Jazz is the American art form that confronts contemporary issues, unites diverse communities and provides healing to the soul. The launch of Jazz @ The Shabazz invites you, our community, to enjoy a night of great music that is sure to reignite your senses and provoke thought through the lens of art…

Although I’m generally not a fan of plugging licks, the truth of the matter is that licks are a very effective means of integrating new material. The lick below shows a practical use for Type 4 trichords, which contain a series of major triads.

Whereas the last post looked at a series of trichords derived from Messiaen?s Mode 3, the grids below depict tetrachords derived from the same.

Continuing on from my last post about the subject, the following matrix depicts one transposition of Messiaen’s Mode 3:

Well tickle my taint, people! We are doing it! Walking The Room presents STARFISH CIRCUS - a too tragic evening of comedy, music, and preening from the stars of America's least downloaded, shiv wield

In my last post, I mentioned a fondness for Messiaen’s knack for using symmetrical pitch sets as a means of generating melodic and harmonic material. This post will focus on introducing Messiaen’s Mode 3:

Well tickle my taint, people! We are doing it! Walking The Room presents STARFISH CIRCUS - a too tragic evening of comedy, music, and preening from the stars of America's least downloaded, shiv wield

I’ve always been incontrollably drawn to composers and improvisers who have managed to deconstruct music down to its most basic building blocks and reassemble them into something that is truly new. Olivier Messiaen was such a composer. His work features a language containing, among other things, ele...