Being a teenage musician in a place like Los Angeles has got its perks. I’ve got access to the Hollywood Bowl, the Baked Potato, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the California Institute of the Arts — not to mention access to thousands of musicians associated with LA-based music organizations. Nevertheless, it’s still exciting to meet those people that you only see in websites and magazines; the faces behind the names that show up on the songs that you play every day.

It was on the last Sunday of January that I met Antoinette Perry, the Senior Lecturer of Keyboard Studies at the University of Southern California, for a master class in a home of a quiet suburbian neighborhood. If you know anything about master classes, you’ll know that they can be absolutely frightening — in front of a large, judging audience the student has to perform a piece, knowing that in the next few minutes an intimidating master class instructor will be hovering over her shoulder, exposing tiny mistakes, insisting on minuscule nuances. It’s not one of the most pleasantly exciting things to do.

But my experience with Antoinette Perry was quite the opposite. To tell you the truth, the first thing I noticed about Perry — before her tall, lanky stature and her youthful smile — were her hands. I was nearly infatuated with them. Her fingers were bony, slender, delicate; they stroked the keys of the piano with the grace of a prima ballerina. I’ve constantly tried to justify playing piano with my short, stubby fingers by pulling up names like Thelonius Monk, insisting to myself that he probably didn’t have Rachmaninoff fingers either and could still play a killer B-flat blues — but Perry flat out dissolved those comforting thoughts. Even she noticed that my elbows aren’t even close to being perpendicular with my hands when I play, leaving me in an awkward angle above the piano keys — a realization that she quickly dismissed by hastily moving on to a different topic. It’s a pretty sensitive subject for a compulsively-obsessive pianist like me.

Still, she had fantastic critiques about my performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 2 in E-flat Major — everything from inner melodies that needed more emphasis to small fluctuations in pedaling to help me out with my E-flat major scale runs. And Perry was an exciting instructor — as she had me try out her tips with the Schubert, she’d flail her arms wildly in imaginary conducting, passionately singing along. She was definitely a great window into the music program at USC.

(P.S. I later won a $300 scholarship from the local Music Teacher’s Association of California playing the same piece!)

Just as exciting was a clinic with Don Menza, the composer of one of our currently most challenging pieces: Time Check. (Menza’s also the composer of the popular piece Groovin’ Hard.) “You can only play as good as you can play,” he told us in regards to being nervous before a performance, adding, “I talk about this with Sonny [Rollins] all the time.” He only ever took off his shades when he wanted to emphasize a crucial point — putting air through the horn; playing lines together; hitting the drumset with confidence. While Perry was a window into a prospective college, Menza was a window into the past — a place where jazz was a taboo gateway into violence and drugs and alcohol. It seemed like jazz had this fountain-of-youth effect on Menza — as he spoke, he moved his body energetically, visually showing us what he wanted us to do, throwing around in his speech the colloquialisms of a jazz kid from the sixties.

And then there was his saxophone. Before he arrived, we already knew that he’d written and played with Maynard Ferguson’s orchestra and Buddy Rich’s big band; we knew that he was an amazing tenor sax player. But the word amazing is used everywhere in nearly every circumstance imaginable — it can’t even come close to describe what came out of Menza’s horn.

On a concluding note, here’s what I’m failing in an attempt to describe in words:

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Roustabout/Simple Citizens/Me and Miss Lemona K

So now that we’ve talked about Miles Davis and Red Garland, let’s move on to the next member of the Miles Davis Quintet: John Coltrane.

Like Miles Davis, one of Coltrane’s biggest influences was Charlie Parker (he says the first time he heard him play “hit [him] right between the eyes”). Coltrane’s career pretty much began in the ’40s, after Coltrane left the Navy (where he still managed to find a way to play jazz through the Navy jazz band), but it launched after Miles Davis asked him to be a part of the Miles Davis Quintet (Relaxin’/Cookin’/Workin’/Steamin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet) in 1955. Jazz fanatics and casual listeners alike finally got a look at Coltrane’s genius ability when these sessions were released in 1956.

Coltrane’s also a part of the Kind of Blue album — along with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. What’s especially important here is that Coltrane, surprisingly even more so than Davis, took the modal approach (simpler melody, fewer chords, the use of modes (check this out in So What from the Kind of Blue album — it only uses D and Eb dorian mode), and an overall cooler, more laid-back sound) used in the Kind of Blue album and used it as an inspirations throughout the rest of his career.

I know that Miles Davis could put his own sound into his own words, but Coltrane was kind of the quiet type, like Bill Evans. But lucky for us, jazz critic Ira Gilter managed to sum up Coltrane’s sound into three words: “sheets of sound.” What this basically means is that Coltrane always played a massive amount of notes in a very little amount of time. (There’s a good example of this here.)

