Jason Lyon Music

Category: i) Reviews

  • Willie Thomas and Not-Quite-Pentatonics

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    Hullo jazz fans. Apologies for the radio silence, I’ve been driving myself nuts on a film project. I’ve found time for a little bit of teaching too, and I’m always on the lookout for new approaches – some just click better with some people than others, so the more you have… I recently came across…

  • The Universal Mind of Bill Evans

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    Jon Brantingham has just put a very good essay up at The Art of Composition. It’s an appraisal of an extended interview with Bill Evans, conducted by his brother Harry in 1966. The “Universal Mind” thing may sound a bit hippyish, but it just refers to the notion that there is a part of all of us,…

  • 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…

  • Grumpy Old Jazzers

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    Jason
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    Regular readers will be aware by now that I have an occasional tendency towards the grumps. On that I’m unrepentant. My gig, my rules, mate. I’ve recently discovered a couple of blogs by other similarly minded individuals and I commend them to you. I’d like to clarify that I make no judgements about the vintage…

  • Priceless and Free

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    So Ornette Coleman has finished his Chronology. Rather than doing a standard obit, I think it would be more interesting to chat about what he did, which was and remains the subject of much confusion. WARNING: May contain unsubstantiated personal opinions. His approach has come to be known as “free jazz”, but that’s not really…

  • So What Intro

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    Jason
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    The Miles album Kind of Blue really was one of a kind. A fascinating, confident adventure that came back with the treasure in abundance – and the whole story is documented really well in a book by Ashley Khan (see here). (Khan has also written an excellent book dealing with A Love Supreme.) Of the tunes from this…

  • Everyone’s a Critic…

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    Jason
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    Jazz musicians will possibly know Nicolas Slonimsky for his Thesaurus of Scale Patterns. Famously, Coltrane practised out of it and I come across musicians today who still explore it. Just the other day, I was chatting to a saxophonist about Tcherepnin’s nine-note scale (the interval pattern is half, whole, half, three times over, and it’s…

  • Re Person I Knew

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    Jason
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    Except I didn’t know him. This is the title of a Bill Evans piece dedicated to jazz producer Orrin Keepnews, who died last week just shy of his 92nd birthday. It’s an anagram of his name*, and seems an appropriate heading for an obituary. Keepnews was a contemporary with Jack Kerouac at Columbia, later a journalist,…

  • Vi Hart & Twelve Tones

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    Jason
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    For some reason I can’t even remember, I was recently spurred to refresh some of the funkier stuff in my maths education. In my online quest after some of the long forgotten detailed bits behind the sublime Euler’s Identity (yeah, I know, I’m weird) the linky stuff led me to this gal right here, who…

  • Ugo Delmirani

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    Jason
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    I do hope the grapevine’s wrong about this one – please let me know if so. I heard the other day that Ugo, a formidable pianist and stalwart in particular of the scene at London’s famous 606 Club, had … sort of disappeared for a while. From what I hear, he won’t be coming back. The…