Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is only partially a movie about music, but the music is excellent (Branford Marsalis composed/arranged most of it), and the blues really speak to me, though I'm about as white, racially and culturally, as you can get (well, not quite, since some people don't think Jews are white). It's based on a play by August Wilson, and was probably better on the stage than on screen. On the stage you expect scenes and dialogue to be artificial, but in film you expect less talk and more natural situations. Despite its artificiality, I'm very glad I saw the movie.

The actor who played Ma Rainey, Viola Davis, was extraordinary both as a singer (I assume she really sang, but maybe I was fooled) and an actor, completely convincing. After the movie, Netflix screened a trailer with the actors and production staff speaking about the movie and what it meant to them, and that was more interesting than the film. It was a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate African-Americans talk about what the music meant to them. I have to admit I was surprised to hear Taylour Paige, a beautiful young woman, who plays a nutty slut in the movie, speak with cogency when she was interviewed for the trailer. She played the role so convincingly, I forgot she was an actor!

I intend to listen to more of Ma Rainey. I am, of course, familiar with Bessie Smith, her successor as queen of the blues, and I've listened a lot to the Louis Armstrong performances recorded in the late 1920s. I have always marveled that oppressed and exploited people managed to find and express so much joy in music,

What Can You Do About a Genius?

Recently the Carmel Quartet, an excellent Israeli string quartet, gave a concert, with commentary by the violist, Yoel Greenberg, who is a professor of musicology as well as a fine performer. The concert consisted of two string quartets: one by Fanny Mendelssohn and the other by Felix, composed after her untimely and unexpected death. Yoel's commentary was so interesting to me that I started reading Mendelssohn and his World. I had long known that according to the late musicologist, Charles Rosen, Mendelssohn was the most gifted child prodigy in the history of Western music. By all accounts, Felix was a universal musical genius: composer, pianist, and conductor. He was also a gifted painter and knew a lot of languages. Fortunately for him, he was raised in a family that appreciated and encouraged his gifts, and was wealthy enough to provide him with every possible opportunity.

Reading about Mendelssohn's talents and intelligence, and his many accomplishments in a short life, I wonder why I bother playing music at all. But then I remind myself that Mendelssohn could not have done without the merely excellent musicians who performed his works. You don't have to be a genius to play violin in an orchestra, just very, very good. And, even more obviously, you don't have to be a genius to enjoy the music written and performed by geniuses (and merely excellent musicians).

Music and Mysticism

 In my day job I have been translating a major academic work on the Ba'al Shem Tov, the eighteenth century mystic whose disciples founded Hasidism, making him one of the most influential figures in early modern Judaism. I am very far from being a mystic myself, but sometimes it seems that only mysticism can account for things.

Recently I was listening to a jazz streaming service, and they played a performance by a pianist, Julian Waterfall Pollack, that was so beautiful, I had to find more about him. He is only 32 and has already accomplished a great deal in many areas of music. He is another one of those child prodigies who amaze us. I was slightly acquainted with one of them, Ariel Lanyi, when he was a little boy. Now he is in his twenties and already well known and admired. And I saw a marvelous documentary about an American boy, Kim Armstrong, who was both a musical and a mathematical prodigy as a child. The Internet is full of clips with performances by these amazing children.

How can a child know so much about music at such an early age, and become such a brilliant performer so quickly? The mystical answer, that they are reincarnations of great musicians of the past, is tempting, but obviously unverifiable. I always wonder, by the way, whether having such a massive head start over ordinarily talented musicians gives them a lasting advantage when they reach maturity.

As for mysticism as an explanation, recently I have gone back to working slowly through Bach's sonatas for flute, not that I ever expect to be able to play them well enough to perform them even informally. The experience of playing this music is one of conversation with one of the greatest musical geniuses of all times. The beauty of his music is inexplicable in rational terms. Why is a series of sixteenth notes that he wrote so much more fascinating and elevating than similar runs written by Locatelli (another composer I was working on recently)? Calling the answer mystical is merely a mystification, an admission of failure at explanation. However, why try to explain it? Explanation is less important than appreciation and admiration - and enjoyment.

Fluency - Musical and Linguistic

 For as long as I remember thinking about it at all, I have been interested in comparing music to language. For me, they are competing areas, though I realize that for most people they go together easily: people sing words to music and feel that the music adds to the words and vice versa. I find that when I am deeply involved with words, which is most of the time, as I'm a translator, music suffers. I hear music while I work. It plays in the background. But I don't pay it proper attention. Mea culpa.

Learning a second language was particularly deleterious to my musical progress. In high school, when I started to study French, I was enthralled by the language and put great effort into learning it well, because it was important to me - importance that I can't entirely explain to myself, and playing clarinet became less important to me. A moment comes when you're acquiring a new language when you begin to be fluent in it, when you stop translating from it into your native language, when you can read it with increasing ease, and when you can speak it without getting tangled up in it. That moment doesn't mean that you've mastered the language, but that you're dealing with it in new terms: fluency. You can be fluent in a language and speak it badly, with a poor accent, making a lot of grammatical errors, but at least you're able to use the language.

