I try to play jazz (Cluck Old Hen, Ed Weaver's version)

Recently I tried to play jazz. It got me thinking about jazz, so I share some thoughts about playing jazz as a violinist, how I approach it, what it's like, how I practice, and how I take a solo.

The tune is Ed Weaver's Cluck Old Hen. In the words of my friend Shane, it's a "nice, meditative tune".

Reach me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
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Transcript

Meg Wobus Beller: 0:10

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio P podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Cluck Old Hen by Ed Weaver's version from a jam in Baltimore, M maryland. . Hello everyone, I hope you are wel I. I call this episode I try to play jazz because I recently tried to play some jazz and then I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about jazz and give people a sense of how I look at it, how I think about it, how I practice it, how I try to play it. Of course I'm not a jazz violinist. I got roped into it because I got asked to play a Klezmer gig and I said, oh sure, I love Klezmer and I love playing and performing Klezmer. Then I found out I also had to play a jazz set, so that was exciting. The world of jazz has a, I would say, a fairly high bar for being able to join in with people who do it a lot. You're really expected to have a lot of knowledge to either know the tunes all the standard tunes from memory, even be able to just transpose them into another key, kind of on the spot. Or, if you don't know something, be able to read it off the page and translate what's written on the page into the style of swing or jazz. It's something that I can do with fiddle tunes look at the way they're notated on the page and translate them into a more stylistic version. But that requires a lot of practice and background, a lot of experience both in the style and to be a pretty experienced music reader and comfortable with that. And in addition to knowing or reading the head of the tune, the melody, you also are expected to play a solo over the changes. That's both exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking, especially if you don't do it very often. The chords you want to be familiar with for jazz, the basic triads that you get in fiddle music, but you're going to get a lot more sevenths. You have your minor and your major chords, but you also need to be very comfortable with the seventh, the major seventh, diminished and augmented chords or having, you know, the sixth or the 11th thrown in. I can get pretty far with that. I think there was one tune on the gig that was Antonio Carlos' Jobin tune and the chords were so complicated. I said I don't know if I can play over these changes. I can play the melody. I didn't know if I could take a solo on it. If it's a pretty simple tune and you know the tune really well and you're not that familiar with chords and how they work, you might be able to just fly by the seat of your pants and kind of pants the solo, fly by the seat of your pants and kind of pants the solo, riff off the melody or off what you're hearing from the folks playing the changes behind you. But I wouldn't count on being able to do that. If you're going to be playing a lot of jazz, you want to be able to read the chords off the page. Use that to help you play the solos. If I'm doing a really tricky transposition you know it's a tune, I know, but they're asking me to play it in some crazy E-flat minor or something because that's the key the singer needs then I may just go off the page and go by my ear because I can't calculate the transposition quickly enough to do that and make up a solo at the same time. But it's nice to be able to read on the page. It gives you the map, basically to know where you're going when you're improvising a jazz or swing solo. I'll give you a couple of suggestions. Of course, remember I'm not a professional in this area, but this is what I think about. If I get into this position, which I did recently I have to do my best to keep up with a band and try to sound like a swing violinist, even if that's not my usual gig. R I try to keep things really simple. I mean, when I say really simple, using one note like for a while, pretty simple rhythms, like for a while, pretty simple rhythms and then you can add some more rhythms to that note. Or you can use your simple rhythms and play a couple more notes, basically add a little bit of complexity as you're going through the form, but you never have to start out with a lot of fancy stuff. You can always start out with just one or two notes and a pretty simple rhythm. Or you can start off with the literal melody of the tune and start to riff over it as you go through the form. Making your own patterns is a suggestion I've gotten from players that I've played with that I've asked about this. Hey, can you give me tips for improvising solos, Just coming up with a little riff or a melody that has a few notes and when the chord changes, playing it again in the new chord, moving it around that way or moving it up and down in a scale. And you can always change it a little bit. A little bit of change in the rhythm, an extra note here or there, or you can just change the way you play it, the dynamic or the articulation or how you slide into the notes or out all of that. It's always good to leave space. Leave way more space than you think you need to. I never leave enough space when I'm soloing and you kind of want it to arc. If you're going to have a really loud part or really high part, you want that to be, oh, whatever. It's like three quarters of the way through the period in which you're soloing. Sometimes I can make that work for me and sometimes I can't. But when I practice jazz I've got my real book and sometimes I'll have an app that'll play chords. So you open it up, you know, find all of me and maybe if you're playing with a person who can play the chords for you or I'll put them on the you know iReal Pro Jazz app. Play the All of Me chords and slow them down, because that's what I need. Play the head through once, then I'll play, let the chords go through again and I'll just outline the chords. You know. Play 1, 3, 5, 3, 1, 3, 5, 7, and do each chord as it comes, and then I'll usually take a crack at doing a little soloing over. That's about it. Maybe I'll play the head at the end and practice putting in some variations, you know, jazzing it up a little bit, so to speak. That's how I practice jazz. You know, if you go on the internet and you Google how to practice jazz there's a lot of discussions on YouTube, on Reddit you can find ways. But that's it's a pretty basic little way to start out and you don't need much. You just need a little bit of sheet music. Get yourself a real book or a fake book, and it can be nice to pay whatever 10 or 20 bucks for the app that'll play you the chords. It'll make it a lot easier to hear the changes. Okay, our tune for today is not jazz. This is Cluck Old Hen, but you will not recognize it as the Cluck Old Hen we're mostly familiar with. You know Cluck Old Hen, cluck and Sing s Ain't a seen an egg since way last spring. I like that one. But this is Ed Weaver's Cluck Old Hen. The Fiddler's Companion book calls this Cluck Old Hen 6. So I guess there were five others considered more important into the Milliner R and Koken collection, the Bible, full-time music, and of course they had a CD that went with. That just tunes, but I guess this was how they played it out in the Shenandoah Valley. Cluck O ld Hen, Ready. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom along with my books, courses for today's tune at fiddle studio. com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.