Jazz-Sax, all things Jazz and Sax
iBrecker.com has a link to a video teaser of an upcoming new album from Michael Brecker. Pilgrimage can also be pre-ordered via Amazon.com as well. Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Jack DeJohnette, and John Patitucci. 30 second clips of all the tracks are available on the Amazon link.
Album is scheduled to be released on May 22nd. For all you Brecker fans, this is a must have.
For months, MakeMusic has been saying SmartMusic 10 is coming. The amount of hype they have been making is akin to Microsoft and it’s “new” Vista operating system. MakeMusic hasn’t even updated the current version of SmartMusic to handle files generated by Finale 2007 which was released way back in August. To create files, you need to have 2006 still installed on your computer.
The other day, I received a packet from MakeMusic. I was shocked. It looked like SmartMusic 10 had been release. Alas, it was not. Instead of spending money getting the stupid program out, they chose to spend quite a bit of money to continue the “hype” of the vaporware SmartMusic 10. This packet probably cost $10 to put together. Perhaps more.
Let us examine the contents of this “hype” package….
First
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I am part of the BMG “Jazz” Music club. I very rarely buy things from them as they charge you up the *#?@#^& in shipping, and it ends up being not all that cheap. I tend to get most of my stuff off Amazon.com used.
Today, I received the BMG Early Spring 2007 Catalog. Not a SINGLE mention of Michael Brecker on it. Nada. They do have, on page 18, Michael’s “Wide Angles” Album. No promo box about him. Nothing. Instead, they are peddling yet another Coltrane album called Gold on page 19. On page 3 they have a big box with Mindi Abair. On page 9 they have Richard Elliot. On page 13 they have Marion Meadows. No Brecker. Not even an insert about it. One would think they could, in addition to Checks Unlimited insert, the Build the Ultimate DVD Collection insert, and the BMG Music store insert, they could have put in a Michael Brecker special or something. I might have actually have bought something from them then. It makes one wonder what they will do when Sonny Rollins or some other titan dies. Are they going to ignore the event and feature the likes of Mindi Abair instead?
I am disgusted with BMG now. I am writing them a nasty letter and canceling my account with them.
Update: 05/04 16:11 GMT by E :I got another BMG thing in the mail. They are featuring KENNY G? What the Hell? Amazing. The “Jazz” club featuring Kenny F@#*$*% G……
Every month, I make it a point to buy new music. New music including books in addition to recorded media. I have quiet a backlog of things to review. So, first up are Approach Note Velocity Studies.
I’m not sure when I found these on the net, but Steve Neff’s Approach Note Velocity Studies are pretty darn neat. For $10, you get 90 some pages of great sounding chromatic lines that you can use on Major and Minor vamps. You can incorporate them into other chord progressions as well, such as blues, rhythm changes, etc. If you own the Joseph Viola Chord Studies book, these patterns are similar to those 16th note lines at the end of each chord study. I have also seen patterns like these called neighboring tones or approach tones in other books.
There are two volumes, Major and Minor. Both are great. Check them out.
From a NYTimes article
"The memorial program for the saxophonist Michael Brecker that filled Town Hall on Tuesday night kept landing on the theme of generosity. Mr. Brecker died of leukemia on Jan. 13 at 57. During his illness he enlisted family members and friends in sending out a call for bone-marrow donors — not just for himself — that resulted in tens of thousands of donor registrations. His friends in jazz and pop music all implied that this wasn’t just an isolated case of conscientiousness."
Some interesting things mentioned are that Michael did drugs in the 70s (probably with 90% of the population as well), as well as some of the stories such as:
"Randy Brecker told a similar story, about one of the hundreds of recording sessions at which he had been hired to work alongside his brother. Michael, he said, came to work straight from the airport after a long flight, not having had time to read the music. He was asked by the producer to build a solo through a long two-chord vamp. One could see where this was going: Michael’s solo was of disturbingly high quality, and Randy was asked to take it from there."
For more Brecker stuff, check out Michael Brecker.com and a new fan site (which was supposed to be a Michael Brecker interactively supported site), iBrecker. iBrecker also has some more info about the Memorial Service.
Ok, so we all know that the latest Macs all run Intel processors. You might have heard of an Apple Beta program called Boot Camp where you can get your Mac to boot up as a *shutter* Windows XP computer. You might also have heard of a program Parallels that lets you mitigate Windows to just a Window. Well, if you take the two programs, and add in Band in a Box 2007 for PC, you get a very functional program that runs pretty flawlessly.
Yes, Virginia, it works fine….
Ok, so, first off, you need to download Boot Camp, and get Microsoft Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2. Not Vista. Vista, as of right now, works fine in Boot Camp (IE: Dedicating the whole machine to it), but has a lot of issues with Parallels. Boot Camp is picky, and you need to have Service Pack 2.