Learning to play a musical instrument is very similar. For a long time you're learning the fingering and other aspects of technique, and suddenly you can simply play the instrument without thinking about how you're doing it. For a long time I have been at that stage in the instruments I first studied, clarinet and saxophone, but flute wasn't easy for me, probably because I started playing it late in life. Now, and I'm not sure exactly when it happened, I play flute with fluency similar to my sax playing (I don't play clarinet often), which also means that it's more fun to play, less stumbling, less groping.

Playing fluently doesn't necessarily mean playing well, certainly not playing perfectly, but it's a necessary step toward those higher goals. Of course, when I am learning a new piece, I always come upon passages that are difficult for me, and I have to slow down and work on them. This also happens to me when I'm translating. Sometimes I run into a passage with difficult syntax or unfamiliar vocabulary, and I have to move through it slowly and attentively. But the basic fluency is there, the connection between what I hear in my mind and what I play. Working on a difficult passage teaches me how to hear it.

For most music teachers playing fluently is second nature and probably not in their minds as they work with pupils. That's regrettable. I've never taught music and wouldn't be comfortable doing it, but, were I a music teacher, I would work on fluency, so that playing one's instrument is like speaking one's native language.

Chega de Saudade

 Recently I've been practicing Chega de Saudade, a famous bossa nova song by Jobim. The English title of the song is "No More Blues," but the Portuguese means Enough (chega) of Missing (saudade). I am not very good at playing bossa nova rhythms. When I listen to to bossa nova, I'm constantly impressed by the musicians' relaxation as they play complicated syncopations without audible effort, while I have to count carefully and think about alternating from notes that are off the beat to notes that are on it. Incidentally, until the very moment when I read the article about bossa nova, I thought that "bossa" meant bass, that it was a new kind of bass. That was wrong.

When I was in high school, I had a radio on a shelf in the headboard of my bed. Almost every night, when my parents thought I had gone to sleep, I used to listen to an all-night jazz program on WEVD, hosted by Mort Fega. I didn't understand what was going on in the music, but I loved the sound. I vividly remember the night that I first heard bossa nova. Fega played Stan Getz's performance of the Girl from Ipanema three or four times, because he was so bowled over by the novelty of it.

I never thought I'd be able to play jazz or bossa nova. At the time, I was learning how to play classical music on the clarinet. Secretly listening to late-night radio was about as close as I could get to following a musical passion, being the uptight kid I was.

Happy Tunes

The late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, once said that he didn't like playing "I Can't Get Started," because the title and the lyrics are pessimistic. Arnie was definitely a man who found it easy to get started, which I'm not. But I don't share Arnie's aversion to that song, because it's also full of self-aggrandizement. Another song about having the world stacked up against you is "Everything Happens to Me," here sung with convincing self-pity by Chet Baker (his improvisation on the trumpet doesn't sound sad at all, by the way). I bet Arnie never played it once. Another song that seems to court disaster is "Comes Love," which is too cute to inspire sadness. This is Artie Shaw's version, a man to whom love came often enough.

The repertoire of standards also contains a bunch of optimistic songs, like "Happy Talk" from South Pacific, "I'm just a Lucky So and So," "What a Wonderful World" (which is played so often, it's beyond a cliche), and "Oh What a Beautiful Morning (a particularly corny version)." In general I'm fairly indifferent to the lyrics of the standards I play, aside from the title, which, I know, is an error. But in this historical moment, in the midst of a pandemic and a failing economy, it's not such a bad idea to sing something hopeful. When a song is happy, beyond its title, it carries you along.

A lot of Schubert's Lieder are pretty maudlin. Maybe you're supposed to feel good when you hear them: at least I'm not as miserable as him! And a lot of blues songs are also full of self-pity. But I've always been drawn to the peppy songs, like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. It's inspiring that those oppressed black people were able to find and communicate so much joy in music.

Recently I've been working in several musical directions. With a pianist friend, I've been playing Piazzola pieces on the flute, and I've also been working on a pretty difficult set of flute sonatas by Locatelli. Piazzola tends to be a bit over the top, but it's great to be called upon to express so much emotion. Locatelli is inventive and decorative, fun to play (or it would be fun, if I could play up to speed). But the most fun for me is to sit down with the Realbook or something similar and play a bunch of standards. Just this morning I played "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" on the baritone sax and couldn't get over how brilliant Richard Rodgers was. Where the lyrics go, "and it looks like it's climbing clear up to the sky," the melody stays on the same note!

The other thing I do is play whatever I remember by heart, or just phrases, and then noodle around on the instrument. Sometimes I do something sort of technical, like playing all the pentatonic scales, but mainly I keep trying to connect my mind, my ears, and my instrument more and more closely. That makes me happy.

