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Check this out. This is not the greatest mix .. one mic in the middle of the room. on a sunday afternoon in portland oregon. my friend david valdez would have weekend session at his crib and would invite some kiler players that lived in portland or were passing thru on tour. just a huge laboratory.. we would all just throw tunes out and play ideas totally to the wind. and press record... Sphereology is a composition of mine that was actually composed in i think 1990 or earlier. This song bring back memories study with Mike Blake at UND.

This is something i dug up from the cellar. This recording in the pre master version of this tune. i dont think the cd ever was released. ive not heard the mastered copy which has tenor player Martin Feiro on it.

With all this talk about lines, I thought I'd remind everyone about some of the bebop heads. Donna Lee, Scrapple, Anthropology, these are major studies in 'the language'. Not only the language of bebop but the language of music, how things resolve, how lines move. You could study Donna Lee for months and learn so much. That's a masterpiece in the art of the line.

To me that's as heavy as any 32 bars of Bach.

how's this?

Hi Everyone,

Can't say I've written a blog before but there's a first time for everything. I was discussing this with John Piper and he thought it would be a great discussion for the community.

This site is obviously a great resource for all of us; looking to become better musicians, enthusiasts, vibraphonists, whatever...and there has been a TON of valuable material posted. I myself check the vibes workshop about 5 times per day to see what is new and what I can add to my practice routine.

I have been working on Tony's Vince Guaraldi etude and was reminded that Christmas Time is (almost) Here (http://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Vince-Guaraldi/dp/B000ICL…) and and would need a couple months to prepare some tunes.

Joe's Performance and lesson on 'She's Always a Woman to Me'.

I believe there is a very interesting fundamental difference between improvising "lines" and improvising "melodies". What do you think? Is there a discussion here?

Here's a simple and fun challenge. For many, it will be very humbling. When we improvise, we're actually transcribing what we imagine in our head and playing it on our instrument. It's spontaneous composition. That's the goal (agreed?). So, this little beginning exercise is to just take very simple melodies and play them without "working them out" but just playing them as if we were singing them on the instrument. Attached is a list of a few tunes that are very popular children's melodies. There's a list that are diatonic and a small list of songs that use simple chromatic notes too.