So today I had my first real lecture. I’m doing two modules this semester: The Improvising Musician and Songwriting Analysis. Today we started on the former.
The basic idea is obvious enough. It’s all about learning to improvise. So basically, what we’re gonna do is learn songs, improvise around them and then put on a show. We’ve been divided into bands, and are to play 6 songs each. Four of them have to be chosen from two lists we’ve been given (two songs from each list) and the final two are to be chosen freely. This means we can pick cover songs or write songs for ourselves, perhaps jam out a couple of songs. These are the songs we get to choose from:
List A
Phish – Birds of a Feather
Susan Tedeschi – Hampmotized
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals – Medicine
Dave Barnes – Chameleon
Jon Cleary (& The Absolute Monster Gentleman) – Sometimes I Wonder
Larry Carlton –Inkblot 11 (inst.)
List B
Steve Lukather & Los Lobotomys – Party In Simon’s Pants (inst.)
Derek Trucks – MaybeThis Time
String Cheese Incident – iBam (inst.)
Phish – Punch You In The Eye
Dave Matthews Band– Trippin Billies
Umphrey’s McGee – The Fuzz
My group has two guitarists, bass, drums and keys, and we’re one of the lucky ones cause we also get the saxophonist. Yay! I love the sax. It’ll add such a nice level to the amount of improvisation we’ll be able to do as well.
We took some time listening to some of the artists on the list. I was especially impressed by Grace Potter. Not her band quite so much, but she was amazing. We watched a video, and she just rocked the house. She had so much emotion and feeling, and you could just see that she really loved being on that stage. That’s what I want to be like!
The Jam-band genre isn’t really a genre per se… It’s more of a way of playing. The bands we listened to played rcok and blues and funk and all sorts of stuff, but what they all had in common was that a large portion of each song was dedicated to improvising. And improvising isn’t just soloing, either, it can be so much more. These people just throw themselves out there and play whatever they feel like, together. I hope that at the end of these weeks of rehearsals we have ahead of us we’ll feel comfortable enough to put on a show as good as what these people do.
The concerts will be on the 29th and 30th of November at the Newhampton Arts Centre. I don’t know which of the dates I’ll be playing yet, but more details to come. If you’re in the area, it would we absolutely brilliant if you’d like to come watch!
I’m beginning to look forward to this year. Hopefully I’ll manage to do a lot of cool stuff, and get to know these other musicians as well. I feel optimistic right now.