Preview on Rhythmic Phrases

Now this course is based on my ideas about how to improvise and how to play jazz piano.

In a second we are going to look at a new tune called “I Love You” by Cole Porter. After that we are going to look at a section called “Rhythmic Phrases”. This is one section which is, in a sense, not due to me. I’ve made use of some charts that have been given to me by friend and colleague Lee Goodall. I’ve known Lee Goodall for many years. He comes from Southampton and is now based in Wales - Cardiff and now Newport.

Lee’s a wonderful instrumentalist - multi-instrumentalist. He plays all the instruments and sings and composes and has his own recording studio, like me, and creates some wonderful, wonderful music. Lee and I have made quite a lot of albums together. In fact, the very first album we made I play piano and keyboards and Lee plays 11 different instruments. Indeed, they were all original compositions. One of the tunes he wrote has a piano introduction, and when we were recording it I had great difficulty in playing the introduction and so he said to me “Would you like me to play it?” To which the answer was “No!”, since he’s already got enough instruments to play.

Anyway, we got an Arts Council of Great Britain grant which we used to record an album, to play some gigs and to do some workshops. The album was called “Future Positive” and was with Andy Cleyndert on bass - who recorded the session - and Winston Clifford on drums. I’ll upload one of the tracks to give you a flavour of what we did. It was in those workshops that I looked at certain aspects and Lee looked at other aspects and, in particular, this aspect of rhythmic phrasing. So I owe these charts to Lee. Lee’s been running workshops more or less all his life, as well, particularly aimed at solo instruments like saxophone, trumpet, trombone, guitar but perhaps less so piano.

He’s developed a new resource called “The Large Scale Project” and I urge you to have a look at it. I’ve given you the web address on our website and there you can see he’s got a whole load of materials to do with the Ionian modes - the seven Ionian modes. You can do it in every key and there’s playalong CDs that he’s produced in his studio. It’s a very worthwhile project and I urge you to have a look at it. But our next task is to look at the tune “I Love You”.