Chris, I'm very happy to provide you the opportunity to promote your latest disc, which is wonderful. More power to you. However, my discussion is more about the concepts Steve uses, which are not jazz, and how we should be studying them on a baroque lute. I'm not sure from what you say that you have had a chance to look at the video. His whole approach is something we could apply to the baroque lute, or Italian archlute, AS WE ARE LEARNING the instrument. It doesn't have to be super advanced. Rob
On 1 July 2015 at 15:15, Christopher Wilke <[1]chriswi...@yahoo.com> wrote: Rob, Thanks for being this up. I did my minor at Eastman in jazz guitar, thinking it might also help me with improvising early music. The results have been mixed. I included some improvised sections on my latest baroque lute album. The most extended stretches are in the varied repeats I made for the slow movements in the Bach BWV 995 suite. In those situations there is a clear model coming from the composer's original. This is actually not so far from what jazzers do. I'm reminded of Thelonious Monk's admonition that a soloist should always be mentally hearing the head while soloing over the changes. I also included several cadenzas, which are more free form but involve developing a motif. Ultimately, jazz studies haven't been very helpful to me in baroque improvising. I learned about the process, especially in not being afraid to copy! (Jazzers spend countless hours copying licks from recordings.) However, the idioms are just so different that few things transferred without major adjustment. This is to be expected. It's kind of like learning Hungarian and being surprised that it doesn't directly apply to taking up Spanish. Musical styles have changed so much in the past hundreds of years, why would one expect that there be one universally applicable approach to improvisation? For those interested, my album is available from CD Baby at the link below. Unfortunately, the samples their algorithm has selected don't include much of the improvisations mentioned above. [2]http://www.cdbaby.com/m/cd/christopherwilke12 Chris [3]Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone At Jul 1, 2015, 8:53:14 AM, Rob MacKillop wrote: I've long thought that there was something missing from the way most of us learn elearningo play baroque music, whether on lute or guitar. Some of us have studied figured bass playing, it's something I particularly enjoyed doing, though I haven't done any for years. But rarely do we step beyond that practice, and I believe that only a very, very small percentage of us are happy improvising baroque counterpoint in Dm tuning. I was fascinated to learn that one of my jazz guitar heroes, Steve Herberman, teaches a class online called Going For Baroque. You have to buy the class, but an overview video is available: [1][4]http://youtu.be/u9oZ5Us0sfQ It would be really interesting to transfer his approach to the Dm lute. One would really get to know the instrument and tuning well, and discover many contrapuntal finger movements which could be used in improvising fugues or dance movements. I'd like to know your thoughts after watching the video. Rob MacKillop [2][5]www.robmackillop.net -- References 1. [6]http://youtu.be/u9oZ5Us0sfQ 2. [7]http://www.robmackillop.net/ To get on or off this list see list information at [8]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. mailto:chriswi...@yahoo.com 2. http://www.cdbaby.com/m/cd/christopherwilke12 3. https://yho.com/footer0 4. http://youtu.be/u9oZ5Us0sfQ 5. http://www.robmackillop.net/ 6. http://youtu.be/u9oZ5Us0sfQ 7. http://www.robmackillop.net/ 8. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
