putting the violin first

well... it's been ages since I've been here, blogs have gone right to the back burner, partly because my son dropped my laptop a while back and it's been in the shop for a while getting repaired and other bills have taken priority so it's been there for a while! The music videos have stopped for now, I've started work again so have less time and energy for the internet...but good news is that after hardly picking the violin up for ages, have been back into it with a vengeance for the last couple of months. Did a bit of a road trip over the Christmas period, busked my way around new Plymouth, Hamilton, Raglan & Auckland. being on the road meant that i did most of my practice outside in nature - which I highly recommend. Found beautiful spots at beaches and reserves on my travels, and I found that playing outside instead of practicing in my room at home, inspired new qualities in my playing in response to the feeling qualities of the places I visited. I tried to tune into and interpret the qualities of the beaches, the wildlife, the waves, the streets etc in my playing. I found a new freedom in this approach and even my son noticed a lighter more freer style of playing emerging over the time we were away.

Part of the purpose of my trip was to find a direction with my music and my life. Now that I'm back home, I've fallen into a job for a while, which takes some of the financial pressure, and a different direction is definitely forming for my playing.

After years of enjoying playing with other musicians in various bands, I've decided make a shift to being solo violinist. this doesn't mean I won't play with other musicians, but I've made a decision that I really want to showcase the violin, and in bands the violin tends to mostly just support the other musicians with occasional solo breaks. I play the violin because I love the violin itself. I want to be able to develop my potential as a fiddle player, and share the pieces of music that have inspired me to appreciate and love the violin. hand in hand with that is a desire to continue to develop as an improviser and composer of original violin music and styles of playing.

In other words I want to be 100% dedicated to the violin. I feel that quality playing, by performers that can really bring out the beauty and versatility of the violin is rare, and I want to dedicate myself to developing my capacity to share the violins true depth and potential.

The violin is a deeply spiritual instrument when played well. It has the capacity to stir deep emotions, to lift the spirits, and to reconnect the listener with their own soul. The violin has healing qualities that can impact the listener deeply when played with soul and passion. As a totally biased violin lover...I never get enough live violin played with heart & depth. In New Zealand where I live, to hear live violin is rare. I'd like to share my love of the violin with others, while updating and modernising the image of the violin too. In the last few month since I posted my first quite rusty videos here, the work I've been doing with my violin has slowly been paying off as I've felt my playing lift a notch or two. I hope that by the time I finally get my laptop back, I'll have a lot more to share, and a better quality of playing. It's the sensitivity and subtlety of the violin that really appeal to me, it has such a range of expression possible, from incredible sweetness, deep soulfulness, heartbreaking melancholy, to bluesy, jazzy, celtic, gypsy - foot tapping fun. It can make your heart mind and soul soar, and express the heights and the depths of being human.

I plan once I have the laptop again, to create backing tracks that I can play to and improvise around. In the meantime..just lots of practice everyday :-)

I used to play every weekend, but I'd rather do less gigs, and have the ones I do have real impact. like a rare treat, a wine you wouldn't have everyday but save for a very special occasion. Once I've developed a repertoire that I'm really happy with, and backing tracks to go with it, have myself set up with all the gear I need etc I'll start marketing myself, producing promotional materials etc. It wont happen overnight, playing solo requires a much higher level of playing to sustain the listeners interest, and I plan to master some really difficult pieces...but I have a direction and a focus now and am excited about the violin again.

To play the violin really well, takes a lot of time and an incredible amount of patience. Despite courses that are being marketed on the internet that promise otherwise, I believe that a lifetime is hardly long enough. I'm in my forties and am just starting to take the violin seriously. I plan for when I'm 70. I watched Stephane Grappelli play live in his 90's - and he was brilliant. The violin benefits from emotional and spiritual maturity. They say that great violin players peak in their 70's and I plan to find out if that's true! I'm pretty sure that it is, for the dedicated violinist, maturity is a blessing as is age and wisdom.

One of the first jazz reviews ever - 1918

A lot of people don't realize just how long jazz has been around.


The First Real Critical Discussion of Jazz (Copied from www.jass.com)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was in 1918, that a young Swiss writer by the name of Ernest Ansermet saw a performance of Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Cook's Orchestra played mostly ragtime numbers and spirituals and featured a young clarinetist by the name of Sidney Bechet who left a lasting impression on the writer. Though Ansermet had some misconceptions about American music and early jazz, his description of Bechet's musicianship and his vision of what was to come with this music is truly inspirational. What follows are excerpts of the original review.

by ERNEST ANSERMET
(appeared in 1918 in the Swiss "Revue Romande")
The first thing that strikes one about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra is the astonishing perfection, the superb taste and the fervor of its playing. I couldn't tell whether these artists feel it is their duty to be sincere, or whether they are driven by the idea that they have a "mission" to fulfill, or whether they are convinced of the "nobility" of their task, or have that holy audacity and that sacred "valor" which the musical code requires of our European musicians, nor indeed whether they are animated by any "idea" whatsoever. But I can see they have a very keen sense of the music they love, and a pleasure in making it which they communicate to the hearer with irresistible force a pleasure which pushes them to outdo themselves all the time, to constantly enrich and refine their medium. They play generally without written music, and even when they have it, the score only serves to indicate the general line, for there are very few numbers I have heard them execute twice with exactly the same effects. I imagine that, knowing the voice attributed to them in the harmonic ensemble and conscious of the role their instrument is to play, they can let themselves go, in a certain direction and within certain limits, as their hearts' desire. They are so entirely possessed by the music they play, that they can't stop themselves from dancing inwardly to it in such a way that their playing is a real show. When they indulge in one of their favorite effects, which is to take up the refrain of a dance in a tempo suddenly twice as slow and with redoubled intensity and figuration, a truly gripping thing takes place: it seems as if a great wind is passing over a forest or as if a door is suddenly opened on a wild orgy.


