12/15/2023 0 Comments Tunesmith harold arlI get the impression that the modern student is oftentimes perplexed as to how to develop the quantity of their repertoire of tunes. I think she called a few pre-Civil War tunes! By all accounts, Russell Malone knows many, many tunes.When I was a guest on the Marian McPartland show, she called a whole mess of tunes that I had never heard of. David Jernigan seemed un-stumpable when it came to tunes. They say Harold Mabern knows at least 5000 tunes. Many of the older cats know way more tunes than I do. Should I insist on having my students learn 150 tunes a year?Īgain, I don't claim to know every tune ever written. It makes me wonder what I should be emphasizing as a teacher. And yet most of my students are struggling to remember "Body and Soul", let alone "Comecar De Novo" by Ivan Lins. I didn't even know "Misty" or "All The Things You Are", but despite that, people thought, wow, he must be very advanced.īack to present-day Winnipeg, I believe that I got the call to play with Marco Castillo because I knew at least a few more tunes than the Level One bossa nova repertoire. Indeed, many of the Cedar Walton tunes we had learned were considered to be advanced, and made people think we were more advanced players than we actually were! In fact, the first tunes we really learned were "Bolivia" by Cedar Walton and "Stablemates" by Benny Golson. I and my friend, bassist David Ephross, used to spend a lot of time working on not just standard tunes, but more obscure tunes, like "California Here I Come", or "Stars Fell On Alabama", or "Heyoke", a wonderful Kenny Wheeler tune. While I don't feel like I know as many tunes as I would like, I spent a fair bit of time in my early twenties learning as many "jazz" tunes as I could. I wonder if that's still the case, in D.C. Tunes like "Corcovado","Chega De Saudade", "Favela", and "Desafinado" were considered the level one Brazilian standards one was supposed to know. I always remember bossa nova tunes being part of the Baltimore and Washington D.C. However, I started to wonder if jazz students these days see any connection with Brazilian tunes and jazz, or with Brazilian tunes and their own musical development. I'm sure there were a multitude of reasons as to why there weren't any students there (although there was a crowd on the Friday night). (Too expensive? Not unless you consider free cover to be too expensive.) (Jernigan "showed me the ropes" regarding any of the Brazilian stuff that I know.) It was a really fun couple of nights, but I couldn't help noticing that there were virtually none of the jazz students from the U of Manitoba (where I'm currently teaching) at the venue to check out the music. And then some were off the beaten path, songs by Ivan Lins or Chico Buarqe that I remembered from almost twenty years ago from my gigs with Washington D.C. The first night was duo, and the second night we added the versatile, spirited percussionist Scott Senior. We played many different samba and bossa nova songs some were originals of Marco's, but many were from what is considered "standard" brazilian repertoire. I played a really nice couple of gigs last weekend with Brazilian-born-but-Winnipeg-based singer-guitarist Marco Castillo.
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