Jason Lyon Music

Author: Jason

  • Benet McLean with JLT Review

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    Thanks to Stephen Graham at Marlbank for this writeup of last week’s gig with the downright special Mr McLean. If you stick the words “jazz” and “violin” together, most people will be mentally transported to a Parisian boîte with Honeysuckle Rose jing-jick-jing-jicking away through the Gauloise fug. Lovely though Hot Club stuff may be, as…

  • The Clock Waits So Patiently on Your Song

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    When you switch on the morning news and hear Ziggy Stardust it can sadly only mean one thing. Pop music has always been tribal. People have loved some bands and hated others – but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t find anything to like by David Bowie. Maybe that was because there…

  • Don’t Shoot Yourself, You’re the Pianist

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    Somebody got me Ronnie Scott’s Some of My Best Friends Are Blues for Christmas. It’s a fun little read, and there are bound to be some anecdotes that will be new to you, even if you think you know all there is to know about that long-ago scene. (Incidentally, the shabby downstairs hangout used to be…

  • Sign of the Times

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    Here’s an amazingly creative, fluid and expressive British Sign Language rendition of Uptown Funk. Just knocks me out. Take it away, Sarah Jane… Well, I suppose a purist might say it’s more SSE (Sign-Supported English) than BSL. But damn cool in my book. My signing is pretty rudimentary and plodding – New Year’s resolution to work on it. It’s a…

  • Merry Christmas

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    Here’s a little festive shout out to some Czech friends of mine. Long before Pixar, long before there were Wallace & Gromit, there were Pat & Mat. If you’ve never come across these little guys before, they were sort of like the animated equivalent of Laurel & Hardy, but with an extensive collection of dangerous…

  • Hark All the Herald Things You Are

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    Christmas is upon us. Festive thingies to you all, and may you realise that something you’ve always wanted is something you already have. In what is starting to become a welcome little tradition of our own, we have the fabulous singer Anita Wardell with us again for our yuletide special on 21st December at Brasserie…

  • Smoke Gets in Your Ears

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    or Being Yourself Interesting experience recently. I spent a fair bit of time working on live sound and recording for a band with another pianist (a really very good one), then went straight out to do a gig of my own… Well I rather struggled to click somehow. It was only halfway through the gig…

  • Dominant Ice Cream

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    I’ve been asked to post something about how jazz musicians play fast and loose with V chords when comping. And boy, do they. Well, I’ll start by observing that the chord alterations we’ll look at are also used in contexts where they don’t resolve down a fifth (or a semitone in a tritone substitution situation).…

  • The Third Rail

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    Or the noble art of electrocuting yourself and living to laugh about it Jazzers of a certain vintage used to refer to what we mostly now call “avoid notes” as “the third rail”. It’s a train analogy. The third rail carries the current, so you really don’t want to step on it or you’ll be late…

  • Clearing Up the Leaves

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    Seems an appropriate time of year for this thought. The hardy standard Autumn Leaves… Harmonically, it’s a very simple tune. It’s basically just turnarounds in a related major and minor key pairing. So why is there usually either an unusually lengthy discussion before it’s played or a cock up? It’s all about the key, and…