You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Our 7 Favorite Slick Turnarounds

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Make your sets slicker than the Exxon Valdez by using these turnarounds, brought to you courtesy of Peter and Adam. And check out the warm-up practice routine Adam mentions in this episode with Geoffrey Keezer's Keez to Jazz Piano course from Open Studio.Our 7 Favorite Slick Turnarounds"The Ladybird""The Yardbird""The Ramada Inn North Airport""Rando""Pretty""Coltrane""High Ridge Express"Coming soon - a new course from Open Studio! It's the long-awaited sequel to our Rhythm Section Fundamentals course, where you'll learn how to get the piano, bass, and drums to play as one well-oiled jazz machine. Stay tuned for more details, and check out the original Rhythm Section Fundamentals to prepare for part two.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh. Uh. Biren Lovelace. Uh. Baren Lovelace. Biren Lovelace. Where are you? I'm Adam Anas. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to The You'll Hear It Podcast. Daily Music Advice coming at you. Dude, I don't know what. We're getting ourselves into. Did that survive? I guess if we're here, the intro survived. If you're watching this, we couldn't come up with a better intro than that. But this is a tribute to our dear friend and listener, Byron Lovelace.

I can't believe you remembered his name. We did that in one take as we always do. How could you forget that name? Alex didn't. You know, quality is sometimes suffers a little bit with the one takenness. We asked Alex, hey, do you remember that guy's name? And he was immediately, Byron Lovelace. Byron Lovelace.

And where's he from? What city, state? Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Come on now. Go Bucks. Come on. Go bucks. Well, Byron, if you're listening, we have seven of our favorite slick turnarounds.

That was one of them. Is that one of them? It'll be a surprise. It'll be a surprise towards the end. That's right. But we're going to just talk about, we actually got an email about one that we'll talk a little bit about here, the Rando Major Sevens, Rando Minor Sevens. I don't know if you know about that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But someone had pointed out that it was in a Brad Meldow recording, and I was like, we should do a whole episode about. Meldok will go Rando at the drop of a hat. King of the Rando Slick turnaround. That's right, right, right. And we did get an email. You know how I know that? I was walking by your desk and I heard your thing go, you've got mail. And your AOL system was.

Activated, right? No, that's not true. Yeah, I mean, I got to update that. I have a disc sitting on my counter that I know. I've got to update it. With like 16,000 free hours. Come on now. Come on now. Not using it. How's your water over there, by the way? Is it cold? It is cold. It is not carbonated like yours.

I'm going with straight... Oh, that's cool. Pour la tap, we call it. Oh, are you sure that's yours? I don't see your name on it? No, no. Pick shout out to the CIC here. That's all good, man. Stay hydrated. Stay hydrated. Awesome.

All right. Number one of our... Are we going to jump right in? Yeah, number one is classic slick turnaround. This is, if you know the tune, Lady Bird, classic bebop head. You might recognize this turnaround. It's one, flat three, flat six, and flat two. Now, you could do this as a series of major seven chords, as I just did.

You could do this as a dominant chord. And then a dominant chord, yeah. I like that. All of it is kind of fair game as you get into it. But practice both, for sure. Having this dominant system is really nice to have under your fingers. And then just being able to kind of blow through a series of major seven chords in that structured way. I almost thought you play, but I was hearing it too.

What a good one out of variation is the major. Yeah. A little suss. A little suss. And you could even go. Oh, I don't know why the suss. It brings out a little vocalese. Love this.

You could go another suss. Is that legal? I don't know. It could be. What I would hear would be like major suss and then maybe major again. And then maybe from our last YouTube or previous. Sharp 11, low create, no, not low. Lillian Dominant.

Lillian Dominant. That's, this is level one slick turnaround. This is like your high school player. You hit the jam sessions. Right, right, right. No, I'm saying this. I'm on our turnaround, man. No, I'm not hitting on it.

It's classic. Classic. But it's why it's number one. This is kind of the first time that you maybe get away from just. I don't know. That's a pretty hip high school. If you're doing that already. Not that.

What, you know, are... Oh, dude. Have you not heard these high school cats now? Yeah, the good ones. Not the bad ones. The bad ones are like... If you're a high school musician listening to this podcast, hit us up. That's what I hear a lot of high school musicians.

But no, you're right. Of course. The good ones are playing all this animal. It's true. There's a lot of them now, man. So what do we call on that? Let's give it a slick name. We'll call it the lady bird.

The lady bird. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm putting it down. The lady bird. Now, this is not the kind of bird that we can't do on YouTube with our middle finger. That's a different. And you could do it. Man, it's our podcast.

You do whatever you want. Okay, cool. And the next one, you know what? The next one we should call? We should call the yard bird suite. The yard bird suite. Right. So this one is four minor to fly.

Flat 7 dominant. Yeah. This has a little relation to something you're going to be doing later too. We'll talk about that later. We'll talk about that later. But what's great about this is your classic borrowing from the four minor,

borrowing from really key of E flat, if I can see here. But this four minor is a powerful way to get outside of that harmony of C major. And then that B flat 7, we call that a false cadence. Hashtag false cadence. Hashtag false cadence. Okay. Because it sounds like you're going to go to E flat, right?

And which you very much well could, but that would not be where we're going here with the turnaround, because we didn't really mention turnaround in general has the implication, if not 98% of the time, has been proven to end. No matter where false it goes or wherever you think it's going to go, it ends back at the tonic. That's why you're turning around. It starts and ends. Turning it around. That's exactly correct. Yes. Okay.

