The Shape of Jazz to Come was promised by Ornette Coleman 60 years ago this month, and yet, for some reason, advanced jazz is still a subject shrouded in mystery for the majority of us. After the ABRSM syllabus fades off (at a still woeful Grade 5) most of us end up meandering through a wilderness of standards and styles, looking for any kind of structure in the pursuit of jazz. Philip Martin's New York Nights proudly declares itself as a collection of advanced level jazz piano pieces. Aimed at the Grade 8 and beyond pianist, this collection is made up of seven original compositions flavoured by Martin's career in the New York jazz scene.
EVC Publishing has cornered the market in pedagogical, developmental publications for piano, running hand-in-hand with its annual showcase – the Elena Cobb Star Prize Festival – which is held in the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room. This latest offering fills a gaping hole in the market for jazz compositions for advanced students. The publication is somewhat light on biographical and instructional details, so I was delighted to discover not only more details on the EVC website, but also video recordings of the composer (and others) performing selected repertoire.
And so to the content. The collection runs the whole gambit, from faux 1930s stride up to Brad Mehldau-style contemporary jazz. ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’, as the name suggests, takes us back to the Pete Johnson era of Carnegie Hall concerts, although with an unmistakable modern harmonic twist. The right hand flies up and down the keyboard, displaying and then subverting the boogie woogie clichés of the Broadway era. The left hand starts with an extended 8-bar blues riff, familiar from many trips around the practice corridor, before giving way to more harmonically adventurous patterns.
New York Nights
I was once told (semi-seriously) that you're not a proper jazz player until you've taken a standard and played it in a different time signature for no particular reason. If you don't believe me, check out The Bad Plus cover of Nirvana's ‘Lithium’. ‘New York Nights’ suggests several nights spent in the company of Ethan Iverson and Ari Hoenig. The angular opening fanfare trips along, changing tempo like a lounge lizard knocking back bourbons at the bar. The frenetic finger work builds up to a virtuosic climax which will reward you for getting your fingers (and brain!) around the gymnastics. Perhaps most importantly, this piece just sounds cool. There's no other way of putting it; this track would be equally at home in a concert hall or a darkened jazz club in SoHo.
‘Alley Stomp Blues’ is an edgy, modern take on the blues piano solo. Enclosed by some stylish rhythm work on the body of the piano, this track manages to be sultry and showy at the same time. The percussion might benefit from the player sporting a ring, or similar, but otherwise this sits well within the capabilities of an adventurous Grade 8 pianist looking for the zest of the New York scene.
My personal favourite of this collection is ‘O’Keeffe Blues’, a slow, sultry three-time number with hinges around a mediant pivot – it has a smoky, folk quality which I can't resist.
Altogether this is an accessible and useful volume, which will appeal to professionals as much as students. All of the pieces contain passages which will require some application. But all of the pieces more than reward the effort put in. Martin treads a neat line between student and professional repertoire, producing a collection likely to be appealing to both levels.
Mosaics: Volumes I and II
These may well be the most attractive publications to cross the ever-shifting sands of my messy desk. Jacketed in a bright, recycled paper cover (the environment thanks you!), both volumes open up to a rich ivory parchment with an elegant font. Coming from an era of hardcover books arriving in the post, it makes my heart sing just a little to see so much care and attention go in to a publication.
The volumes of this series are made up of 26 pieces for young pianists. Volume I sits comfortably around the Grade 1 level, with contributions arranged progressively moving towards the Grade two spectrum. Each of the 13 writers contributes two pieces each, laid out in a clear and rounded font across one page. A few familiar names are chalked up in the index, with Nikolas Sideris, Anna Blonksy, and Andrew Eales among them.
Ferrum places the biographical and program notes in the preface of each edition, which while initially puzzling, does leave each page of music pristinely clear of distractions. The notes are worth a read – entertaining and informative as well as instructive, I could almost imagine reading them as bedtime stories.
Leafing through the collection, the most striking feature is the carefully considered order – making subtle but gently increasing demands on young pianists; from static hand positions and single note lines, to antiphonal and finally contrapuntal parts, before introducing extensions (‘Go to Sleep’), changing hand positions (‘Question Mark(?)’) and hand crossing (‘Crossing over the Sea Bridge’).
Volume II picks up immediately where the first left off, with separate, simple counterpoint between hands that carefully reinforces and builds on the material. ‘Monty Monkey and the Coconut Tree!’ picks up unobtrusively on the hand-crossing techniques introduced in Volume I. ‘A Simpler Life’ introduces an easy Alberti bass pattern and this theme is developed further in ‘Who Stole the Carrot Cake?’. I'm hoping that these titles are giving you some sense of the fun spread across these pages! Not only are these carefully crafted and scaffolded pedagogical tools, but tuneful and fun little miniatures for you to enjoy with your students.
Having tried a few of these out with some of my younger pianists I was delighted by how intuitive the material felt. When faced with a large collection of ‘learning’ songs, there can occasionally be that sinking feeling when realising that you'll be hearing ‘Jelly on a Plate’ on repeat for the next six weeks – thank you for that image, Rachel Parris! (Please Google this. You'll thank me!). This collection is not only imaginative enough to listen to with multiple students, but is also perfectly placed between instinctive and easy, and sufficiently challenging to motivate students on to the next piece.
Recent educational theory has put a lot of emphasis on the idea of pitching the right task at the right level at the right time. Goss and Sonnemann make an interesting case for students being either passively disengaged, actively disengaged, or disruptive almost 40% of the time in the average classroom. Much of this, they conclude, is down to tasks which are either too easy or too hard to engage the student. The second volume of Mosaics happily trips towards Grade 3 level, almost without the player noticing that the trees are turning into woods. We can only hope that Volume III is currently in production!
