The Improviser's Bass Method Pdf Download
Sofie Kovalcheck
I've been playing bass guitar for around 8 months and have mostly been noodling around learning songs through tab (I can read bass clef but not well). I also know the basic major, minor, and pentatonic scales/the notes on the fretboard up to fret 5. I want to start taking bass more seriously & start getting into walking bass lines/improvisation/jazz and saw the book The Improviser's Bass Method by Check Sher suggested on here. Has anyone tried this book? What'd you think of it? Any other resources to level up my playing?
The most comprehensive bass method book ever published! A complete method book, over 200 pages, filled with information and exercises on all aspects of bass playing, for both acoustic and electric bass.
Plus transcribed bass lines and solos by: Eddie Gomez, Ron Carter, David Friesen, Charles Mingus, James Jamerson, Ray Brown, Paul Jackson, Scott LaFaro, Marcus Miller, George Mraz, Jaco Pastorius, Paul Chambers, Alphonso Johnson, Jimmy Garrison, and more.
Jazz Educators Journal - "What makes the book outstanding is how it covers both the basics and the more creative aspects of bass playing. Recommended for electric or upright bass players at all levels of musicianship."
Eddie Gomez (bassist with Bill Evans, Chick Corea, and many others) - "Chuck Sher has put together a book that is informative, readily comprehensible, and highly imaginative. I recommend it for any bassist interested in expanding his awareness in the art of improvising."
David Friesen (Inner City Records recording artist) - "Chuck Sher has sincerely made an honest and musical effort to bring to bass players a complete book on how to approach the bass violin as a creative instrument... used not as a means to an end, it may become a very valuable source of information to the serious bass player."
Includes transcribed bass lines and solos by: Eddie Gomez, Ron Carter, David Friesen, Charles Mingus, James Jamerson, Ray Brown, Paul Jackson, Scott LaFaro, Marcus Miller, George Mraz, Jaco Pastorius, Paul Chambers, Alphonso Johnson, Jimmy Garrison, and more.
Steinbeck is also a bassist, composer, and improviser. He studied bass with Harrison Bankhead and composition with Ari Brown. His compositions and improvisations are documented on twenty-three recordings. He performs with a number of ensembles, including Low End Theory, co-led with former AACM president Mwata Bowden.
The only comprehensive book ever published on how to play bass in authentic Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Caribbean, Latin Jazz & South American styles.
Over 250 pages of transcriptions of Oscar Stagnaro playing each exercise. Learn from the best!
For over 25 years, Chester Harlan, guitarist, composer, and Berklee College of Music graduate, has dedicated himself to the art of music improvisation, focusing all his instructional work on the development of creativity. His method guides the student step by step towards a deep understanding of the instrument, its technical aspects, and also towards liberating the inner musician within.
In this series of episodes Thomas Martin takes a look at left hand technique, addressing a number of issues commonly experienced by players. This first episode covers the basics of positioning the left hand on the double bass in order to stop the string. Read: Dealing with Dystonia Read: ...
MARK TURNER is a cool and startling draught of fresh air in American jazz. Turner is a tenor saxophonist who recognises the acknowledged role models and yet sounds not quite like any of them, and his unassuming manner masks a probing and hard-won method. He makes you feel the physicality of the sax, but it's done with a tone that's light, almost sing-song, and a delivery that works a compelling linear path, not the tension-and- release climaxes of most improvisers.
This was best demonstrated in the solo cadenza he used to begin a noble treatment of Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti". This was sax playing of spontaneous mastery, the kind of clear-headed intensity which years of work make possible, gloved by melodic substance that welcomes listeners in. A shy-looking beanpole of a man with long, spidery fingers, Turner hugs the horn into himself, as if reluctant to let it escape. No disrespect to Albert Sands (piano), Jeremy Brown (bass) and Stephen Keogh (drums), who offered attentive and limber support, but this was all about the leader. Bereft of the grandstanding excitement that lesser imaginations settle for, Turner's music is fascinating proof of how the language of post-bop keeps finding new ways to go forward.
First, it is important to focus on the central and defining characteristic of jazz within its historical context: improvisation, the creation of new sonic structures and relationships in the real time of performance. Now, improvisation is not unique to jazz, not even in the history of western music-baroque practices of ornamentation and the realization of figured bass constitute important precedents, even though they clearly have no direct bearing on jazz techniques. The importance of jazz improvisation in this cultural context was its re-activation and elaboration of long-dormant creative possibilities. From the point of view of world musical culture as a whole, jazz improvisation is even less anomalous: in fact, most folk or indigenous musical traditions around the world, from raga to flamenco, contain a strong improvisational element.
