piano geek

so the musical is going well,

just hitting it's stride with tonight's performance, the 5th, although we've got a long break before the next show...

i'm still making tiny mistakes and it irritates me, so i've set myself quite a grueling practice regime in which i do 2 handed scales just like i get my students to do, but while i get them to do a major, natural minor & harmonic minor scale on each note (gradually, throughout the year),

i'm getting myself to play all the modes of the major scale on each note...

i've been doing it for some time now (tonight) and i'm not quite half way through,

i do it in the order suggested by W A Mathieu in "harmonic experience", where each change of mode adds one more flat, staring with lydian:

lydian,
ionian (major),
mixolydian,
dorian,
aeolian (natural minor),
phrygian,
locrian,

i'm working on a tune at the moment and i've got my gigging keyboard out with the GEM module being the piano, insane, what with the piano right there, but that's the weird place i'm in right now...

i was just playing through the same list of modes, but improvising while holding down notes with my left hand, not to sound the notes but in order to free those (imaginary - digital) strings and let that strange reverb ring out... as in this section of this improvisation...

the tune is currently called hay fever, but that'll probably change, i can't decide if it's right yet, or whether a certain section needs changing, but i love it, i play it whenever i can...

sunshine

once again i'm not working and it's beautiful but unhealthy for the bank balance...

i'm about to off to manolis's where i'll eat my repast and then spski will meet me there and we'll pop over the road to see sunshine @ the holly O...

listening to lakshmi shankar which is a joy...

my practise of overtone singing to a drone continues and coincides with teaching about scales in the last couple of weeks and finding an indian mode called bhairov, 1st in a lesson, one of my students had it written down... then in the book harmonic experience which i'm working through at the moment...

then in the track listing for lakshmi shankar's the hours and the seasons...

anyway, must dash, beautiful things are afoot...

(and dinah is at this... - click on towser TV)

x

andrew hill

this week's improvisation is rendering and i was pootling around on the web where i found out that andrew hill died today... this morning...

very sad, genius piano player he was, in the offcenter not quite free still jazz world...

had i known i would have mentioned him in the improvisation, which i recorded against a drone a few hours ago...

i brought my copy of harmonic experience into work on tuesday to read a quote from it (which i didn't get round to in the lesson) and i was talking with y1mk1n about it afterwards and it struck me that maybe after all this time now would be the right time to start the singing practise it asks for...

i bought it years ago, back when me & P were together, she spilt nightlight candle wax over one of the pages the night she moved into the squat near waterlow park, a huge wind was blowing and her room was right at the top of this immense block... i was scared the roof would come in or something...

i'd just received the book through the post, $45... i'd met with D the D shortly before then and he'd told me about it...

anyway i read through th first section fairly quickly and skipped the exercises but at the end of that section the writer advices not to proceed until doing the singing exercises, so i held off, and held off...

over two years later and i might get round to doing it...

we just had a brief power cut which set my rendering improvisation back an hour or so, so not there yet...

bless andrew hill, what have i got to hand by him...?

x