Jason Lyon Music

Category: f) Esquina Latina

  • Que Sabroso!

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    Jason
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    Apologies for absence, music pals. Real life has been coming first for quite a while. I recently had some big band arrangements performed in Oakland CA – couldn’t be there but I’m told all went well. It got me to thinking about some posts I’ve been meaning to write for a while about the practical…

  • Da-ba-da-ba-dah…

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    Jason
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    Never mind Baldwin’s superb yanqui lounge creep, I just love the beautifully done, inane, piss-take bossa. “You have my hand… it gives me the blues… in my heart…” Perfect Portubollocks. Also watch Maya Rudolph on shaker (and “da-ba-da-ba-dahs”) at 1:42. She knows the lines that are coming and starts losing it… The timing throughout is…

  • Robosalsa!

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    Jason
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    I’ve had an enquiry from PD who enjoyed the article on Hearing the Clave, but isn’t a great music reader so he was asking whether I could give sound examples. Fair enough, I thought, I’ll get to it when I’ve got time… Then I thought, I wonder if someone’s already done an app for this? Well,…

  • Word for the Day: Slatin

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    Jason
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    Every now and then someone coins a new word and I think it deserves to spread. I’d like to introduce you to the wonderfully descriptive term “slatin”, which comes courtesy of virtuoso percussionist João Bosco de Oliveira. Bosco will sometimes tell a little tale about one particular gig when he’d only recently arrived from Brasil in the ’80s…

  • Modern Merengue Piano Basics

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    Jason
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    If you’ve found this article, you probably don’t need to be told what merengue is. But let’s run things down very briefly to start us off. Merengue, the Latin-American musical style originating on the island of Hispaniola (comprising the Dominican Republic and Haiti), has over the past three or four decades become one of the most…

  • How to Hear the Clave in Salsa

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    Jason
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    If your experience is anything like mine, you may have struggled to hear clave direction when playing or listening to salsa (and its precursors, son, guajira and mambo). Sure there are differences, but rhythmically these styles are largely the same, they’re just played at different tempos and with different instrumentation. I’m aware that it’s a…