Now, having
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Sadly, this time around it is true. I had seen a couple of emails in various lists I subscribe to this morning, but someone finally gave me a link to the a news site that has the details.
"Michael Brecker, a versatile and highly influential tenor saxophonist who won 11 Grammys over a career that spanned more than three decades, died Saturday at age 57.
Brecker died in a hospital in New York City of leukemia, according to his longtime friend and manager, Darryl Pitt. "
Truly, a great loss for jazz and the saxophone. Michael was a genius.
I remember first seeing him in the late 80s at the Shoreline Jazz festival. I had gone to see the group Spyro Gyra cause I thought they were great (hey, I was a high school noob). I was totally wrong. The Michael Brecker band, of which I knew nothing, was playing during the day, and I was amazed. He did his thing with the EWI where he would walk on stage, and play around with it for 15 minutes. Amazing stuff. I don’t remember staying for more than 3 Spryo Grya songs after hearing Brecker.
Soon after I heard him on Michael Frank’s song Dr. Sax. Wow! I was hooked. I got to meet him when he was the guest artist at my College. We talked about tech gadgets (Something about Palm Pilots and Maps as I remember). He was funny. During rehearsals, he was messing up (jet lag), and he’d make this face when he did it. I was laughing to whole time.
It’s a sad day.
Update: 01/14 19:28 GMT by E :The New York Times has a nice article about him today.
Update: 01/15 00:48 GMT by E :The Michael Brecker site now has word of his passing. 
Update: 01/15 07:18 GMT by E :Someone posted a video on Youtube as a tribute. Nice montage. And of course, my favorite Steps Ahead song, Self Portrait
Bill Duncan, who put together the great Finale Productivity package, has passed away. He was a great guy. I had numerous email exchanges with him, and he was very informed on the notation practices in L.A.
I’m sad. His great stuff will live on in my Finale work. His over-sized time signatures, rehearsal font, and jazz articulations. Thankfully, he was able to complete his wonderful engraver’s jazz articulation font before his death.
Bill, I’ll miss you. Thanks for the great fonts, Finale insights, and general music preparation techniques.
Way back in the day, like 1996, I bought a kick ass laser printer. A networkable (10BaseT), 16ppm, 1200dpi, postscript Lexmark Optra R+. I love the printer. It weighed as much as a VW Bug, and would cause the lights to dim when I turned it on. It printed nice, fast, clean music and text. Over the years, it had developed some issues, which I fixed (the boot that grabs the paper wore away, and I replaced it with some cork. Worked fine). However, the toner for the printer is over $200. I have no clue how many toners I have went through. One or two a year. But, you can get a new printer nowadays for that much, and they do so much more. And the toner cartridges are around $70.
So, with a little sadness, I decided to toss the Optra R+ and get a new, $199 Brother HL-5250DN and a HL-5240 for the studio to replace my previous Brother 1440. Wow. That is all I have to say….
First, they are small. They turn themselves off when not in use. Second, they both have Postscript. Which means nice slurs on music and whatnot. You have to look for it to see it. Both printers look identical. But, the DN version has a built in Ethernet port, and duplex (prints on both sides of the page). On a PC, it’s kind of hidden in the print settings (Advanced, and like 2 tabs in or something). On a mac, you have to make sure you run a Java application to set the duplexing on or off. The print driver totally lacks that feature. Shame on Brother for this!
Not much more to say about these printers. A great value. Print quality is amazing. Flawless, and the consumables (IE: toner) is cheap (around $70). If you are looking for a laser to do 8 1/2×11 sheets for music or whatever, either of these would be excellent!
There are a couple of programs I always update when a new version comes out. Finale, Digital Performer, anything from Apple, and, of course, Band in a Box. Yes campers, a new version of Band in a Box is out for PC. 2007. The Mac version, sadly, is still languishing in limbo at version 12. Though there was a message from PG Music about this in their forums and they said a new Mac version was “A high priority”. Yeah.
Moving on. Band in a Box (BinaB) is an incredible program and a great musical tool. It has been for years. The new 2007 version has some interesting features, and well, does leave me wondering about the future of the program…
First off, when you have a program such as BinaB, it has had just about everything one could want since, um, 2004’s version. Version 2007 is billed as having 50 new features. Let’s list them:
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Blender.com, a great music music site, published a great list in 2003 of “The 50 Worst Artists In Music History“. While I don’t agree about #16, Oingo Boingo, I do agree with #4, Kenny G.
"Hated equally by jazz and rock fans, Kenny Gorelick's limpid instrumentals and obsequious cameos helped turn the soprano sax solo into pop music's most feared cliche. He started his career with fusion hack Jeff Lorber, and his 1986 album, Duotones, established a steady market for anodyne, minimal background music, an aesthetic that reached its zenith in 1997 when "The G" set a world record by holding a single note for 45 minutes.