The musician who directs them and who is responsible for creating the ensemble, Mr. Will Marion Cook, is, moreover a master in every respect, and there is no orchestra leader I so delight in seeing conduct. As for the music which makes up their repertory, it is purely vocal, -or for one voice, a vocal quartet, or a choir accompanied by instruments -or again purely instrumental; it bears the names of the composers (all unknown to our world) or is simply marked Traditional. This traditional music is religious in inspiration. It is the index of a whole mode of religion and of a veritable religious art which merits a study of its own. The whole Old Testament is related with a very touching realism and familiarity. There is much about Moses, Gideon, the Jordan, and Pharaoh. In an immense unison, the voices intone: Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go. And suddenly, there they are clapping their hands and beating their feet with the joy of a schoolboy told that the teacher is sick: Good news! Good news! Sweet Chariot's coming


Or else a singer gets up, I got a shoes [pronouncing the s to make it sound nice], you got a shoes, all God's children got a shoes. When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God's heaven. And the word heaven they pronounce in one syllable as he'm, which makes a long resonance in their closed mouths, like a gong. Another time, a deep bass points out the empty platform to one of his companions and invites him to come and relate the battle of Jericho, and it's a terrible story which begins, with the mighty deeds of King Joshua and all sorts of menacing fists and martial treads; then hands are raised and then lowered, and the walls come tumbling down. In a lower tone, but with such a tender accent, the quarter also sings Give me your hand" or sometimes "Brother, give me your hand. There is another very beautiful part in which a female voice sings the ample sweeping melody (wavering between the major and minor) about those who are going away toward the valley of the Jordan to cross the river, while the choir scans with an ever more vehement motif, "Nobody was heard praying."


Of the nonanonymous works, some are related to a greater or lesser extent to these religiously inspired works, others sing of the sweetness of Georgia peaches, or of the perfume of flowers, or of country, mother, or sweetheart; the instrumental works are rags or even European dances. Among the authors some are Negroes, but these are the exceptions. Even though the author does not have a European origin, the music does, for most ragtime, for example, is founded on well-known motifs or on formulas peculiar to our art -there is one on the Wedding March from Midsummer Night's Dream, another on Rachmaninoff's celebrated Prelude, another on typical Debussy chords, another simply on the major scale.


The aforementioned traditional music itself has its source as could doubtless be easily rediscovered, in the songs the Negroes learned from the English missionaries. Thus, all or nearly all, the music of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra is in origin foreign to these Negroes. How is this possible? Because it is not the material that makes Negro music, it is the spirit. . . .


Nevertheless, some works in the repertory of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra mark the passage from oral tradition to written tradition, or, if you choose, from popular art to leanred art. First we have a number for choir choir, soprano, and orchestra, inspired by the traditional works, and signed Dett. On a Biblical text, Listen to the Lambs, which Handel too has treated in the Messiah, this musician has written a work which is very simple yet very pure and has a beautiful rapturous quality. Or we have some works of Will Marion Cook, including a very fine vocal scene entitled Rainsong. Perhaps one of these days we shall see the Glinka of Negro music. But I am inclined to think that the strongest manifestation of the racial genius lies in the Blues.


The blues occurs when the Negro is sad, when he is far from his home, his mother, or his sweetheart. Then he thinks of a motif or a preferred rhythm and takes his trombone, or his violin, or his banjo, or his clarinet, or his drum, or else he sings, or simply dances. And on the chosen motif, he plumbs the depths of his imagination. This makes his sadness pass away—it is the Blues.


There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet. I've heard two of them which he elaborated at great length. They are admirable equally for their richness of invention, their force of accent, and their daring novelty and unexpected turns. These solos already show the germ of a new style. Their form is gripping, abrupt, harsh, with a brusque and pitiless ending like that of Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it—it is Sidney Bechet. When one has tried so often to find in the past one of those figures to whom we owe the creation of our art as we know it today—those men of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, who wrote the expressive works of dance airs which cleared the way for Haydn and Mozart—what a moving thing it is to meet this black, fat boy with white teeth and narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but can say nothing of his art, except that he follows his "own way"—and then one considers that perhaps his "own way" is the highway along which the whole world will swing tomorrow.

fiddle jam 2 - May 11th 09

I'm very much learning improvisation as I go along. got into this whole thing quite late, so I hope you'll see some progress over time, and I can share some tips and some of my challenges along the way. At moment it's about finding the best notes to head each phrase towards. first it's about just finding the obvious ones, but later for a more sophisticated sound, it's about finding those alternative notes and chords that add interest and colour to an improvised melody. This is todays attempt.