Pat Martino Linear expressions

[Mike Neer]

It's how you get fired from Ray Price's band.

[Stuart Legg]

I'm not trying to pick a fight with this. It is an interesting topic about a great player. But!
I'm going to get the book because I'm still leaning toward the theory if you play fast enough you can play any notes you want and it being a case of a picture that theory explanations cut up into a puzzle and folks are trying to play the puzzle and missing the picture.
I'm from the Show Me State....maybe the book can change my mind

[Christopher Woitach]

Good idea, Stuart

Check it out

However, your premise that "if you play fast enough, you can play any notes you want" is simply not true.

Using chromatic notes in a musical fashion to lead into significant notes is one the important studies in jazz, and it isn't random, at all

[Earnest Bovine]

your premise that "if you play fast enough, you can play any notes you want" is simply not true.

The correct version is: if you play with good time and feel, you can play any notes you want.

[Ulrich Sinn]

I probably should put my flame suit on now...

Pat Martino's playing is actually surprisingly consonant (in that context and within the rules of that style of music). After going through the book you probably heard a lot of music he's actually playing.

The trick is the precision and the speed: his mind can adapt his material to fit the shifting musical landscape mind-boggingly fast.

Compare that e.g. against Jim Hall who is consistently way more dissonant - at any tempo (and, alas, much harder to imitate).

[Richard Nelson]

No Mike nothing to do with you old boy , I totally understand your post . It's just that I'm trying to play these patterns in different keys now and its frying my head . After about an hour I need to lie down . And yes, a few bands I've been in I've been shown the red card for leaking the Jazz shit into the country stuff .

[Christopher Woitach]

Ulrich

No flame suit necessary!

Martino is very consonant, especially compared to Jim Hall.

I was lucky to have studied with Jim Hall for a while, in the early 90's - one of the nicest, and smartest, people I've ever met. Beautiful player

[Stuart Legg]

When I said "If you play fast enough you can play any notes you want"
I qualified it to notes "you want" (not what a monkey or robot would want) which I assumed a given that as a musician you would want acceptable tonal targets throughout.

[David Mason]

When I hear Martino, it seems to me he does a lot of "stair-stepping" lines. He plays a line from one chord, plays a line from a second chord, plays a line from the first, then the second - and then plays a line from a third chord. Back to two, up to three, then a line from a fourth chord, and the first one disappears. Then three->four->five, and #2 is never heard from again... Etc., on and on.

Maybe "toggling" is a better word than stair-stepping... that and variants off of 1-4-5 (including subs) can keep you busy for a long, long time. If I had to boil it down, I'd say my primary interest is in the methods, tricks and schemes used to generate melodies. This guy can pull more tricks out of the ether than anyone else I've heard and uses most of them on the first guitar solo:
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/Reme ... stonMA.asx

Kind of a show-offy concert - Berklee - there's a few more musical and dangerous ones out there, like this:
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/John ... ermany.asx

There's 25 0r 30 fun Coltrane concerts (under "John") and maybe 100 Miles Davis shows in here too:
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/
Miles 83-02-04 in Austin was a ripper... (Scofield + Stern)
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/Mile ... stinTX.asx

As far as schemes for melodic development, IMO Miles is still the reigning wizard - I've been trying to figure out what he was thinking for twenty-five years now. About as far as I've gotten is that when he had his juice on he could smoke Coltrane, Adderly, Shorter, Jarrett, McLaughlin or Scofield with three notes. Any three notes....

[Sid Hudson]

I'd just like to know what all this has to do with Ray Price.

SCREAM OL!!!!!!

I don't think I've ever read anything so complicated as this thread.

[Sid Hudson]

I'd just like to know what all this has to do with Ray Price.

SCREAM OL!!!!!!

I don't think I've ever read anything so complicated as this thread.

[Jim Cohen]

Stick around, Sid; it's bound to get worse.

[David Mason]

That "Pat Martino" in the title is a dead giveaway it's about 50's country singers, I guess. Everybody lives is some country or another, right?

[Michel Rose]

Considering his love and respect for Mr Martino"s playing, i would love to hear Buddy Emmons' view on this matter.

[Jim Cohen]

That "Pat Martino" in the title is a dead giveaway it's about 50's country singers, I guess. Everybody lives is some country or another, right?

Maybe you're thinking of "Al Martino"...?

[Richard Nelson]

I still dont get it . What am I supposed to be learning here ? I can play the first 5 activity exercises . Then when he goes to Phase 2 Vertical movement what then ? He's varying the licks around again . Also the fingerboard at the bottom of the page with the notes on the guitar dosen't seem to tally with the notes in the exercises . What exactly are the lines I'm supposed to be learning as in Linear ?

[Chris Tweed]

I don't understand, Richard. You never seemed to need all this fancy stuff when I used to watch you playing with Southbound Train on a Friday night at The Bridge in Dunloy

[Richard Nelson]

Chris , I moved on . How are you ?

[Chris Tweed]

I'm doing well Richard thanks. I'm living in Cardiff now. Started playing PSG a couple of years ago after playing dobro for a long time. I'm strictly a weekend warrior, though.

I've watched a few videos of you playing at the Irish Steel Guitar Festival and have been very impressed. It's great to see you pushing the boundaries and introducing some 'angularity' to the music. Keep up the good work.

[Richard Nelson]

Back to this old topic . I've been putting a solo together on Stella using these ideas and it sounds great . I think it would take a lifetime to be able to use them in an improv with fast changes

[David Mason]

Sorry, Richard, I didn't mean to confuse things even more--I was just thinking aloud. Basically, all I wanted to say is that if you can hear it, you can make any notes work, and the beauty of jazz is that lines move throughout different changes and harmonic cycles even if the rhythm section is vamping on one chord.

Senor Neer gives me the oppo to polish up and drag out one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Technique and articulation can only come from your imagination - how do you hear what you play? This is the key - if you hear it you can play it. It's just a matter of... do you hear it clearly enough? If you hear it clearly you just apply yourself to it.

- John McLaughlin

This is one of the hardest things to teach to students, in fact it might be the root, brain stem core of it all - and it sure separates out the workers from... the others! I'm pretty sure Mr. Martino had the idea that you're supposed to dig deeper as to see why one chord changes to the next. It's like any of this stuff - you can just plow through it and in a year's time you'll just be 365 days older, or you can look for the where and how of leading tones, counterpoint vs. parallelism etc.

A book like that definitely has to catch you in the right time and stage of playing. Several years back I got all excited about chords and I bought the requisite DVDs - Joe Pass, Martin Taylor, Scotty Anderson etc. And what I learned was that all of them harmonized chordal passages in completely different ways! So I did learn something real important, it just wasn't what I expected to learn.

[Richard Nelson]

Great article from Guitar player mag that pretty much sums it all up .When I play these lines it sounds like someone else playing , someone better than me .http://m.guitarplayer.com/article/10-th ... artino/241 I love the stuff about the holistic approach .