Practice Makes

A good friend and fellow musician aims at practicing for four hours on the day off that he's given himself by cutting down on his work load. He has a series of books of exercises based on scales, and he is trying to increase the speed at which he can play them. What is his aim? To get as good as he can, as close as possible to a professional level on his instrument. He doesn't practice four hours straight, but he tries to accumulate that time over the hours of his day off from work.

I try to practice for an hour every day, and that tires me out. I guess I could put my instrument aside, do something else, and then come back to it, but I don't. Would I gain anything by practicing more? Aspiring professional musicians - I'm thinking of the documentary I saw with Alfred Brendel mentoring a young Asian-American pianist, Kit Armstrong, and advising him to increase his practice time to four hours - practice all day long, but I imagine that they're learning new pieces all the time, and that takes a huge amount of work. I feel that, after an hour, I've reached the point of diminishing returns.

I do play scales and other exercises, and I also work on new pieces, but not a lot of them, and not with the idea of performing them. I work on them to appreciate them. And my purpose in practicing is to play more and more musically.

Playing music is like acting a part in a play. You express emotions that you wouldn't feel if you weren't playing the part. You aren't faking the emotions. They're somewhere inside you. You're giving yourself the opportunity of expressing something you might ordinarily keep to yourself or be unaware of.

Isn't that what all art does for us?

What is an Instrument? The Definition and Invention of Musical Instruments

This morning as I was putting my flute away, after working on a Locatelli flute sonata, I found myself thinking that the baroque period defined the flute in a certain way, meaning that baroque composers understand what the flute could do and asked performers to do it. Nineteenth and century composers like Doppler redefined the flute, demanding virtuosity and exploiting the capacity of the newly invented metal flute, and things have gone farther and farther (listen to Claire Chase).

Throughout the history of music, composers have redefined instruments, using them in new ways, and forcing players to go beyond what was expected of them. The makers of instruments keep improving them, in response to these demands, enabling musicians to do more easily what was close to impossible.

My insight, though, had less to do with the changes in the design of the flute, from the wooden baroque flute, with only one key, requiring the performer to use complex fingerings to produce sharps and flats, to the silver, gold, or platinum flutes of today, than it did with the conceptual invention of an instrument, the changes in its use by musicians.

This is easily seen in the history of jazz and the development of the saxophone as a major vehicle of jazz performance. Players grasped the expressive capacity of the instrument and kept pushing, getting more and more out of it. The physical invention of the saxophone in the mid-nineteenth century produced the tool that, in the hands of creative musicians, made music undreamed of by the makers of the instrument.

You'll Never Get Rich Doing This

My friend and fellow saxophone gear-head (a more acute case than mine) has a handmade baritone saxophone mouthpiece that doesn't play well for him. Mouthpieces are quirky. What works for one player is a disaster for another. So I thought I'd give his MP a try and buy it from him if it was good.

The maker is Francois-Louis, who makes some very serious claims for the engineering behind his handiwork. In fact I have one of his tenor mouthpieces, and I like it. However, I tried the bari MP and right away saw that it didn't play as well as the one I'm using. So, with a heavy heart, I'm returning it.

That's too bad, in way. Wind players are always hoping that one bit of new gear - a new kind of reed, a new kind of ligature, a new MP, a new flute head-joint, a new trumpet mouthpiece - will make the crucial difference between the way we are actually playing and the way we would like to play.

If you search for mouthpieces on the Internet, you'll find tons of them, for all the sizes of saxophones and clarinets, for brass, etc. Why are there so many people putting masses of effort into designing and manufacturing what are at best niche products? How many mouthpieces can Francois Louis sell in a year? His company will never make the Fortune Five Hundred.

The mouthpiece manufacturers are fanatics, as are the flute makers and lutanists.

I am immensely grateful to these people who are more interested in making a fine instrument (or accessory) than in making a lot of money. When I was in Boston a couple of years ago, I went to Flutistry to see whether a new head joint would improve my playing. I spent a few hours in a room by myself, trying one head joint after another, until I finally bought one made by Emanuel, and I'm still pleased with it. The head joint I bought was used, so it just cost an arm and not an arm and a leg, but it's very hard to make a head joint, and I'm sure Emanuel makes a lot less than people with less skill and devotion to their profession. Though, for that matter, if he (or Francois Louis) has gotten as rich as Croesus doing what he does, I wouldn't resent it.

Bach, Mozart, Charlie Parker, my Baritone Saxophone

For a change I played my heavy, awkward baritone saxophone this morning (this is a picture of the kind I have). I often joke that owning a baritone saxophone is a lot like owning the ball was, when I was a kid. If you owned the ball, and they were choosing up sides, they had to let you play. I play the bari in a community orchestra and in a sax quartet. However, because of the Corona Virus, both the orchestra and the quartet have suspended rehearsals, giving me less of an incentive to concentrate on the bari and more incentive to try out my other saxophones, and even my clarinet. This morning, however, I lugged my baritone out and played it. Every time I pick up one of my instruments (except the clarinet), I remember how much I love it.

