Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Yearly Archives: 2014
Intervallic improvising
When making analyses of great solos, jazz teachers like to look at the scales and arpeggios used and try to relate them to the underlying chord sequence. The operation consists of extracting all the notes in a passage and stringing them out … Continue reading
Ethiopian groove
Anyone interested in exotic scales should definitely listen to the Ethiopiques record collection, copiously shared on youTube. They were re-mastered from recordings rediscovered after being buried in the vaults during the 18 years of Ethiopia’s repressive Mengistu regime, which tried to … Continue reading
Working the Boogie Woogie scale
A while back I commented on some of the scales that have seen a lot of use in the past hundred years but don’t seem to have been incorporated into scale practice routines – yet. Maybe this is a good thing, … Continue reading
Charting the Emotions
Once upon a time, inspired by Alain Daniélou’s Ragas of North Indian Classical Music, I mapped just-tuned frequencies into an infinite web that I call the Honeycomb. You can explore it in my interactive Atlas of Tonespace, by clicking on the notes … Continue reading
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
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 