Appalling fact He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington with a degree in accounting.
Worst CD Classics in the Key of G (Arista, 1999)"
They also have some interesting comments about Jazz Fusion
"It's a rule of thumb that any music that uses jazz as a prefix will make you want to saw your head off in boredom (see also: jazz-funk, jazz rap, jazz house). But none is as wearying as the genre that thought what rock really needed was month-long bass solos and time signatures Stephen Hawking wouldn't understand.
Cut them some slack, they did publish a fairly good jazz list a while ago. They did nail the Kenny G thing though, I’d have put him as #2. And a newer list would have Paris Hilton and Ashlee Simpson I’m sure….
MakeMusic released Finale 2007 a while ago. August I believe. I’ve been using it since then, and I think I can finally review it properly.
There are not a lot great new features in Finale 2007 compared to 2006. The big feature, in fact, really the only feature that is huge, is the linked parts. Though, on MakeMusic’s preview page they harp “features” such as “Authorization Improvements“, and “Improved pickups, vertical collision remover“. There are a couple of other new things I get to. Let’s dismiss the authorization thing. That is as lame as the Copyright symbol they billed as a feature in 2006. The vertical collision remover sorta works, but not really. I can’t really see any difference in the pickups as I really didn’t do much with complex pickup measure.
So, lets dive into the reasons why you’d want to upgrade to 2007…..
I had rave reviews of Greg Fishman’s “Jazz Saxophone Etudes” book. I really like the tunes in that book. They are melodic, sound great, and are idiomatic of good jazz solos. The concept of including two CDs (one for Alto, and one for Tenor) was, well, fairly obvious (yet no one else does this, ie: Snidero’s Jazz Conception books, or Mintzer’s Etude books).
So, in the mail the other day, I received Fishman’s latest creation, Jazz Saxophone Duets ……
Yup, it’s as good as his other book. There are 10 duets. Two versions of each. One version is for two like instruments, such as two Tenors, or two Altos. The other version is for Alto and Tenor (Alto on the top line, Tenor on the bottom). Each “Duet” could be an etude that could, perhaps should, have been in Greg’s other book. The tunes sound great.
Oh, and they have a rhythm section accompaniment track as well. Did I mention this book contains three CDs. One CD of all the etudes done on Altos. One CD of all the etudes on Tenors. And one CD of all the etudes Alto and Tenor. And on each CD you have the Duet with both parts played, just the top line, just the bottom line, or just the rhythm section (which is on all the tracks). How cool is that?
Two little complaints. First, when I ripped the CDs into iTunes, all the CDs showed up as the Tenor version. That was a pain. Also, the Artist column didn’t make sense, and I had to change that. Second, I kind of wanted another couple of medium tempo tunes. There are 5 tunes that are metronome 200 or above, One ballad (mm=69), one near 200 tune (mm=192). So, that leaves three tunes at mm=126, mm=132, and mm=152. I think if there were two more tunes in the 130 to 160 range, this book would be a perfect 10.
In all, this is a very cool duet/etude book. It’s for advanced intermediate on up players. I give it a 9 out of 10.
Update: 11/12 07:14 GMT by E :Greg Fishman emailed the following:
"Since the three CDs are all almost exactly the same length and same number of tracks,
i-tunes thinks they're all the same disc. I tried correcting this many times by submitting the correct info for each CD separately to the CDDB database, but it didn't make a difference. After several weeks of trying to get the i-tunes database to see the difference, I just stopped trying. This is not my fault or the book's fault; it's just an i-tunes glitch, but I know it's a pain.
Regarding the medium tempos, I did have two more tunes planned, but due to the format of including four versions of each duet, I ran out of space on the CDs. As it stands, the CDs are 74+ minutes each. It would have meant including more CDs or cutting some of the faster duets. I ended up simply picking what I thought were the best duets."
Yes, seems the CDs are indeed filled to the brim. However, the first thing I did when I got the book was add them to my iTunes library. Makes one wonder if it even makes sense to include audio CDs anymore. Why not just a data CD that has the tracks ripped in high quality MP3 format?
If you haven’t heard this album, Ray Sings, Basie Swings, you need to. A live performance of Ray Charles and the Count Basie band, archived and forgotten, then rediscovered, and re-recorded. It’s a great CD, maybe not as good as Sinatra at the Sands, but it’s up there.
Rolling Stone has a new list of the 500 Greatest Albums out. Of note are:
Personally, I’d rather have Sinatra at the Sands in there but, it’s good to know that Miles beat Abbey Road by the Beatles 