Star Of Jupiter - Intro Lick

Here's a line from 'Star Of Jupiter' recorded at Regatta Bar Boston, as recent as 3/6-2013 with a transcription by Jim Needham. Jim writes:

Here's a transcription of the lick starting around 17 seconds into this clip:

The sound quality isn't great, but the lick caught my ear. I've been thinking of the lick as side slipping pentatonic phrases. The phrases have slight variations or the point in the lick where the change occurs varies. It gives the whole thing a more interesting sound than just planning a repeated phrase chromatically.

The same motif that's used at the end of the lick is used in the earlier part of the lick starting around 16th fret. It's pretty difficult to hear what's going on in that section because there's clipping in the recording.

There's a core phrase which is side slipped chromatically, but the sideslip is done in one of two different places.

 

This makes the whole thing sound a bit less predictable than just side slipping at the same point in the phrase. The motif file shows an example of each way of side slipping the lick. The phrase is then used in the fast runs starting in measures 5 and 9.

There's lots of good stuff in the intro (as usual), but the arpeggio at the end of the intro, at about 1m30s, sounds cool, and falls easily under the fingers for guitar. It's a B7b5 arp played over a G bass to give a G9. I think it's played so that it alternates one and two notes per string. For picking aficionados, I think Kurt hammers on the second note where there's two notes on the string, and alternate picks the first note on each string rather than sweeping.

e |----------------------13h17p13-------------------------|
B |-------------------15----------15----------------------|
G |-------------14h16----------------16p14----------------|
D |----------15----------------------------15-------------|
A |----14h17----------------------------------17p14-------|
E |-15----------------------------------------------15-13-|

I realise this stuff is a bit sketchy, it's just some notes I made while transcribing the lick.

Thanks to Jim for sharing this!

- Download 'Star Of Jupiter Intro Motif' as .PDF
- Download 'Star Of Jupiter Intro' as .PDF

More body... more soul... more pentatonics

Bryan Campbell just sendt me this transcription from 'Body and soul' also from the Gdansk clinic.
This is not the first time, I've mentioned this tune on this site. Click here to view the other posts referring to 'Body and soul'. This transcription starts around 14:37

- Download as .PDF

And while we're talking about the Gdansk clinic, Rafalmazurkazik has recently uploaded yet another video from the clinic with Kurt playing pentationcs.

If you want to know more about Kurts use of pentatonics, check out the post "Pentatonics" from October 2012.

Lewis and Clark College Clinic

This is the first part from a clinic at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Almost half an hour of talk with questions like:

• "When did you start?"
• "Did you have some early teachers on the guitar?"
• "What have music on the guitar meant in our life?"
• "What else would you rather have done?"
• "Did you go to college?"
• "Any one or anything you listen to?"
• "Do you write on the piano, guitar,...?"

...to highlight a few of them :-)

I do hope that yesterdaysfire (who upload the video) will share the second part with us - where Kurt actually plays.

Donations!

Just a quick shout out to say thanks to Philippe! Yesterday I received the very first ever donation to the site “The music of Kurt Rosenwinkel” – AWESOME! I do appreciate it when someone throws a few coins in my direction. Everything on the site is of course 100% available for free. I do spend a lot of time on creating the content for the site, so to me a few coins or affiliate shopping sends a clear message that someone is very appreciative of my work.

"Body and Soul" 1+7 & 3+5

From the Gdansk clinic I've transcribed the 1+7 & 5+3 exercise Kurt plays over "Body and Soul". He plays a few different chords than what's written in The Realbook. This one also includes lots of susbistutions. It's so simple and yet it, sounds so good.
Also check out the transcription from November 2012 with the same exercise or the two voicings per chord study.

Here's the part at 3:55 where Kurt plays through the changes with some different voicings. ( video below )

And here's a transcription of the exercise that starts about 12:50 minutes in.
- Download as .PDF


Here's a quick transcription of the Ebm7 chords Kurt plays, just after saying "Ebmin7, so what have you got?" ( starts at 21:36 ).

Kurt Rosenwinkel Clinic Gdansk

I came across these videos on YouTube posted by Rafalmazurkazik. The video is from the Academy of Music. S. Moniuszko in Gdansk and it's recorded on 1. December 2012. It's certainly the most recent clinic recording I've come across - awesome! The audio and video quality really good.

I haven't had a chance to transcribe anything from these videos yet, but if you have, please send it my way.

