BREAK the improv barrier!

[dfrankjazz]

For all of you VAMP-ires out there) You can do this!

Beginning Improv using modal vamps w/Dave Frank

[danthecomposer]

I personally recommend all of Dave Frank's videos on YT.  If you know a lot already, you will always find at least one diamond in the video.

[ted]

I also watch your videos, Dave, as you know, largely because, unlike most people who expound on such things, you seem to actually enjoy your music. My principal reservation concerns the unbridled hagiolatry expressed about various famous players. Improvisation, aside from the purely and trivially imitative sort, concerns the lifelong building of a highly personal universe of sound and its psychic implications. Jarrett, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and all the rest are sometimes interesting but not compulsory; they cannot possibly play the sounds essential to move me to the maximum extent. Only I can do that, and the implication that musical consciousness must necessarily be dominated by the sounds produced by an arcane few, most of them long dead, and the living ones of little interest to me personally, amounts to suggesting I must live somebody else's dream, something I rightly refuse to do.

I can voice this gentle but valid objection here because Pianostreet is a broadminded forum. Were I to do it in the other place the reaction would be like Monty Python's sixteen tons, with their incessant greatest this and best that. It is not necessary to listen to, even less like, any famous music at all, and certainly not jazz or classical, in order to forge one's personal improvisational universe. That is the simple truth of the matter.

Having said that, I too invariably find much to please me in your generous presentations. What Jarrett, or any other famous person does - and I hasten to add I have many of Jarrett's recordings - may or may not be relevant to a particular player depending on personal taste. There is no universality about it.

[dfrankjazz]

It's like the story about the old guy in a saloon in Memphis. He could play only one tune, which he played well every day of his life. Somebody asked him what he thought about Art Tatum. He said with a snark, "He has his style, I have mine".



Finding your own voice is the whole lifelong process..

thanks for your friendship and support Ted, blessings and keep swingin man!

DF

[dcstudio]

lol... I love that you say first--you can do this!!  really if you can just convince them of that little fact then you know---somewhere down the line--the light will come on.   I like your style