Years ago I bought (yes, bought, didn't download or copy from someone else) two of the Bach cello suites, arranged for baritone saxophone, and I have worked on them sporadically. This morning I played through the first one on the baritone - not very well, but that's not the point. Playing the suite as an exercise is more valuable musically than playing any exercise I can think of.

Similarly, I have been playing some Mozart duets on the flute, knowing I'd never learn them well enough, but using them to improve my tone and to deepen my understanding of music. When you play Mozart, there are frequently moments when you say to yourself, "How did he ever think of that?" Suddenly he inserts a new theme or does something that makes his endless musical creativity clear. I don't get exactly the same feeling when I play Bach, though playing his music always makes me admire it more. The music develops essentially out of itself, evolving and going where you might not expect it to go, but doing it the way an evenly flowing river becomes a rapids for a while and then flows along calmly again.

After I played through the Bach suite, I picked up the Charlie Parker Omnibook (which I also bought and paid for) and played four or five of his songs. They are astonishingly compressed, impatient, jagged, refreshing after Bach's long developments.

Evolving Taste - the Challenge of Eric Dolphy

When I first heard Eric Dolphy play, I couldn't stand his music. It sounded formless and wild. Now I love and admire it, more than fifty years after the fact. Recently I happened on a great documentary about Dolphy, "The Last Date," which made me appreciate him even more.
I wonder how it is that one's taste can change that way. I also wonder why now, when I'm an old guy, I love the freedom and intensity of his music, and why, as a student, when I ought to have been open to it, I just couldn't go there.
The musicians who were interviewed in the documentary constantly spoke of Dolphy's single-minded pursuit of music. He practiced all the time (like Coltrane), and he was the master of three very different instruments: alto saxophone, flute, and bass clarinet. He was more or less the first musician to use the bass clarinet as a solo instrument in jazz, and his mastery of the instrument was phenomenal.
One of the musicians interviewed in the documentary (which was made in 1991) was a Dutch bass-clarinet player who was working on transcriptions of Dolphy's solos. Not only are they nearly impossible to play, but he would move from one demanding instrument to another during a set.
A couple of the elderly black people who knew Dolphy during his childhood in Los Angeles, who are interviewed in the film, said that he aspired to play clarinet in the Los Angeles symphony orchestra, a path that was blocked to black people at the time (he was born in 1928). Similarly, Nina Simone (before she took that name) was unable to pursue a career as a classical pianist. Lucky for the world that they were thwarted in that direction! Jazz would be much impoverished if they had gone on to become classical musicians. In his lectures on "The Ethics of Jazz" at Harvard, Herbie Hancock also tells how he was blocked as a  classical pianist. Notwithstanding these three creative people, who found their way in defiance of discrimination, I'm sure that there were hundreds of talented black kids with great potential as classical musicians who didn't find their way into jazz or another creative musical field.
In my own modest musical practice, I only hope to keep deepening my appreciation of music. Even if I play Handel and Mozart on the flute, and I don't even try to emulate Dolphy's freedom, hearing him also gives me appreciation of classical music.
I recently read a long book of essays by the eminent classical pianist, Alfred Brendel, whose repertoire did not include contemporary musicians, although he was intensely interested in new music and listened to it. You can stick to what your comfortable doing and are good at, and admire what make you feel uncomfortable and inadequate at if you tried it. Though, on the other hand, doing things that make you uncomfortable is a good way to grow.
It appears that Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes at the age of only 36 because the doctors in Berlin assumed that a black musician who had gone into a coma was overdosed with heroine - and Dolphy didn't use drugs. What a loss.

Tone Development - finding your own way

No serious music teacher neglect the matter of tone development.
Every great musician has an unmistakable, personal sound, which is recognizable to aficionados. I got to be pretty good at recognizing the better known jazz saxophone players when I was listening to a lot of jazz. I'm sure lovers of violin music can tell immediately whether they're hearing Heifetz, Menuhin, Stern, or Grumiaux.
We amateurs strive to produce a sound that is beautiful and our own, and we are taught that the way to do so is, first of all, by playing long tones. I have done a lot of that in my day, trying to turn the practice into a meditation, trying to listen hard to the sound I'm producing. But, how interesting can you make that?
About a year ago I found a pdf file of Marcel Moyse's book: "Tone Development Through Interpretation," and printed it out. The theory behind the book is clear: long tones can only get you so far; you have to put the notes together into musical phrases. Moyse, who played in orchestras, took a lot of arias from major operas and turned them into exercises, challenging the student to transpose them into different keys. For a while I was diligently playing through Moyse's exercises, but, in the end, I don't like opera that much, and playing Verdi or Donizetti arias didn't send me.
I love to play standards, however. So, I reasoned, why not use standards, especially ballads (right now I happen to be hearing John Coltrane playing "You Don't Know What Love Is," one of the greatest ballads in existence - and what Coltrane does with it!!!!) for tone development?
Musicians can use whatever music they enjoy playing as exercises in tone development. We don't need Moyse. But we have to remember to play very slowly, so that we can be attentive to the sound of every note, and to the connection between them.

