Lesson with ideas for working on Major7#5 chords. A good place to start if, like me, you feel like you don't always have much to play over them.
Practicing solo vibraphone today on Body & Soul. A few things that I was thinking about during this practice session included: enhancing the harmony via added tensions, Upper Structure Triads and a variety of voicings, varying the harmony with chord substitutions, staccato articulation via deadstrokes, incorporating dampening as a means of adding to the variety of articulation as well as helping to make the counterpoint sound clean, varying the four mallet techniques.
Here's a link for a video of The Neighborhood Trio performing "Shag" on MN Original.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7RR-4RRQrXU
I keep checking out the Gyil players and that makes me want to work on my independence. I think we did an independence month a couple years ago. But what about a month of independence and ostinato work? I would love to bust my butt on all that for a month!
Thoughts?
Tony and VW guys, I hope the Virtual Day of Percussion went well today. I'm sorry that I couldn't be around for that. I was involved in a promotional video shoot for Berklee. The session included an array of percussion, drum set, steel pan and mallets. The piece was arranged by drummer Mark Walker who also played on the session. Dave Samuels played marimba and I was on vibes. The piece was titled Island Hopping and featured 6 segments of various grooves including Tango, Samba and Calypso. Lots of fun.