The first challenge will be the #DFBlues challenge. Simply post a video of yourself playing a 12 bar blues for a minute or less on Social Media and make sure you use the ‘#DFBLUES’
At the end of January I’ll pick my favourite three, tell you why they are my favourites and the winner will get an exclusive ‘Coffee with Dan’ mug!
There is a good mixture of old classics and new players, so get listening and GET SHARING!
Naturally as I’m a jazzer and primarily a tenor player, it’s going to be biased towards those, but please feel free to add your own and share your playlists back with me via the forum.
If ‘Something went wrong, please try again later’ is displayed by Spotify – head over to Chrome and it will work there, or simply follow me on Spotify and you can view it! (Safari doesn’t like the way Spotify wants to track you and I)
In 1959 Miles Davis released Kind of Blue (the best selling jazz album of all time), John Coltrane (who plays tenor sax on Kind of Blue) recorded his seminal Giant Steps album and Ornette Coleman pointed to the direction of jazz in the 1960’s with The Shape of Jazz to Come. One also must not forget the contributions of Dave Brubeck and his Time Out album, (featuring Paul Desmond’s ‘Take Five’), Charles Mingus with his amazing Ah Um & amazing contributions by Cannonball Adderley, Coleman Hawkins, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Oscar Peterson, (who released 8 albums in this year!)
1959 also saw the death of two of the most important artists in the development of jazz both before the Second World War and after it, Billie Holliday and Lester Young, great friends off the band stand, an amazing partnership on it and died within weeks of each other.
So listen to the playlists below and be sure to come along to one of our concerts celebrating this amazing year in jazz history. We’re at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on Sunday, 3rd March and the Cockpit London on Monday, 15th April with more dates to come!
Getting the ‘something went wrong’ message for Spotify? It’s not us, it’s Safari, (or the web browser you’re using.) We know it works in Google Chrome.
Rob now studies Classical Saxophone at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but studied with Dan Forshaw and Cambridge Saxophone from 2012 – 2015. Rob won the Woodwind final and played with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for the final (watch from about 48 minutes) – sadly the BBC will remove this programme after 31 days, we will hunt for another recording!
At least 85%, possibly as high as 95% of Bebop tunes are ‘heads’ written over songs from musicals and shows of the 1930’s and 40’s. Musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie did this to avoid paying royalties in the recording studio for the songs they were using in the clubs. Popular songs such as ‘How High The Moon’ (which turned into Parker’s Ornithology) and ‘I got Rhythm’ (Anthropology) were transformed into instrumental songs, often pushing the technical demands of the player.
This playlist is meant to give you a starting off point. There’s no doubt that if you want to get better at improvising, then learning these songs, (and I mean learning, that’s NO PRINTED MUSIC,) will give you a greater vocabulary to work with.
John Coltrane was born on 23rd September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina. He grew up in Philadelphia and made his name alongside Miles Davis, before becoming a superstar in his own right. Coltrane, like Charlie Parker has influenced every saxophonist who has come after them, be it in jazz or classical music.
As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history. He received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007.[2] His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son, Ravi Coltrane, is also a saxophonist.