Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Category Archives: Moves notation
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
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
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
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
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 