Cornelius Bumpus

Watching a video of Steely Dan's the other night I was enjoying the solos of tenor sax player Cornelius Bumpus - Chris Potter was playing in the same group but somehow these touched me more. Wanting to find out more about him I googled and found out that sadly he had died in 2004 of a heart attack. Fortunately www.corneliusbumpus.com is still there and has lots of information, links to buy his cd's as well as mp3 preview clips.

Indigo Jazz festival Bangalore

We were very happy to be invited to play again this year at the Indigo jazz festival in Bangalore. Here is a review of the two day event by the Hindu's excellent jazz writer JAZZEBEL.

http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2009/02/09/stories/2009020951240300.htm

Mixing up scales

Just a little exercise I found to practise major scales a little differently. Ascend in the normal way but coming down change the 2nd and root, to the corresponding degrees of the scale a semi tone above. ie C B A G F E D# C#. Continue by ascending in the new scale you have now reached and apply the same idea. Once this is completed in all keys on the descent try changing the last 3(4, 5 etc) notes to the scale chromatically above.

This was an idea i wanted to try in order to improve my fluency and flexibility of changing from one scale to another during soloing. Lets see if it works! I see there are many more possibilities to this and will post some more ideas when I find them.

All about jazz forum

Ive been following several music forums by RSS feed for some time including the excellent saxontheweb. Somehow I had missed the forum at allaboutjazz.com but its another very good resource with alot of reading on just about every area of jazz possible.

http://forum.saxontheweb.net/
http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/