Music in Isolation

It's hard to maintain motivation when you're not playing with a goal in mind.
Because of the threat of Covid-19, Israel, where I live, is essentially shut down. My flute teacher is not permitted to give lessons. The wind orchestra where I play every week cannot meet for rehearsals. The sax quartet I play with has suspended operations. I occasionally play Haydn flute sonatas with my wife, but otherwise, I am on my own.
For quite a while I was mainly practicing flute, trying to achieve a satisfactory level. I'm almost there, so I've decided to practice more saxophone again. On flute I have been working on tone, articulation, and flexibility in fingering. I've started doing the same thing on sax once again. I went through all that years ago, and I more or less counted on my ensemble playing to maintain my level. But now that my ensembles are suspended, I have to practice a bit more seriously.
This morning I took out my baritone saxophone and spent about 20 minutes doing various warm-up exercises. I enjoy the warm-ups. They can be a form of meditation. Recently I watched a 2 part documentary about Jascha Heifetz, who was a stickler for very elaborate scale exercises. He never neglected them.
After the exercises I did one of the things I enjoy most of all in music. I played a bunch of standards: Someone to Watch Over You, Stars Fell on Alabama, Skylark, Stardust, Love is Here to Stay, Lover Man, and a few others. I tried to play these ballads as musically as I could. They aren't technically challenging, but the melodies are great, and you can hear yourself as you play.
On flute I have been playing baroque and classical music. Recently I've been reading through the Haydn sonatas, and the more familiar with them I become, the better I like them. I'm also working on the first Mozart duet for two flutes or for flute and violin. As I play these great composers, I am constantly amazed by their creativity. Where did they get their musical ideas?
The Haydn is not beyond my technical proficiency on the flute. However, I don't think I'll ever be able to play the Mozart as fast as it's supposed to be. Recently I listened to a performance of the W. F. Bach flute duets, something I was working on for a while. The two flutists were so great, much better than I could dream of playing, but I'm not discouraged. I'm inspired.
Occasionally I play a standard or a blues, or bossa nova on the flute, but I prefer to play that kind of music on the sax. It's as if I have a split personality - classical and jazzy - and one instrument is for one part of the personality, the other for the other.

Patient Practice

There's so much music to learn, I want to tear through each piece and get on to the next.
The warm-up exercises I do take so long. When will I ever get through them and reach the music?
My flute playing is still inconsistent.
How long can I work on boring long tones, vibrato, scales and arpeggios?
When will I be able to play sixteenth notes with sufficient speed?
How long will it take for the exercises in musical theory that I do (playing chord progressions, etc.) to sink in and become second nature?
I'm already an old man. It's a race against time. My chances of improving as a musician are probably lower than my chances of declining into decrepitude.
What's the solution?
Only patience.
If it takes me a month to learn a piece, and, even after that month, I can't play it well, I have to understand that the month wasn't wasted.  I have to derive satisfaction from the process, from the effort, from slight improvement. And I have to avoid frustration and disappointment when the improvement doesn't happen.

Communication in and through Music

The level of communication between Hillel Zori and Zvi Plesser, when they played the duets they composed based on Bach's solo cello suites, was extraordinary. In the discussion after the concert, Plesser noted that they had spent hundreds of hours working on the project over the past eight years, and you could tell. Not only was their playing seamless - though their tones are slightly different, if you listened with your eyes closed, you could probably not tell who was playing or whether it was one or two instruments playing - but it was also clear that they had worked out together just how to perform the pieces.
The communication between Marina Solodovna and Polina Semenihina was also excellent. The two women have been working together for quite a while, developing a repertoire and deciding how to play it. Without good communication between the musicians of an ensemble, communication between the musicians the the listeners, which is the point, after all, is impossible.
Lack of that communication was what made it difficult for our saxophone quartet to play for the patients in the nursing home. The communication among ourselves was excellent, because we had to concentrate very hard to ignore the occasional shouts of a demented patient and even the time when an old women drove her wheelchair into us. Most of the patients were somnolent and unresponsive, however, making us wonder whether anything got across.

