Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Keeping Tabs
I used to play a fair bit of Japanese sankyoku music on my maplewood shakuhachi (couldn’t afford the bamboo variety!) with koto players Hideko Dobashi, Rie Yanagisawa (who also played shamisen) and later in Toulouse with Takaya Odano. Unlike Western … Continue reading
Let’s Build a Wall!
In my young day they didn’t have jazz courses. You had to blunder about picking up tips, trying stuff out and bluffing where necessary. So when I play with the young players here in France what sticks out to my … Continue reading
Musical Chromosomes
Working with whole tone panpipes has for me been a liberating experience, a shortcut to what they call stage 4 competence in NLP or what I call “mindless playing”. For those unfamiliar with Romanian panpipes, I should explain that the semitones are obtained … Continue reading
Reading Between the Dots
One of the commonest exercises in jazz improvisation methods is the transposition exercise. You are given a lick or an arpeggio, usually in the key of C, and you are required to practice it in all twelve keys. The assumption … Continue reading
Six Seconds Make a Seventh
Six seconds make a seventh? Is time expanding? How do they do that? Simple! The same way as two thirds make a fifth! Two fifths make a ninth, but three of them make a thirteenth, which is also twelve seconds. … Continue reading
Anyone trying learn the bridge of Jimmy Rowles’ sublime composition “The Peacocks” will end up consciously or otherwise doing a MOVES breakdown of the patterns it contains. In the illustration you can see the bracketed patterns are {-1 -3 -1 +3} and {-9 … Continue reading
What Boys Like
When I taught beginner’s sax to ten-year-olds I used to ask them what was the first tune they wanted to start work on right away. There was a clear sex divide in their preferences. “Doh, a deer” and “East Enders … Continue reading
Seventh Heaven
Like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who didn’t realise he had been talking prose all his life, most of you have performed faultless major and minor seventh leaps (± 10 or 11) without thinking. Yet if asked to sing … Continue reading
Slow down
Teachers never tire of telling students to play it slowly, and students often cannot see the point. One thing I can suggest is that you use the time to conjure up a yearning for the next note, so that when it … Continue reading
Posted in Musicianship
Tagged half speed videos, slowing down videos, Transcribing tunes
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Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 