Lesson numero 7 saw us briefly reviewing the ear-training from the previous week, in the form of a quick informal test -- most of which I nailed. There was an amusing misunderstanding at one point when he played a descending interval. I was saying "major second, major second" to his increasing exasperation ("mate -- it's decreasing, listen!"), but just as my conviction was beginning to waver, he realized what I was getting at and said "what a minute: what did you just say? ... Ah yeah, okay. You're right -- but I was thinking of it as a minor seventh.". I was correct, but I should have specified that I meant it was descending, so that the first note was a major second above the second one.
We then went back to the jazz standard "Mr P.C.", and I played the melody (which I had learned during the week). Right away we encountered some "issues", the discussion of which took up the majority of the lesson. This is fairly basic stuff, but absolutely key, so I was happy to be covering it:
Two-bar count in: this is a real "band practice 101" thing. When he asked me to count us in, I just went for "1-2-3-4-", but apparently the "standard" way is a two bar count, where you count beats one and three of the first bar (saying "one, two") and then all 4 beats of the second bar ("one, two, three, four - "). This is familiar -- for me it seems to conjure up images of fifties music like Chuck Berry (am I just thinking of Back to the Future here?) -- but it took a little bit to get comfortable with it. And of course, being put under pressure to get it right doesn't exactly help you relax into the groove! As usual, I was over-thinking it as well: at one point, I was getting hung up on the fact that in the first beat you say "two" on beat 3.
Swing feel: in my first rendition I played the tune with a bone-dry straight-eighths feel which, of course, sounded pretty lousy to the teacher's jazz-trained ears. I can't blame myself too much, because I had listened to Coltrane's original recording and it sounded pretty straight to me. However, the difference is that he is playing it at a much higher tempo. The teacher explained that there is not just straight vs. swing (i.e. triplet feel), but rather a continuum. It's a matter of feel, but in general, the faster the tempo, the less "exaggerated" the swing. So that kind of explains why the recording I listened to didn't sound like it had as much of a swing feel (but listening more carefully it isn't just straight eighth notes either).
Aside: the teacher pointed out an interesting discussion of this in Mick Goodrick's "The Advancing Guitarist". Basically, it expresses the concept of "swing" in terms of the relative duration of the first and second note in an eighth-note pair. "Straight" eighths has 50-50, "triplet feel" has 67-33 (i.e. played like the first and third note of a triplet), and in general "swing" is somewhere in-between. He mentions 55-45 as a typical value. Less frequently, you also hear 75-25 (where the eighth note pair is played like the first and fourth note in a sixteenth note group) which has something of a latin feel. I realize this is an attempt to quantify something that most musicians do by "feel" -- and it's certainly not a substitute for that -- but I find it very helpful to be able to think of it in this way.
So, we spent a fair bit of time just counting in and playing the basic melody. I think what's required is lots of playing (along with myself, on the loop station) to get a good sense of "feel" happening. And, just as important, lots of (critical) listening.
The final thing we looked at was playing chord tones over the Mr P.C. chord progression. I know what I'm trying to do here, but I need to become more familiar with the arpeggio patterns for Cm7, Fm7, Dm7b5 and G7. As always, practice practice practice...
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