Let's talk about Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation

wow yous got brains

 

You know Lydia too?

 

...and it's to do with the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation. Some years ago she was duped into attending a hapless Uni music course, which included a section on giving Community Workshops. As part of this, she attended a jazz workshop which was being delivered by an eminent Scottish classical composer - who had never played a note of jazz in his life. What was he using to explain basic improv on a II-7 V7 Imaj7 to high school kids? Yip, the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation !!!???!! What a clever boy, eh? My wife gave him a BIG row, and, being an aminent Scottish classical composer who had never played a note of jazz in his life, he wasn't amused. Neither were the poor kids @ the workshop right enough - prob put them off jazz for good!

 

c'mon, name some names! since i'm doing a somewhat hapless uni music course in scotland, i have a right to know! it could be me next time!

 

I actually read that book in ninth grade, back around 1984 or so. And I understood it. I'm a dork.

 

How many well-known,living, Scottish Classical composers are there!!??


James McMilllan...and ...?

 

Don't be put off by the long name, George Russell's Lydian Concept is actually perfectly useful and pertinent. It's neither the alpha and omega of jazz improvisation/composition nor an effective way of explaining Western art music from "Bach to Stravinsky" (as the claims would have it), but it's cool. George had some influence on some pretty important people (he takes credit--maybe more than he is due--for Miles' "invention" of modal jazz), but most importantly he wrote some wicked cool stuff based on his Concept ideas--"New York, New York" and "Jazz Workshop" and "The Outer View" are all albums that sound like nothing else, very creative writing and great playing and all that jazz.

Oh wait, this was a joke thread and I took the bait...crap.

 

I shouldn't worry - Jamie Cullum is doing a good enough job of putting kids off Jazz for life - and nobody likes Jazz when they're young anyway - they'll come back to it as they approach middle age...

 

well, he said "eminent", which could just mean "the front rank of scottish composers" although it is as you say a pretty limited front rank...

ugh, jamie cullum... as a reasonably young person who likes jazz, the less said of him the better!

 

It does force you to think about tonal organization differently. However, (1) it really is just a recentering of normal jazz theory, from the root to the fourth of the origin scale; and (2) it is overly fascinated by "weird notes," and probably only really useful in so-called "modern" music like (surprise) Russell's. But sometimes I pick it up to get some different neurons firing.

 

I wonder why this seems to be true? Does something naturally change in one's brain as one gets older about musical tastes, or is it just a progression of musical learning to move into more complex music? Both?

These days, its all about jazz... not that I cannot appreciate a round of Led Zep once in a while, and am happy Cream is doing reunion concerts, but I'm shedding Standards and working on jazz soloing today.

 

What the heck is a "weird note?" Russell's 45-year-old recordings of "modern" music are pretty tame-sounding by now, and the stuff he wrote about in his first book in the early 50's (before there was a standard approach to jazz theory, and before everyone equated chords to scales and sat around practicing their Jerry Coker "Patterns For Jazz" and playing along with their Jamey Aebersold recordings with the chord-scale syllabus on the back page) has long since been assimilated into the playing of everyone from Coltrane to Chris Potter. (Not that they got it from him--I don't think his books are nearly as influential as he claims them to be--but the standard practice of jazz improvisation eventually incorporated the same ideas he was writing about.)

Of course, I played in Russell's big band when I was in Boston, so my ideas about what's weird and what's not may be different from someone else's...

 

I meant "weird" like automatically raising fourths and fifths -- weird in the context of diatonic harmony. Weird for 196? -- actually, it wasn't even very weird then. Weird if you understood jazz to mean "cool." Like, self-consciously weird.

I have a cool recording of him using electronic noises with a big band and this really great, out, tenor player. It sounds like a casserole that hasn't quite "jelled" yet -- disparate things all going on together. Cool you were in his band; I expect it must've been challenging.

 

i suspect this is the case... having been exposed to increasingly complex classical music since i was 11 (when i started playing in orchestras) i can now listen to any kind of extreme jazz or classical with enjoyment... except opera... never got in to opera... while my taste for popular music is there but not tolerant of total spacewasters.

 

Sally Beamish. Lyell Creswell. Robert Crawford. Martin Dalby. Peter Maxwell Davis. David Dorward. John Maxwell Geddes. Edward McGuire. Nigel Osborne. Ronald Stevenson.

Just because you've not heard of them...

 

I've heard of Peter Maxwell Davies and know that he was born in Salford, Manchester and is therefore ENGLISH!!

 

Besides - how can somebody be well-know if nobody has heard of them!!??

And by that I mean outside Scotland!!

 

Funny. I thought Radio 3's studios were in London. So all these composers who've been broadcast on Radio 3 were somehow only listened to in Scotland...?

I agree that the man on the Clapham Omnibus may not have heard of Sally Beamish. But he probably hasn't heard of Charles Mingus either. It's all a matter of degree and I think Scotland does pretty well for a nation of only 5 million.

BTW Peter Maxwell Davis has lived in Orkney for many years. I think he might even no longer be referred to as an incomer.

 

for the scottish tbers:
is Ivor Cutler still alive ?

"take two notes and rub them together until one catches fire"