Coltrane’s also one of those brave musicians that ventured into the fields of free jazz and avant-jazz — jazz without any real structure or limitations. We’ve got a lot of this in today’s jazz, but back in Coltrane’s time, this genre of jazz was probably one of the strangest (and sometimes even super uncomfortable to listen to). But it’s probably Coltrane’s bebop/hard bop/post-bop where you can hear him at his best.

What you’ll see in a lot of Coltrane’s compositions is that the melody makes the song seems ten times slower than it actually is. Take Giant Steps for example; the melody’s pretty much only two half notes a measure (which makes it sound like it’s in cut time). But this contrast between the simple, slow melody and Coltrane’s complex, one-hundred-mph solos makes him sound even faster. Check this out in this recording of Giant Steps. (Pay special attention to the bass, too.)

Where to start…

ALBUMS:

Workin’/Steamin’/Relaxin’/Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet (all four of them!)

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall

Blue Train

Giant Steps

My Favorite Things

Impressions

Duke Ellington and John Coltrane

A Love Supreme

SONGS (& WHERE THE MODAL TONE COMES IN):

Giant Steps

A Love Supreme

Moment’s Notice

Acknowledgment

Lazy Bird

Make sure you get around to hearing Coltrane play with musicians Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Happy listening!

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Evidence/Thelonious Monk/Jazz Piano Anthology: Bop

I was first introduced to Sonny Rollins through the Community Arts Program (CAP) at CalArts (which I’m so incredibly lucky to have nearby). I was just learning my blues scales then; with a group of about 5 or 6 musicians, we learned the Rollins tune, “Tenor Madness.” It’s a pretty catchy piece in the Bb blues scale.

But anyways, about Sonny Rollins — this saxophonist from the 1950s comes a bit after the bebop era of musicians like Charlie Parker and Monk (although Sonny Rollins was able to play with Monk at the age of 20).

One of Rollins’s most unique accomplishments is the piano-less trio. Although omitting one instrument from a musical group (even a classical group) doesn’t seem like such a big deal, it really is — each instrument in a group like a jazz quartet plays its own role: the piano outlines the chord changes and support the solos, the bass lays down the foundation and keeps the groove, the drums keep the drive and the rhythm, and the soloist (which might be a trumpet, saxophone, etc.) carries the melody. The way Rollins succeeded his piano-less trio was by using his saxophone like a rhythm section instrument during the bass/drum solos. You can check this idea out in these recordings of St. Thomas and  There Will Never Be Another You.

Sonny Rollins is still alive today, unlike many of his contemporaries (i.e. Miles Davis), and he’s turning a ripe age of 79 this coming fall. In fact, he’ll be doing a concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 16th, 2010 — go check him out! I’d better start saving up money for those tickets. :)

Sonny Rollins’s Standards: 1…St. Thomas. 2…Airegin.(Nigeria spelled backwards, hah) 3…Oleo.

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Czech Suite, Op/39/B93, II. Allegro Grazioso/Antonín Dvořák/Smetana: Má vlast; Dvorak: Symphony No.4

Who is Charlie Parker?

Charlie Parker is bebop. Charlie Parker is saxophone. Charlie Parker is notes everywhere; scales up and down, arpeggios right and left. And Charlie Parker is never, ever ending. Ever. The notes just don’t stop. But you don’t want them to, either.

Charlie’s standards: 1…Billie’s Bounce. 2…Anthropology. 3…Ornithology. 4…Confirmation.

Ever heard the tune Birdland? By Weather Report. If you haven’t, go check it out. Charlie’s nickname, Yardbird, or Bird for short, inspired the name for the New York jazz club, Birdland, which in turn inspired the name for the song.

Charlie Parker → Yardbird → Bird → Birdland, NY → Birdland, Weather Report.

That’s not the only influence he’s made, though. Despite his drug and alcohol abuse, Charlie Parker held a master role in the development of bebop, as well as jazz/style fusion. He made the jazz musician the Jazz Musican; not simply an entertainer, but an intellectual musician and a persistent artist. Parker was a major icon in the Beat Generation of the 1950s, an influence to writers focused on turning away from the American mainstream values (of that time, of course).

Looking for some saxophone to listen to? Listen to Charlie Parker.

Looking for some Charlie Parker to play? Buy the Charlie Parker Omnibook.

I’m still fumbling with the ropes of using lead sheets and fakebooks, but the whole experience is enlightening. Especially when you do it with your musical buddies.

In fact, I’ve been playing with some of my own musical buddies, and we picked up Charlie Parker’s Moose the Mooche the other day. Supposedly it’s supposed to be named after his drug dealer. Fun stuff.

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: How About You/Compact Jazz/Bill Evans