Helloooooo Out There

Hi Angelo,
Seems I remember working through ‘Willow…’. I’ll have to dig it up again.

My project to build a practice workshop has rather stalled out but hopefully I’ll resurrect it again next year.

Thanks for posting.

Hi guys…

Glad to see that there is still a bit of activity. I tried generating activity in this forum a while back, but it seemed to fizzle. I have said this on other occasions, but will say it again – David Sudnow is/was singularly the most influential person in my musical journey. He solidified for me a practical approach to making sense out of all the music theory, as well as giving me a solid sense of how to practice. I really would like to see this site continue to exist and even better, flourish. Kudos to David Haynes for keeping the Sudnow method alive and available.

I still have my Roland V-Grand, and am ever grateful to my wife for pushing me to just shut up and buy it. 🙂 This thing is so good that it transcends the constant march of new products being introduced every year. It is a pleasure to play. I have played Roland’s new line (LX-17 and similar), and can safely say that they have yet to top the V-Grand/V-Piano. David Haynes was my influence for getting it (beyond my wife’s urging). He bought a Yamaha grand way back when and I always thought that was the coolest thing – go for the best right away and don’t look back.

As for song play, I still listen a lot to Jim Haskins’ cocktail piano. I have all of his CDs. Of course, I listen to others too. I still enjoy Bill Evans, but have lately been re-discovering Keith Jarrett. Still, my absolute favorite vocal collection is the Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks series.

As for playing, I have always been interested in pianists along the lines of David Lanz, Michele McLaughlin, and others, as well as the standards via the Sudnow method. I seem to move between spending time on standards via the Sudnow method and learning music from these “new age” players by ear off the recordings.

There are two books (related to the Sudnow method) that I would like to recommend to folks here. They do not conflict with the Sudnow method. If anything, consider them as extensions, like “super piano chats”:

Harmonic Foundation For Jazz and Popular Music by Jimmy Amadie

Piano Improvisation: A Powerful Practical system by Frank Caruso and Karl Mollison

The first book is all about creating chord voicings and harmonizing a melody. It is essentially a superset of the Sudnow voicing rules. The book has been around jazz circles for a long time, went out of print, and then was picked up again (though I don’t know for how long). Consider that both Mel Torme and Woody Herman wrote forewords for the book.

The second book is a solid approach to improvising. One really important aspect of this book is that it gives EXACT fingering for playing improv lines on the piano. Frank Caruso is an active full time pro player and jazz piano teacher and says that the fingerings are very important so you don’t box yourself into a corner while improvising. Fingering has always been something of a mystery to me on the piano, and this book directly addresses that, as well as giving you a solid vocabulary for improvising in most any style. Caruso says it is the approach he uses on gigs all the time.

Often, when somebody recommends a book or course, it steers away from the Sudnow method. These two books really don’t. I would say that after you get a few tunes under your belt, these are a good means of furthering your skill set, rather than a means to move away from the Sudnow method and on to something else. From my perspective, if one were to focus solely on the Sudnow approach, then all you really need to go on forever with new ideas as a sort of “Part 2”, would be these two books. I own lots of books and methods, and in hindsight, I can definitely whittle it down to these two and discard the rest.

Tony

There is one other book I want to recommend. I didn’t think of it earlier because it is a guitar book, but the information is definitely relevant to the piano and the Sudnow method. Robert Conti, the jazz guitarist has quite a few teaching materials available in the form of both books and DVDs. He has two books that focus on playing “chord melody” (the guitar version of cocktail style piano).

The first book “Chord Melody Assembly Line” is essentially parallel to the Sudnow method for piano, and is not what I am recommending.

The second book “The Formula” shows how, by manipulating the bass line, you can play a different series of chords every time you play the same melodic passage. Though the book shows guitar chord diagrams, the information is perfect for the piano, and Conti told me that keyboard players are buying the book.

You use whatever Sudnow voicing rules you want, but the chord being voiced is then dictated by the bass note you choose using Conti’s approach, rather than what some fakebook dictates. This, then, is very relevant to the Sudnow method, rather than steering you away on some tangent.

Tony

Thanks Tony. I put the Caruso book on my Christmas list.
You might have been the one who pointed me toward the Tim Richards book on Blues Improvisation. Very good book but my problem is still carving out the time to work on stuff.