a half-step below A, the 7th. That plunges to a Bb - the note the other side of A of course, but an octave down. and neither of them resolve to A anyway.

After the Bb comes a G - so we can at least see Bb-G as a half-step above Bm7 chord tones, or maybe a bluesy anticipation of the G7. Then back up to F (b5 of Bm, or anticipated b7 of G7?), back down to F#, and finally up a tritone to C, which is not any kind of resolution, but another outside note *.

However, if we see the Bb as A#, maj7 of Bm, the first 4 notes could all be seen as B melodic minor, and therefore not technically outside at all. It's the big leaps that make it sound "out". From that perspective, only the F and G are outside, a pretty orthodox enclosure of the F# - except for the octave displacement of course, which ruins any sense of resolution.

 

It seems like an unholy mess of 2 or 3 different outside (or anticipatory) ideas, jammed together. But then I guess "unholy" is kind of the point! ;)

 

(Other than this phrase, btw, the solo is very plain and simple, a lot of B roots on the Bm chord, a few F#s; although it sounds like they're squawking in protest as he squeezes his hands round their throat... :))

 

 

*EDIT: in fact it occurs to me that the 11th harmonic of G is a pitch mid-way between C and C#, so - accidentally or not - he seems to have gone for a pure tone, even though it's technically out of tune according to equal temperament. (I'm pretty sure Marc Ribot would know all about overtones, frequencies and various kinds of intonation.)

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Posted

I guess I look at things at as outside, freeform or free jazz is you will, but then also just free. Free includes inside, outside, and freeform as well as anything else you can throw at it, and all on the fly, in the moment, no looking back or forward really. Just going for it with confidence and exploration.

I can see that as a strategy, a viewpoint to play from, but if you're playing "free" in any context involving harmony (tonality, modes, etc) then it will be heard as relating to that context as either inside or outside (or the various stages between of course).

So one can be "free" in the sense of ignoring the context - saying "what the hell" and just flying by the seat of your pants, as it were. (Hopefully one's ear and subconscious will keep one in some kind of sensible relationship with the music.)

True "free" jazz, of course, has no harmonic context at all, and often no time either. The only premise is listening and responding to others - or, if solo, to the sounds one has just made (and maybe to those of the venue).

 

The great avant garde British guitarist Billy Jenkins used to run semi-spoof performances of free jazz that he called "Big Fight Nights", where two "teams" of players would "compete" as duos in "bouts". There was even a wrestling-style ring set up, with a referee in a bowtie, and the bouts would be limited to two minutes, after which a bell would ring to end it. Points were deducted if players over-ran, or if they played any recognisable piece of melody or chord. The announcement at the start was "no biting, no gouging, no standards" :D. Naturally, a performer would sometimes tease wth an old quotation, to boos from the audience.

It was enormous fun, but because the protagonists were all good jazz musicians, some great music came out of it. I remember a particularly inspiring duet between a bassist and drummer. (Drummers have a kind of advantage in free jazz, because their whole expertise is in non-pitched noises. Other instrumentalists have to ignore what their instruments are designed for.)

Mostly it was deeply thought-provoking: not only about what "free" actually means (with dumb artificial rules being applied), but about the whole notion of performance, improvisation, communication (between musicians and with audience), and even about the nature of music itself. It was like a grand lesson in what jazz is really about - but delivered with a sardonic irony that only seemed to make it even more convincing.

 

http://www.billyjenkins.com/cv.html

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Posted

I can see that as a strategy, a viewpoint to play from, but if you're playing "free" in any context involving harmony (tonality, modes, etc) then it will be
heard
as relating to that context as either inside or outside (or the various stages between of course).

So one can be "free" in the sense of ignoring the context - saying "what the hell" and just flying by the seat of your pants, as it were. (Hopefully one's ear and subconscious will keep one in some kind of sensible relationship with the music.)

True "free" jazz, of course, has no harmonic context at all, and often no time either. The only premise is listening and responding to others - or, if solo, to the sounds one has just made (and maybe to those of the venue).


The great avant garde British guitarist Billy Jenkins used to run semi-spoof performances of free jazz that he called "Big Fight Nights", where two "teams" of players would "compete" as duos in "bouts". There was even a wrestling-style ring set up, with a referee in a bowtie, and the bouts would be limited to two minutes, after which a bell would ring to end it. Points were deducted if players over-ran, or if they played any recognisable piece of melody or chord. The announcement at the start was "no biting, no gouging, no standards"
:D
. Naturally, a performer would sometimes tease wth an old quotation, to boos from the audience.