Three Performances

Because we are fortunate enough to own an apartment with a large living room and a baby grand piano, we have been hosting recitals in our home every month or two. On a recent Saturday night two fine Russian-born musicians, the pianist Marina Solodovna and the cellist, Polina Semenihina, played a demanding program by Franck, Schnittke, and Prokofiev. I asked them to play romantic and modern music and suggested that because of their Russian background, they would be offering something unique by playing Russian music.
The Franck violin sonata in A major, transcribed for cello, was the most familiar piece. One piece by Schnittke, who wrote mainly atonal music, was the Suite in the Old Style, which sounded almost like a baroque composition. Then, at my suggestion, Polina played his Improvisation for Cello Solo, a short, extremely atonal piece. Finally they played two movements of the Prokofiev cello sonata. Their performance was intense. They communicated well with each other. Everyone I spoke to after the recital raved about it.
Our house was packed. Not a chair was vacant. Because of the vaulted ceilings of our living room and the adjoining dining room, where the overflow audience had to sit, the acoustics are very live (too live without the bodies of the audience to absorb the sound). Usually when you hear a recital, the musicians are up on a stage. When you hear a recital in our house, you're sitting right next to the musicians. The experience is powerful.
The second performance was my own. On the following Tuesday morning, I played with a saxophone quartet in the nursing facility of an old age home to an audience of demented people and others who require constant care. We played ten pieces with as much seriousness as if we were playing for a discerning audience. We chose music that we know very well, not particularly difficult, but pleasant to hear. We only rehearse once a week, and we're not professional musicians, so we're limited in what we can play.
This version of our quartet (we lost our leader and soprano saxophone player, when he had to move to Haifa and begin a residency in family medicine) has been playing together for a year or so, and we're improving. Playing in a quartet is valuable for developing musicianship, as it requires concentration and coordination. Our next performance will be for a more alert audience, but it doesn't matter to us.
The third performance, by two Israeli cellists, Hillel Zori and Zvi Plesser, eclipsed the concert that was in our living room by a light-year and trivializes, musically speaking, our saxophone quartet. Zori and Plesser are in the midst of a long-term project of rewriting the Bach cello suites for two celli rather than for cello solo. They have taken the suites apart, divided them up between their two instruments, added music from elsewhere in Bach's works, brought out the inner voices, the implied counterpoint in the original work, and produced something absolutely sublime.
Everything about the performance was extraordinary. Zori and Plesser demonstrated their deep understanding of the Bach suites, their virtuosity, and their intimate personal communication. They have no intention of superseding the original, but, unquestionably, no one who has heard their reworking will hear a solo performance of the suites with the same ears.

Reviewing Modes (2)

In Lush Life, the fine biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu, he describes Strayhorn, still in high school, if I remember right, listening to broadcasts of jazz from New York and then writing down the chords so that his band in a club in Pittsburgh could play them.
Not many of us have such retentive ears. If we did, there would be no need for fakebooks.
But most ordinary mortals do need what are known as charts or lead-sheets. We need to play the melody from written notes and be told what the chord patterns are.
In courses on jazz that I've attended, I was taught how to look at the changes (chords) of a tune and analyze them, so that I'd know what scales to improvise in. You learn, for example, that if you see the following symbol, "C7#5," you know that the chord notes are C-E-G#-Bb, and you can play on a whole-tone scale in the measure where that chord appears. For each chord symbol, you are supposed to learn which modes or other scales can be played over it.
I have very strong resistance to this rather mechanical method of figuring out what notes to play when you're trying to improvise, though I understand its didactic value.
In part my resistance is simple laziness, refusal to spend time at the keyboard with a chart and learn how the chords relate to each other and to the melody. But it's also connected to the aesthetic of jazz, as I understand it. The point of improvising is not to play the right notes but to play expressively what you hear, even if you hear the wrong notes. Arnie Lawrence used to say that a mistake is a gift from God. In the great documentary movie about Blue Note Records, Herbie Hancock mentions a performance of his, when he was accompanying Miles Davis, and he played an absolutely wrong chord. Miles heard it and took the wrong notes that Hancock had played and used them in his improvisation.
When we speak, we don't think: a singular verb in the present tense in English ends in 's.' We just say "ends" and not "end" or "ended" or "ending." Similarly, I can't believe that an improvising musician, in real time, looks at the symbol, "A-7," and thinks, "I can play either in the Dorian or Aeolian mode over that chord." He or she hears what notes work well in that part of the piece and plays them. The explicit thinking comes earlier, when one is learning a piece.
It's definitely useful to practice the modes and to improvise in them. It sharpens the ears. But the real challenge is using those sharper ears.
Incidentally, knowledge of the modes is also relevant to classical music. I've been reading through Haendel's flute sonatas, and I find that knowing about modes helps me understand the harmony underlying Haendel's melodies as I play them.

An Interesting Feature of the Modes

Instead of thinking of the modes as beginning on different degrees of a single scale, it's more challenging to play all the seven modes on a single base note.
For example, using C for convenience, you have:
Ionian: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C.
Dorian: C-D-Eb-F-G-A-Bb-C (the second degree of Bb major).
Phrygian: C-Db-Eb-F-G-Ab-B-C (the third degree of Ab major).
Lydian: C-D-E-F#-G-A-B-C (the fourth degree of G major).
Mixolydian: C-D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C (the fifth degree of F major).
Aeolian: C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C (the sixth degree of Eb major, the relative minor).
Locrian: C-Db-E-F-Gb-A-B-C (the seventh degree of Db major).

An interesting routine that helps you think modally is to start in the Lydian mode and modify the modes one after the other. An interesting thing happens when you do this.

