teach them about the basics of improvising and playing jazz you have beginning to think can't do they have all scales yeah right we are and somebody was asking how do you define key and when the musicians talk about we're in the key of c and we're just explaining that to the key of c means that the notes of the c scale are being used for the composition and those are the basic no such you're going to use when you play that composition do we have an example to begin well we could do we could so just from that  tricky because these instruments are in the key of c they're called non transposing instruments so they're actually using the notes of the key of c the saxophone plays a minor third lower so i'm using the notes of the key of a to make it sound a right forth so there's a lot of there's a lot of theory that goes into jazz and music and for that matter that's where you need a good a ring you have to make a big band sound oh yeah they're interested about how to transpose all the instruments and what to do with them and what their ranges are how high they can play how low they can play where they sound good some parts some not some sound as good as others lots of things to think about yeah rangers job is tough beautiful a do we have a song well what do with what i was thinking of doing is to take that basic blues piece and show you what we would do with a student that has never played jazz before so i'm going to put this first i'm going to we're going to then i put those mike back i'm going to play two notes of what we call the blue scale now the blues scale kind of was something that was intuitive in the thirty's forty's there wasn't a lot of music written down they just they just played what they heard and and and most of the black musicians at that time were so adept at hearing these kinds of things from their past my dad used to be a musician and he played at the sarasota tell and unfortunately in those days they were they had a party on one floor was was all white in a party and one on the floor was all black and neither could the people go from one floor to the other was prohibited crazy stuff and but my father would go to the fire escape  sneak up and he'd listen to the floor up above him then you'd hear the scale and he come down and play it but he never told me when i was a kid what the notes where because he didn't really know he just was doing it intuitively do i took a course at uva am as a matter of fact in the seventy's and this fellow come to rosa wrote it all out and i went oh those of the notes of got to play so you write it out for the kids and then they have something to hold onto it and you try to make it you tell the kids you cannot make a mistake it's impossible if you just play to know it's so i'm going to play two notes and first we do a little call and response so bob and i are going to do a call and response based on two notes i'll play to in a certain rhythm then he'll copy  me so that goes on and gives the kids of a little bit of an idea of what they do and they're the ones that are doing the call and response they're the ones that are doing the copying i'm now we're going to play that same twelve bar blues and usually in a twelve bar  a group and we're going to play that they're going to play the same course they did a little while ago and instead of us me playing the melody this time i'm going to improvise to know and to make it simple for the kids and that's what you want to do and so you're you know you're now there's a lot of things you can teach them and that you notice that sometimes i play loud sometimes i played soft sometimes i growled into this a bit and made a different amber or tone quality sometimes i played short notes sometimes a play long notes it's important to leave empty spaces wynton marsalis was here a few years ago and there was a student you have him that was playing a storm and he was just and went and said stop he said take a breath because when somebody keeps you even when this happens when speaking when somebody keeps talking and talking and talking talking like i am now unfortunately you can't remember what they said if they don't stop  ok so when you play jazz sometimes you have to have a space empty spaces gets to be really important so now we're going to do the same thing and we're going to add a few more notes i'm going to play the blues scale first to hear it let you hear what it sounds like and then we're going to use more notes of that scale so you can see as the child progress is they can keep adding notes as they feel comfortable and then you do that a few times and we'd say that's a chorus we say take the chorus and you do take you just been would probably take two or three days that's a short tune two or three of course is like that and i used all the notes of the scale in that case but i would i would try to if the student was feeling a little bit uneasy about that many notes and they didn't know the scale that well i would probably suggest that they played three notes rather than all of the notes but i jumped ahead a little bit so then finally after a little bit while if you do that in order you get something called the chromatic scale which is every note there are known in our western civilization music there are no notes in between in china there are but not here so it would sound a chromatic scale sounds like this so i can play i can play all the notes of that scale but you have to learn which ones fit the chords and which ones don't so that it gets a little bit of your training and i'm going to land on certain notes that work but i'll play all of them so it gets more complex ok and you know there are other scales when you play jazz a lot of times you can use the you can use the commands go anytime you want a fellow named george volunteers a great improviser lives in the area and i played with him songs like that and that's a different scale and it sounds latin jazz sounds more latin more more of the way it would sound in south america and that's kind of you know what we do with the kids and little by little you know they start to get the hang of it if they go practice it so that you have the class at home we're having a class at home oh that's right sure sure there you go good i'm really fascinated with it good so do we have one song i think that you have brought a couple of them that how insensitive that is your being we can make a little trip to brazil we could do that ok you like that i love it thank  much so this is going to be a kind of the next step when i'll be playing the head or the melody at first and then after that i'll play i'll improvise on the chords of that song or the key in that and that key and when i'm done i'm going to pass it over to bob and then he'll improvise and then we'll pass it to andy and he'll improvise and when he's done we come back to me and i'll play the head again and that's the kind of the pattern that is pickled wrinkle in winter harbor maine and there were five guys that were had played with some fantastic people the bass player played with cody carmichael which just blew me away and that's that's a real big time and they were great players and they found out that i played in told me to bring my horn and i just sat in with them and it's amazing how everybody just knows what to do because there's this universal pattern that we're going to show you now teach well you should play well so they really pushed performance and i was a clarinet major i know i didn't play much saxophone at that time and then i went out into the world and i could play well so i played a lot but i taught mainly that was my thing that i like the most and i i wanted to be a music teacher and my dad was one also so i taught for forty years when i came to vermont i started to take on more responsibilities and i think because of the extra responsibilities i was taking on and the fact i was having some success at charlotte central school and having a large program and not having kids quitting all the time and that sort of thing that the music teachers of the state voted me as music educat realize there's not that much you can do with just a clarinet there's a lot of jazz and you need to play jazz so i i picked up the saxophone and i started playing more jazz and i listen to a fellow in a rich davidian who's a very good friend of mine plays the lead part in the vermont jazz ensemble and i copied him as much as i possibly could and he taught me really how to play you know simply the flute a little bit i'm spending more time with that right now i'm trying to get that better you made something beautiful with a flute that  two i don't remember that he did and now he did oh yeah well it's a good song yeah it's important that we played the different ones the thing i like most is a play shows i like to play in the pit for broadway shows and i played spam a lot at  some of them well the swing in vermont big band asked me to play with them now and then i play with two dixieland groups sitting with the onion river dixie when band and i play on a fairly regular basis with the six i play with various combos we form combos quite often so you know you do play with many different times we need to bring a combo of the play here now yeah yeah we have a beautiful studio where you say that on your own  another song we could how high demobilize were yeah sure now we are in the morn after listening to that song so think about him oh my dear friends i'm fascinated with all that is happening here with our richmond tuesdays and just today o'clock friday where they'll be a concert at two o'clock and they will rehearse from nine thirty to eleven thirty every day until friday because and if there is one viewer now who is watching the television or wants to join the cow why does he have to do there are