August 6 - Many great jazz events around Edmonds! Read whole blog?

August 6th,

Mark your calendars for August 22 Big Band Event at the Edmonds Opera House on 6th and Dayton (old Masonic Hall).  Jazz Punishments and Honor Jazz Band will play from 6:30 PM - FREE

Thanks to JazzClubsNW for sponsoring this great opportunity.

https://www.jazzclubsnw.org/

As we head toward the performance we will try something new. Next week we will have a 15 minute slot at 7:00 where directors will go hear one tune by another combo and give feedback. If you leave your group, get them rolling while you’re away so they can get some reps in with you out of the room?

Draft:

Conner will go upstairs to Fox/Swanberg “Good Bait” combo - Avalon.

Joel will go hear Max Bennett’s “Body and Sole” - Yardbird Suite.

Swanberg will go to Conner’s choir room group - Doxy.

7:15-7:30 we will have Max Bennett listen to Joel’s “Dolphin Dance” combo.

Fox to Brandt’s “Wave” combo.

If you haven’t encouraged your combo to listen to their namesake song or artist can you try to encourage that next week?

Keep up the good work! - Mr. B

Many jazz events this week. Here's a photo of a bunch of my high school friends that are still playing music and now their kids are into jazz too. Bill Wilson brought his son Chris to the SeaJazz event.  Chris is playing jazz piano at Augora Hills in California (3rd place at Ellington last year).  

Bill & Chris were impressed at how mature our players were and they really loved the session.  Heidi Baum was a trumpeter with me in Jr. High School and we played Bugler's Holiday way back in the 1980s. Now she teaches nursing at SPU and she is an avid yodeler :)  Heidi's son took trumpet lessons with me for a bit. Michelle Broderson has a daughter who's now playing trombone and Devi especially enjoyed Hot Java this year at the Paramount Theater. They came down from Camano Island.

Here's what happened at Colony:

We are Dolphin Dance,
This week we learned the rest of On Green Dolphin Street. We even learned interesting ways to play over some of the changes. We utilized what we covered the week prior: playing scale degrees in 6 note runs, triads, thirds, the scale’s arpeggio and its variations, etc…
-Reminder to hit the shed a bit harder this week, as we will have a mini-performance in the coming Colony session.
-Brush up on Sandu, Eb blues. 
-Don’t forget that the blues scale exists. 
When all is done and well, why not try your hand in choosing what YOU believe is a good Ballad for our group to learn. (bring charts for extra musician points) - Don Tran

We reviewed the melody to Avalon starting with the last eight bars and moving backwards. The logic here is that the beginning is practiced the most, it's usually the strongest and it gets weaker and weaker as you go on.

We then started working on improvising over avalon. We went through the chords one by one, playing chord tones only; quarter notes, then eighth notes, then both. When comfortable with that, we did the same exercise with entire sections. During this time we also discussed articulation.

We reviewed the melody one more time at the end before practicing the roots only. We would have one person play The Roots while the other played the melody and then switched. - Scott Swanberg

Honor Jazz Band plays at Sea Jazz next Wednesday at 6:45 PM.  Bring a lawn chair and come check it out?

Join us at the Mainstreet Commons for Friday night sessions from 5-7 PM.

August 16th will feature Marina Albero and Jeff Busch!

Conner's Combo - This week, we decided to really hone in on playing a pattern through the chord changes of Doxy. The pattern we worked on was 1-3-5 over each chord change. We also went over how doing this is actually harder than improvising because when you're improvising, you typically aren't thinking of hitting every chord change systematically in this manner. Hitting the changes is important, but lyrical lines that incorporate more rhythmic variation usually aren't so rigid. 

We also played a "game" called "Switcheroni." It's when you're playing the melody of the tune and randomly switch to singing the pitch and number of the chord tones! It's a great way to learn the changes of the tune and make sure that you "stay found" within the melody and the changes. 

We then took some time getting used to playing Maiden Voyage. We did a lot of improvising, so there's not much to report on that front. However, one thing of note is that Conner demonstrated how you can play something through the changes of a modal tune such as Maiden Voyage. 

Don't be afraid to ask me (Liam) for advice too! - Liam Salas

In the Wave combo, we continued working on the song "Wave," arranging the rhythms and articulations of the melody. We also practiced the chord changes for "Little Sunflower" in F, as a possible alternate set of chord changes to perform over "Wave." At this time we also practiced soloing over the dorian scale with limitations on numbers of notes we could use. Later, we worked on the blues "Centerpiece" and practiced taking solos that featured call-and-response between the horn players and rhythm section. We also practiced taking clapping solos, to focus on rhythm in our improvisation.

Thanks, Forrest