Starting on C Lydian one has: C-D-E-F#-G-A-B-C.
Flatting the fourth, you have C major (or C Ionian): C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C.
Flatting the seventh, you have C Mixolydian: C-D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C.
Flatting the third, you have C Dorian: C-D-Eb-F-G-A-Bb-C.
Flatting the sixth, you have C Aeolian: C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C.
Flatting the second you have C Phrygian: C-Db-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C.
Flatting the fifth you have C Locrian: C-Db-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-Bb-C.

Then, what 's left to flat? The tonic. If you lower C to Cb (enharmonically, B natural), you find yourself in the B Lydian mode:
Cb-Db-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-Bb-Cb, which is equivalent to B-C#-D#-E#-F#-G#-A#B.

If you go on, playing B Lydian, B Ionian, etc., you end up with B Locrian (B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B), and when you flat the B, you are in Bb Lydian (Bb-C-D-E natural-F-G-A-Bb.

If you look at the key-signatures of the modes as you cycle through them this way, you see that they follow the circle of fifths (G-C-F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb-Cb).

The inner logic the relations among the modes is wonderful.

Reviewing Modes (1)

This year I've been attending a jazz workshop. A lot of the material is familiar to me, but I haven't been playing much jazz in the past few years. The topic of the modes came up, a topic that I find fascinating. I'm explaining this more or less to myself, so that I can get a better grasp of it.
The modes were developed in Western medieval music theory, more or less forgotten after the baroque period, and revived in late nineteenth century classical music and in jazz, as a way of conceptualizing what we play.
Essentially, the modes are very simple. They are all based on the ordinary diatonic scale, as in C major: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. This is the model for all major scales: base note (C) -major second up (D) - major second up (E) - minor second up (F) - major second up (G) - major second up (A) - major second up (B) - minor second back up to the base note an octave up (C).
In the major scale, which is also called the Ionian mode (the Greek names for the modes are entirely artificial, but that's what they are), the first five notes (CDEFG) have the same structure as the five notes ascending from the fifth (GABCD). The strong notes in the scale are the first, the fifth, and the fourth. The fifth, known as the dominant, gravitates toward the first, the tonic, and the fourth, the sub-dominant, can gravitate toward the fifth. When people improvise in jazz in the Ionic mode, they tend to avoid the fourth.
In Western harmonic theory, every major scale has a relative minor, the natural minor, which begins on the sixth degree of the scale. In C major it is: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A (the two variants, the harmonic and melodic minor, which I'll ignore for the moment). The natural minor scale is also known as the Aeolian mode.
There are two ways of thinking about the other modes. The easy way is to remain with the white notes on the piano and conceptualize the modes as beginning on various degrees of the C major scale. Thus, the Dorian mode, another minor scale, begins on the second degree of the scale: D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D. When I improvise in the Dorian mode (in fact, in all the modes) I find it difficult not to gravitate toward what would be the tonic (C) in the major scale that it's based on. This creates an inherent tension in the use of this scale. In jazz harmony (to jump ahead a bit), the Dorian mode is related to the II chord, in the basic chord progression of II-V-I.
The third mode is the Phrygian, and it begins on the third degree of the scale (E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E). This is a common mode in a lot of folk music, but the minor second between E and F sounds very odd to Western ears, so it's an interesting mode.
The next mode is the Lydian mode, starting on the fourth degree of the scale: F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F. It's a lot like the F major scale, but the fourth degree, the B, which would be a Bb in F major, is raised. The Lydian mode sounds strange and wrong to me when I improvise in it.
The mode that starts on the fifth degree of the scale is the Mixolydian, a major scale with the seventh degree flatted (G-A-B-C-D-E-F natural -G), as in the dominant seventh chord, which resolves to the tonic (G7-C).
I've already mentioned the Aeolian mode. The final mode, called the Locrian, is the weirdest  mode, because it begins with a minor second (B-C) and the fifth is flatted (F natural): B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B. In jazz harmony it is associated with the half-diminished chord (B-D-F-A) and resolves to the tonic.