#1 The language of music


#2 "Ruby My Dear" improvisation


#3 Teaching approach


#4 Chord melody over "Body and soul" (  Transcription here  )

#5 Legato


#6 Technique and timing problems


#7 Articulation and phrasing

"Little dreamer"

Here's another one from Rob Wolfe who earlier send me a transcription of "Portuguese". This time Rob  sendt me a chart for the tune "Little Dreamer". He writes:

...It's really just a sketch written with the assumption that the person reading it has heard the tune. I didn't write down the melody because it's so simple that it can be remembered by listening to the song a few times. 

The 2nd chord in the B section is Ab major7 with no 5th... If you want tensions, the best chord scale in my opinion is Lydian #5 #9.

It was transcribed from the NPR Village Vanguard recording from January 7, 2009. Below you'll find a link so you can stream that set and hear the tune. It's the second song in the set and starts around 17:00 minutes in: http://www.wbgo.org/internal/mediaplayer/?podcastID=528

There aren't really any publicly available recordings of this tune besides a version on Youtube with the Polish female jazz singer Grażyna Auguścik.

- Download the .PDF

"Under it all"

Rob Wolfe send me a transcription of "Portuguese" from the unreleased album "Under it all". Robert writes:

...Note that on the "voicings" page, those are the voicings I like most when playing the song. Not all of them are exactly what's played on the recording (although most of them are). Also, there's a trivial typo on the D/C chord: it's 7th position, not 5th.

- Download "Portuguese.PDF"

A while back I have had the opportunity to thoroughly listen to this album and it is absolutely stunning! He also writes that he has done this transcription from a YouTube clip. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the static image in the video was my own creation. I made this album cover and shared it on my old site www.rosendahl.wep.dk which is long gone now.



Here's the tracklist for "Under it all" with YouTube links:

01 Brooklyn Sometimes

02 Number 10

03 Love Signs

04 Under It All

05 The Past Intact

06 The Cloister

07 Aurora (Figures)

08 Turns (also on the transcription page)

09 Recognized

10 Portuguese

You might be wondering why this album never was released, so here's the story.

..."That record was called Under it All," Rosenwinkel says, "and my inspiration for that record was all the blueprints—all of the technical information and blueprints beneath everything we use on a day-to-day basis. My father's an architect and I've always been fascinated by architectural drawings. During the time we recorded Under It All my room was just covered wall-to-wall with architectural drawings.
I didn't know what any of the symbols meant—I couldn't interpret them literally—but to me the specificity of all of the blueprints was inspiring to me, and yet was totally abstract because I didn't know how to interpret them; but I loved the idea of specificity and abstractness. And that, of course, is really what's underlying music—it's very specific but at the same time totally abstract.

And so that was my inspiration for the concept of the record," Rosenwinkel continues, "which was just a personal aesthetic concept of my own. I made the record with the same people as on Enemies—Jeff, Ben, Mark and Scott—and we recorded it, we loved it and then the merger happened and I got sent to Verve. Verve saw that I had this record that I had just made and I also had this record that I had made a couple of years before, and they said that they wanted to put out the one that I had made before, which became The Enemies of Energy.
That was cool for me, because I had done that one all by myself, had raised the money and was in debt to people for making it. So Verve bought it from me and that was good—I was able to get paid and pay everybody back for it.

"Musically the two records are pretty closely related," continues Rosenwinkel, "in that they are both very compositional, very orchestrated, they have some production elements — although Enemies has some post production and Under It All doesn't — we played it all live. But one of the biggest differences, and I think this is one of the reasons Verve didn't want to put it out, on Under It All I was using a guitar synthesizer—not on the whole thing, but on some of it, and they weren't into that.
They really wanted to put me forward as a guitarist and I think that they had a record that was very compositional and I wasn't featuring myself as a guitarist hardly at all. And when I was featured I was playing guitar synthesizer, so they didn't really see, from a marketing standpoint, that it would represent the new guitarist, Kurt Rosenwinkel.

"I don't really care if Under It All ever gets released," Rosenwinkel concludes. Copies are floating around here and there, but my work is done. I would feel conflicted if I hadn't had the chance to finish it; but having finished it, it's totally mastered it's all there — I don't really feel the necessity to see it released. I've finished it, I've done it, and I've completed what I had to do. So whatever happens in its life, I wish it all the best—and I'm sure it'll come out sometime in some way. It's already out as far as I'm concerned in that if anybody really wants to get it they can find it."

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