Like these other folk forms, the tradition of jazz improvisation constitutes what guitarist Derek Bailey calls an "idiom," analogous to a linguistic idiom. Ferdinand de Saussure notes that the "term idiom rightly designates language as reflecting the traits peculiar to a community,"10 while Louis Hjelmslev further distinguishes four types of idiomatic commonality or community: vernacular language, national language, regional language, and physiognomy of expression.11 All of these types have parallels in sub-genres of jazz improvisation (cool, Latin jazz, Dixieland, boogie-woogie). "Idiomatic improvisation," Bailey writes, "is mainly concerned with the expression of an idiom-such as jazz, flamenco or baroque-and takes its identity and motivation from that idiom."12 The idiom forms a reservoir or foundation from which the improviser extracts components to assemble into an appropriate musical utterance according to the rules that define the idiom. The success of the utterance can be measured by the degree to which it simultaneously fits into the pre-existing idiomatic structure and responds to the unique circumstances of the performance situation. In a word, it communicates. As Bailey emphasizes,
No idiomatic improviser is concerned with improvisation as some sort of separate isolated activity. What they are absolutely concerned about is the idiom: for them improvisation serves the idiom and is the expression of that idiom. But it still remains that one of the main effects of improvisation is on the performer, providing him with a creative involvement and maintaining his commitment. So, in these two functions, improvisation supplies a way of guaranteeing the authenticity of the idiom, which also, avoiding the stranglehold of academic authority, provides the motor for change and continuous development.13
The supreme importance of the governing idiom can be measured by the terminology used by its practitioners: "The word 'improvisation' is actually very little used by improvising musicians. Idiomatic improvisers, in describing what they do, use the name of the idiom. They 'play flamenco' or 'play jazz'; some refer to what they do as just 'playing'" (Bailey xii).
Idiomatic improvisational techniques are the key to the continuity and stability of jazz (and other musical idioms), not just because of the way they form a framework for clear expression and communication among those competent in the idiom, but also because of their pedagogical utility. When musicians learn to "play jazz," they are learning the idiom just as musicians learning to play baroque music or raga learn an idiom, though not necessarily through the same methods. The pedagogic effectiveness of idiomatic techniques is a double-edged sword, however, especially in current jazz:
The tendency to derivativeness and the prevalence of imitative playing in all idiomatic improvisation seems to have produced in jazz a situation where increasingly the music became identified with the playing style of a handful of musicians. Strangely enough, the number of acceptable models appears to get smaller as time goes on. The performing style of the rest, the vast majority of players, is invariably identified by association with or reference to one of the 'great' players on his instrument.... This situation, which can be one of the main drawbacks in any improvised music, stems, of course, from practices which are an intrinsic part of it.... [T]he learning method in any idiomatic improvisation does have obvious dangers. It is clear that the three stages-choosing a master, absorbing his skills through practical imitation, developing an individual style and attitude from that foundation-have a tendency, very often, to be reduced to two stages with the hardest step, the last one, omitted.14
A good example of what Coleman means by this can be seen in his reflections on his contribution to the soundtrack of David Cronenberg's 1991 film adaptation (I use the term loosely) of William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch. Coleman insists that the entire film "is harmolodic, meaning all parts are equal. Its score and script are harmolodic. The actor's sound, scenes, dialogue, objects and colors have equal relation to the art of Naked Lunch."39 I take this to mean that he considers the film to be the result of an active, free-form, real-time collaboration between himself, Cronenberg and Burroughs (an old friend of Coleman's, with whom he appeared in Conrad Rooks' film Chappaqua and with whom he traveled in Morocco), as well as the film's production staff.
Whether it's an accurate description of the film or not, this claim certainly raises the stakes involved in harmolodic, but Coleman doesn't stop there either. As Howard Mandel notes, "Coleman...holds two ideas tenaciously: the primacy of the individual and the possibility of a perfect world modeled on musical rapport."40 Harmolodic theory, then, is a utopian social philosophy as much as it's an avant-garde musical or artistic method, like Cardew's ethics of improvisation. This parallel is worth pursuing at greater length. Cardew's experience with AMM led him beyond the traditional ensemble structure of leaders and accompanists to a much more egalitarian approach, and Coleman's commitment to harmolodic has had a similar effect. He has always refused to accept descriptions of his groups that place him in the center; as he says, "[b]ecause people hear the horn standing out in front, they think that I am doing the soloing, but that's just the sound of the instruments.... I am with a band based upon everyone creating an instant melody, composition, from what people used to call improvising."41 Since everyone creates and therefore composes, no one really leads-or everyone does together. The focus is on the group as a community of equals whose relationships are defined by reciprocity, not the hierarchy of solo and rhythm or melody and accompaniment. Coleman makes a concerted effort to "give them what I'm playing and say, 'You take this and you do anything you want to do with it. If you want to take it apart, put it together, put Silly Putty on it, whatever it will do for you, give it back to me that way, then I'll interpret it from what I hear.'"42
The radical egalitarianism of this conception of ensemble dynamics also characterizes Coleman's attitude toward technique, which resembles Cardew's plans for the Scratch Orchestra. His invitation to "Take this and do anything you want to it" is not directed only at virtuosos but, as he said to Mandel, at
anybody-my band, you, anyone. If you said, 'Ornette, I like your playing music but I have never played. Do you think I could? What instrument?' I think we could get together and find something that you could express, that had something to do with you, that we could play together, and go out and make a performance as good as anyone else. This is what I believe.43