Warm-Ups and Changes

I am always surprised when very good amateur classical musicians (not guitarists, of course) tell me they don't know anything about harmony. Why weren't they ever taught? Weren't they curious enough to learn?
You can know how to play a classical piece very well without analyzing its harmonic structure, though you can play it a lot better if you do hear and understand the way it moves from tonality to tonality. But knowing just the melody of a jazz standard is barely knowing it at all.
Typically, a written piece of classical music tells you exactly what note to play, how fast to play it, how to articulate it, and how loud it should be. All these precise directives still leave a lot of room for interpretation. The classical musician is not a robot producing sounds dictated by the marks on the page in front of her. But the ideal remains of playing the piece the way the composer wanted it to be played.
Typically when a jazz musician has sheet music in front of her, all she sees is a melody line and some chords written as letters (e.g. C7, G-7b5). The harmonic instruments - piano, bass, and guitar - have to figure out how to play those chords, and the melodic instruments have to improvise in a way that fits over them. No two jazz pianists, given the same series of letters representing chords, would play them exactly the same way. Not only that, they have freedom to substitute chords that can have a similar harmonic function.  I found a good article on this stuff in Wikipedia.
When I was working on jazz, I got to the stage where I could look at letters standing for chords and play stuff that fit, and I could also transpose to the right key for the kind of saxophone I was playing (C major concert is D major on a tenor sax, for example). I also got to the stage where I had learned the melodies of a good number of songs by heart. However, I never pushed myself past that stage, to memorizing (and hearing) the underlying harmonies of a song.
Recently I found way of doing that by combining that exercise with another musical goal: improving my sound. I'm gradually learning the harmonies of the great jazz standard, All the Things You Are, by Jerome Kern. I'm using the notes of the harmonies as long tones to warm up on the flute, first playing the bass notes (F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, G, C... etc.).  I've almost learned the progression well enough that I can go through it without stopping to think. Then I build on it by playing the first two notes in the chord (F-Ab, Bb-Db, Ab-C ... etc.), then the triad, then the seventh, etc. etc.
I'm doing something very similar with rhythm changes, the chord progression underlying Gershwin's I Got Rhythm.
Warming up on the flute or another melodic instrument this way makes more sense than just playing a series of long tones, because the notes you play have musical meaning as a sequence. For the same reason, sometimes I take a piece by Bach or Telemann and play it very slowly, concentrating on the quality of my sound, but still brought forward by musical logic and not anything mechanical.

Plotting an Old Course in a New Way (Maybe)

On a recent, rainy Saturday night a quartet of young jazz musicians played a concert in our living room to an absolutely packed house - there wasn't an empty chair left in our house. The musicians are Jerusalemites who have known each other since high school and been playing with each other for something like twelve years. They call themselves "Friendy," and I hope they'll have a bright and successful future together. The pianist is Noam Borns, the bassist is Daniel Ashkenazi, the drummer is Shai Yuval, and the tenor sax player is Zohar Mokadi Amar. They played all original music of their own. Everyone loved it. At the end, after they were officially finished playing,  they were soaring and couldn't stop. I asked Zohar to try my tenor, and he confirmed what I thought: it's a good instrument. Then they invited me to play a blues, "Tenor Madness," with them. What a kick to play with such great musicians! I held my own, almost, and that inspired me and gave me confidence.
On Friday mornings I've been going to a class in blues and jazz given by Yaki Levi, a great drummer and pianist, at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Yaki is inspiring. Last week we were playing solos of "Freedom Jazz Dance," a quirky tune by Eddie Harris that is all on a single chord, so you don't have to think about changes when you play. At a certain point in my solo (we go around the room, and everyone gets a chance to play), I was inspired. That's the only way I can put it. Suddenly I was playing the way I always wished I could play, finding notes that I hadn't thought of and that didn't come automatically in a pattern that I always fall into.
A few days before that, my flute teacher told me that he couldn't teach me any longer, and I realized that it was probably a good time to strike out on my own. I'm never going to be a fine classical flautist, and I don't even want to be a fine classical flautist. I want to have fun playing whatever instrument I play and to be free and creative if possible.
For years I played standards with a pianist and improvised, but it didn't work, partly because the pianist never learned how to accompany and support soloists - that bored him. But also because I find it very difficult to memorize songs, to learn them by ear, to hear and remember the changes. Up to now I've been too lazy to work on what didn't come relatively easily. But in the past week I decided to learn the changes for "All the Things You Are" once and for all, slowly and patiently. I'm going to give that what it takes, and once I can do that fluently, I'll try to improvise on those chords. If I can muster the patience to get that song down, maybe it will be easier for me to learn other songs.
If I had begun doing this kind of music work when I was a teenager, I wouldn't have to struggle now, when my memory isn't as retentive as it was.

Music Lessons: pros and cons

My second flute teacher fired me.
Not because I wasn't practicing and making (slow) progress, but because of a change in his circumstances.
Now I have to decide whether to continue taking classical flute lessons from a fine teacher, who's been recommended to me, or whether I should work on my own. After all, I've been playing wind instruments for decades, and I've received the fundamentals of flute playing from two excellent teachers. Maybe I know enough to step out on my own.
With my teacher, I mainly played baroque music with occasional forays into the classical and romantic realms, and I love that music. I've learned a lot by struggling to master the Bach flute sonatas, and that learning has been valuable.
But I also love listening to jazz, and I especially enjoy playing standards, what people call the American Song Book.
I have no trouble playing blues, but I do have trouble sticking to the changes when I play standards. I'm generally too impatient to learn the chords of the pieces I play. I can read a chart and follow the written changes, and I can memorize melodies pretty well, but I've been too lazy to memorize the harmony up to now.
Today I decided to work on that. I worked on the chord progression of "All The Things You Are" and II-V-I patterns.
I think I can combine technical work on the flute - improving my tone and vibrato, for example - with work in music theory: examining the connection between chords and melody. I haven't decided against continuing lessons with a classical flutist, but I'm leaning that way.