I haven’t had any chance to play this weekend. Apart from a gig in town. I’m calling some tunes I don’t know that well to try and get some new tunes down. What are you working on?

A simple one in Bb today. CHALLENGE! Either Post a video of you playing it as is Post a video of you playing it in a few different keys Post a video of you using it in an improvisation. WHY? (Food analogy incoming) We learn melodies and lines from other musicians like recipies from seasoned chefs. With each recipe we learn and perhaps forget, we build an understanding of what we like, what works for us and perhaps what makes a dish taste great. We can start to price together dishes of our own over time and build a repertoire of great meals! Enjoy!

I’m just chilling today. Going to a friends 40th bday party. Tomorrow I’m playing jazz in duo with Harry Diplock at the Green Note in Camden. Will probably be dusting off some tunes for that on Sunday afternoon. What’s happening with you guys?

Tell us, what is the best advice that you have ever received that has shaped your music making? When I was first becoming interested in jazz , I was in the the last year of secondary school (in England this is often called 6th form). I had gone to a local polytechnic college as it had a decent music course. My composition teacher was a really eccentric trumpet player and electroacoustic contemporary classical composer. Great guy who also had studied jazz in the past. I asked him what the chords at the end of “There Will Never Be Another You” were all about. He said “that’s the question you will probably be asking yourself on and off for the rest of your life and you might never really have a definite answer, but that’s the job of a jazz musician” Whilst it didn’t answer the question as I had wanted, it helped me realise that jazz is for lifelong study, harmony is often subjective and that really there aren’t any right answers with any of this stuff. (I’d say though that the actual answer is just, a prolonged cadence from chord I back to chord I again, often done via a few chromatic dominant chords but that’s not really essential) What’s yours?

But late with this as I have been away. I’m back and here is this weeks “lick of the week” Either Post a video of you playing it as is Post a video of you playing it in a few different keys Post a video of you using it in an improvisation. Or just chill.