Books updates. And music books.#
April 5, 2023
Improvisations masterclass, Toop’s Ocean of Sound. And more paths. Time to indulge in some note revision.
I’ve finished Toop Ocean of Sound, the new Italian translation of a classic book about music (so I learned). This is a nice follow-up to a previous reading on music from last year, Ex Machina by Valerio Mattioli. (Mattioli mentions Toop in the book. Also, both books were bought at the book pride event in Milan. Last year I was explicitly looking for the Ex machina book. This year I stumbled upon Toop’s book and could not resist the cover. Then I worked out the connection about the music book at the same event the previous year.)
So… how was the book? Strange. It made me want to go into Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, and Jon Hassell. (I already had stumbled upon Reich here, and Hassell was one of the ah-ah moments of my listening youth. I think it was some Eno and Hassell music. I was listening to it because of my dad and uncle, probably with them. And that was probably on a cassette.)
My girlfriend had a look at some reviews for Ocean of sound. Among those following the “super masterpiece. A classic” lines, there’s one a bit more critical saying it is mostly disconnected self-indulging crap. Sounds like the review of a postmodern novel. And I like postmodern novels.
Anyway, I can relate to the review even though I liked the book. I dare to say you’ll be more inclined to agree with that review the more you are far away in age and spirit from the unfolding of the ambient scene. Also, you should not have been part of the academic experimentation and theorizing about music.
Dad got the book at the end. I’ll wait to hear back from him.
The book made me want to go further into Mila’s Breve storia della musica and a 100 records to understand jazz. Those were books on music I had in secondary school when I spend more time listening to music (and reading PoMo stuff) than actually reading about music. (By the way, PoMo news: we brought Infinite Jest home).
Music-wise, I bought Jack Gardiner’s masterclass on improvising and Martin Miller’s book on modern guitar. I appreciate them both for similar reasons despite being a different product.
The major shared pro is that they both teach you improvisation without assuming you like the blues and you need to start from it. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great learn blues improvisation books. But getting into impro is hard enough without struggling with a vocabulary and genre that is not your preferred.
In Improvisational roadmap, Gardiner puts a lot of effort into pentatonics as the main fretboard visualization tool. We start from there and then we add an extra note to get more flavor. The incredible part is that he keeps playing on the same backing track and he mostly plays in a single box. Exactly. A single box squeezing out a lot of music. So you’ll have no more excuse to say you cannot find ideas in that box. Stuff sounds good and is deceptively simple. But it’s not.
If you moved from a highly technical section that is rhythmically simple (a single subdivision for the whole duration of the technical part) to playing Guthrie Govan’s blues mutation, you know what we are talking about.
Miller has four different tracks for different styles – melodic hard rock, modern funk rock, emotive blues rock ballad, contemporary rock. The tracks have different sections, so there is something to keep thinking about and there are mood shifts.
For each track (and style) we get the progression analysis. Then 5 signature licks and two different solos (intermediate and advanced). I like that approach. This gives a lot of opportunities to see the different ideas and material you can experiment with and how to combine the different phrases into longer solos.
While this is actually a lot, that is only half of the book. Miller gives you another book in the form of an explanation of 32 soloing concepts grouped as improvisational tools, articulation and technical concepts, chord tone soloing and changes playing, harmonic concepts and scales, shapes and melodic cells.
You get an explanation of the concept and references to the licks and solos where the concept is applied. This gives you plenty of opportunities for rediscovering the licks (assumed you’ve learned them all) when reading about the concepts or allows you to go from the licks to the concept section. And then spend 15 minutes playing on the track expanding on the lick and the concept. That is a great way to go from the “learn the lick” to phase to the “learn from the lick” phase, borrowing this iconic description from Scott Henderson. I struggled a lot with the “how do you learn from the lick”? Having licks and concepts seems a way to make this easier and give you more clues!
Do tab books count? I’ve bought the tabs for Camilla’s Sperati Moonrise.
So, well, guitars made a came back. And so Adam Tooze’s Crashed.
This means I went into bits of The predator state and looking forward to reading more about Tett’s Fool’s gold.
I’ve also started reading The Networked State, which is something I thought would be easier to dismiss or summarize (25-30% into it). Nonetheless, while I disagree on pieces and parts, an especially with the tone, I have less of the impression of “hey, this is way oversimplified…”. So, yep, that’s something I need to watch out for.
Oh, connections wise I am reading Pollan’s book on the mind (and psilocybin and co.). Probably I’m one of the few readers linking Nevermore to Timothy Leary. But it is always nice to discover connections. And it turns out psilocybin has its connections with the ambient and electro musicians we started with.
Ok, closed circle. Time to stop.