Captain's (rehearsal) Log, Day 1

Please enjoy and read the summaries your group's interns

Cedar - Today we introduced ourselves and laid out goals for the summer. All of the members would like to get more comfortable improvising so we began to look at the arpeggios of 7th chords and different ways of practicing them I.e. starting with diatonic, then the second note in the scale and so-on, working out what intervals are required to craft the diatonic 7th chord. We also work-shopped the melody to Jerome Richardson’s “Groove Merchant”. Tim recommends the Thad Jones, Mel Louis big band version of this on YouTube. 

Brady - We worked on an arrangement of “Bluesvillie” (see Jimmy Heath recording for something similar in feel), especially getting offbeat and pickup parts in time where they need to go. For the second half we worked on soloing over the Bb blues, being intentional about our shape, and repetition; as well as getting comfortable soloing in front of others.

Max - The St. Thomas combo played through a number of tunes. Milo informed us of some specific chord changes that you can typically hear in the songs we played.

1. "St. Thomas": We developed some harmony lines in the horn section. Milo showed EJ a Calypso groove. The goal for next time is to solidify the arrangement, so horn players should come up with a good harmonization of the last four bars.

2. "Have you Met Miss Jones": We talked about some different descending changes you can play in the last A section and a chromatic ii-V you can play in the first ending. Milo also showed EJ about a brush technique passed down to him from Jeff Hamilton and Philly Joe Jones. 

3. "You'd be so nice to come home to": We played through this. The goal for next time would be to learn the lyrics to the tune and the head.

4. "Airegin": We thought we could run with the Sonny Rollins theme and play some of his tunes this summer. This is a difficult tune, but a good one. The goal for next time would be to dig into some of the recordings. Also begin to learn the melody and work on the changes. 

Kyle – The Driftin’ group had a wonderful first meeting. We began by improvising over an Ab drone. Then we played a couple scales, where each note was cued by a select member of the group to practice communication. After playing the scales out of time, we played them in time and in thirds. After our nice warm-up, we group-composed a “spooky” Fmin blues entitled, Driftwood. The rehearsal was a creative start to the summer, and we look forward to meeting our fearless leader next week.

Brandt - We were leaderless and bass-less, but Mr. B came to help-out. We warmed up on “Birks Works,” learned the tune by ear, and listened to the Art Pepper version (From the album Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section). Focus on intentional listening. Listen to music with friends to learn! We briefly discussed transcribing: (1) Listen to what you want to transcribe thoroughly before playing. (2) Be able to sing the notes. (3) Use technology to your advantage (YouTube, Spotify, slow-down apps). We went through an arrangement of “blue skies,” listened to the Ella Fitzgerald version? We worked on sight reading, division of parts among the group and keeping the form. We briefly worked on “Stolen Moments” arrangement, soloing and finding chord tones over the beginning vamp, further work will go into this chart... possible soli arrangements… Check out the original Oliver Nelson Version!

Overall, a solid first rehearsal!