It was enormous fun, but because the protagonists were all good jazz musicians, some great music came out of it. I remember a particularly inspiring duet between a bassist and drummer. (Drummers have a kind of advantage in free jazz, because their whole expertise is in non-pitched noises. Other instrumentalists have to
ignore
what their instruments are designed for.)

Mostly it was deeply thought-provoking: not only about what "free" actually means (with dumb artificial rules being applied), but about the whole notion of performance, improvisation, communication (between musicians and with audience), and even about the nature of music itself. It was like a grand lesson in what jazz is really about - but delivered with a sardonic irony that only seemed to make it even more convincing.


http://www.billyjenkins.com/cv.html

 

 

I'll be checking out that link for sure, it sounds like a riot!

 

What I listed where aspects or views. There's no box there as any can happen individually, in any combination, or all at once. In the outside-free thread I bumped this morning there's a video of a completely free jazz section, but while the chaos is happening you can hear the trumpet players inserting melodies such as When The Saints Go Marching, but it over the chaos. And I just posted a new vid in that thread where there is a specific rhythm happening but the soloist are playing free.

 

When we do the "what the hell" thing, we aren't disregarding the sound or looking for wrong notes to play but trying to create an atmosphere of sound that blankets what you are hearing, or a dense sound scape...

 

it's hard to explain but it's more a "happening" than anything. But surprisingly not bad to listening back to :)

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Posted

Sorry man...theory jokes are a sign of douchebaggery. My freaking bad. Sometimes I just need to stop typing.
:facepalm:

The super tonic is the second degree of the major scale. Etymologically the term super in super tonic means 'above'. Therefore, the super tonic is the note 'above' the tonic.


Thus the joke about super locr....dude I'm sooooo sorry. Really.
:facepalm::lol:

Ima quit music. It's making me a moron...jokes about theory and listening to free jazz....what an ASS I've become.

 

I disagree - you seem like a cool guy to me. I love beer! And I was just continuing the beer-for-modes ongoing forum joke, of which Mr. gears is well aware. :)

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Posted

True "free" jazz, of course, has no harmonic context at all, and often no time either. The only premise is listening and responding to others - or, if solo, to the sounds one has just made (and maybe to those of the venue).

 

Not necessarily. Splitting hairs here but.....

 

Some concepts espoused by Ayler and Coleman say that in a free context, the musical (harmonic, melodic, rhythmic) context is implied as a rule due to the nature of the fact that ALL notes have musical context when they are played. And free/avant/whatever is the idea that you don't divulge any implication. Great free players don't just whack around, come as what may, they DELINEATE musical context AS they play. So the ears of the players must respond immediately to the musical foreground with SOUND not context, so as to create NEW context unencumbered by the act of controlling and identifying said context. (I swear that last sentence makes sense....:lol:)

 

Which is (mostly) different than "flying by the seat of your pants"....it's kinda more like flying by the seat of something you can't touch, but everybody has a hold of.....not with their hands, but with one collective MIND.:freak:

 

And while we are at it, one more :freak: for good measure.

 

While you do "listen and respond" there has to be a deeper context, or else these guys wouldn't have a leg to stand on! That's why Ornette called himself a 'songwriter'!

 

And btw JonR...I love reading your posts...you give up some great stuff around here! Thanks for being so generous mang.....

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Posted
What I listed where aspects or views. There's no box there as any can happen individually, in any combination, or all at once. In the outside-free thread I bumped this morning there's a video of a completely free jazz section, but while the chaos is happening you can hear the trumpet players inserting melodies such as When The Saints Go Marching, but it over the chaos. And I just posted a new vid in that thread where there is a specific rhythm happening but the soloist are playing free.


When we do the "what the hell" thing, we aren't disregarding the sound or looking for wrong notes to play but trying to create an atmosphere of sound that blankets what you are hearing, or a dense sound scape...

Gotcha. Sounds great to me!

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Posted
And btw JonR...I love reading your posts...you give up some great stuff around here! Thanks for being so generous mang.....

Thanks - my pleasure.

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