Dave Frank Jazz Class: Learn the Rules First Before You Break Them

Aug 08

friendart, internet, music , , , , No Comments

In my profession, it no longer surprises me to find an artist or a musician who can’t wait to stay and learn a few basics and hit the ground running. These people believe that execution is more important than learning the skills to properly execute the idea.

People like this wants immediate gratification and pass over things that are “childish” or “time consuming”.   There were even some musicians I know that even skipped completely over the basic chord patterns and progressions that were all necessary for them to progress and grow as an artist, in the hopes of “becoming the rock star of tomorrow”.

Everything takes time to grow and nurture. You can’t really plan the seeds in your garden and expect to harvest apples the next day. Everything in the world is bound by this simple rule of nature. But that basic law can be readily missed because our society today pushes the idea of everything INSTANT. However, that basic rule can be readily set aside because today, we push the idea of everything INSTANT.

If join this bandwagon, you might just rid yourself a few pounds after a week, do Yoga in three days, and earn your Master’s degree in a couple of weeks. Taking things slowly, what do you think is the quality that you can have?   How many exercise routines can you actually learn in a week? How many moves can you remember by heart in 7 days? Are you sure that you can perform the different Yoga positions without hurting yourself after learning them in 7 days? How confident would you be to do a Head-stand without breaking something?

There are a number of musicians out there who does not have the time to learn to play the bass guitar and form a rock band right there and then. They buy some random equipment, start hammering things out, and end up finding that they hit a brick wall.

After attending Dave Frank’s workshop last week when he featured the hilarious and very talented Marx Brothers, I realized that it is very important to learn the rules first before you can break them. Yes the techniques of Chico Marx were no way learned from a conventional piano lesson, but the point is, he learned the basics at the very least. Although Chico missed a few notes on purpose as a part of the act, everything still sounded great – simply because he hit the “perfect wrong notes”. Of course, there is no other way of learning which notes to miss if he did not know which ones he was supposed to hit, in the first place.

The rules should be learned before they can be bent. As a musician, it is important that you learn that you know the proper scales and chords before you can improvise.

If you have heard about him Dave Frank is one of the hottest solo jazz pianists music educators on the jazz scene today, the man behind Hal Leonard’s best-selling book series Joy of Improv.

Dave Frank’s Marx Brothers Master Class is available on Youtube. To watch it just check out that link.

 

Jazz

Aug 23

musicsurveyormusic , 22 Comments

Jazz is an American musical art form which originated around the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style’s West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, call-and-response, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note of ragtime.

Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin-jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and later developments such as acid jazz.