Saturday 24 September 2011

Peter Bernstein on listening at the start of tunes

At the recent Barry Harris gig at Pizza Express I was really struck by the way that Barry would start a tune, unannounced then look up to see if bass player Dave Green had got it and Dave and drummer Steve Brown would just slide seamlessly in.

It's just about listening.

In this clip Peter Bernstein talks about starting tunes with no words spoken. Just listening and following, or leading the other musicians in:
 If you can just learn to follow and say, "I hear what he's playing, I hear what key he's playing it in, and it's obvious what tempo he's playing it in (hopefully)," and go from there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting concept and I have certainly observed how much time is wasted between tunes - like he says - what tune, what key, what tempo, solo order, 4s or not, etc. However, you would need to be very experienced in the jazz repertoire and be playing with similarly experienced others for this intuitive beginnings process to work, though.

John Clarke

John Harris said...

Hi John, I'm sure many reasonably experienced could do this with jam session favourites - All the Things, Beautiful Love, My Funny Valentine, Autumn Leaves, Summertime, Blues, Rhythm Changes, Softly, Perdido, Misty, So What, Body & Soul etc. Certainly something to aspire to, and I guess you have to start somewhere (i.e. before having learnt the Real Book backwards in every key).

John

Anonymous said...

An inspiring lesson from PB - thanks for posting this John.

Bill