Number three is a favorite of yours. So wait, we're going to call that one the... We'll call that one the yard bird suite. The yard bird. Let's call it the yard bird. The yard bird. about like a, you know, Yardbert is a chicken. That's old, that's old Kansas City term for chicken.

Southern term, actually. Love it, love it, yeah. So the third one, this is the flat five descending. Now, this is one that you play a lot. This is... I'm not playing it like you. Why, you got to make me sound like a... Like, I'm at the Wiki, wiki room at the Ramada in North by the airport.

Yeah, so if Peter Mard plays it, it sounds a lot like this. Welcome to Lambert Airport. Try the Mai Tai. You'll feel like you're in Hawaii. Hawaii? You want to break this one down in the PM way? Well, no. Actually, it is that.

It's kind of a basic one. Yep. But you can make it a little slicker. Come on. Right. So you start on the flat 5. So if we're in the key of C here, that's G flat or F sharp. Well, let's change it from C.

Maybe that's why it sounds so plain. Okay. Why let's do it in like D flat? Yeah. So we're going still, flat 5. Flat 5. So you got your G, usually half diminished. Usually have to diminish.

And then you got your G flat. Usually minor. Could be dominant. Either works. Yeah. And then you got your three, which could be minor. Or it could be like a one over three if you really were going to be.

You know what I mean? Like so you got this sound. Yeah. Oh, come on now. And then you got... That's like you move from the Ramada in north by the airport to like the W hotel. On the other side. Like in the hotel.

So, all right. So we had flat five for... Minor three now. Minor three. Yeah. This might be a good... Minor three, which is usually diminished, but also could be dominant altered if you wanted. That's why I was thinking even dominant.

Lidion. Lidion dominant. Yeah, yeah. And then two. Two. Typically minor. Miner 11. Could be dominant.

Could you also? This is why the Lidian Dominus, man. I mean, we didn't talk about this in Lidia and Domit. They're agile. We could talk about the two. Yeah. We could go the whole way. We could.

But the reason why this works so well, I think, is because you can keep that tonic on top, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. So then as you just finish, the flat two major seven. Yeah. Yeah. Which could be.

yeah you could do dominant I'm a little bit of a Lydia and Dominant kick and now this whole cycle too we should just say it could also be yeah I know I spiced it up a little bit but basically

oh I started the wrong place too I'm nice like so instead of like basically you're just going 2525252 5 instead of just going down descending right so it'll be like

good good I like it that's the what do you want what are you going to call that one I just had flat-flat. The stando.

The stando. The stando. No, we should call the Ramada in North. The Ramada in North. Okay, that one will be called. The Ramada in North Airport. Okay. Yeah.

Just like we play. Yeah. Just so you might, you don't have to make it sound like, they'd be the hippest Ramada ever. Oh, come on. Oh, yeah. Okay, so number four, I have just here, PM Pretty. What does that mean?

I don't remember that one. It's just a bunch of pretty stuff that you were playing. Oh, that was the, um, Oh yeah. No, no, we got to come back to that because I've got to remember that one. Okay. How about some rando major seven or rando major? That was yours, I think. Yeah, minor seven. So this was more in the line of what our listener was writing in about the brand meldow changes that if we're in, let's change it up to B flat. If we want to do a turnaround here on B flat, you know, depending on where you want to put the melody, let's put it on the tonic.

Let's see. you can do some rando major seven or minor seven chords but they have to kind of be the same right so let's do i love how you're starting on just a straight try it that's part of the strategy right yeah i hear you you know what i don't say or they could even be just rando chords with like a common note on top of it like all of these things can work but the idea is that there's no idea like the idea is that you're it's that's why we call it the rando major sevens yeah and minor sevens. Yeah, and I think if you think about

the melody, because there's variations on this, the concept is that the harmonic development, and it does develop, it's not as rando as the title might imply. For sure. But it's really driven by a little bit of enclosed possibilities

for where you can go harmonically. You still want it to be, have some logic to it. It can be very diverse in terms of where it's going, but the thing that pulls it together is that notes staying the same. And so you can extend this also by some free improvisation. I'm thinking, you know, I've heard Keith Jarrett do this with solo piano where he takes a very simple melody, even single line like this, and kind of goes rando with the harmony, but in a very beautiful way. And then moves to another, you know, melody.

But it's always sort of driven and encapsulated by where that melody note is. That's right. And this is one you're going to want to work out ahead of time if you're playing with a group. Like this isn't one you can just kind of nod in like the others. Like the ones we've done so far, most professional jazz musicians will. be able to catch. Yeah. But this is because it's rando.

Right. You want to work it out if you're playing with a group. Yeah. The Brad Meloddell context was a solo piano context. The Keith Jarrett context is certainly a solo piano context. And in those contexts, you can really just like, you know, put in some random chords. Kind of sounds cool.

And you can really start crafting the bass movement, I find. Right. Like you can do either in whole steps or half steps or create a melody with the bass note. And then the chords kind of follow that pattern. Yeah. And actually, I was around the corner. the other day at Urban Chestnut Brewery, one of our fine St. Louis breweries

and they had a finely crafted baseline they're offering on tap this week. Okay. They're all laughing, so you hear them and then you see them laughing. Okay, this one too, you can think about like how do you get ideas

on this? Because people will be like, okay, that's easy but when I play it doesn't sign. It's really as easy as as easy. It's as simple as going through and you've got the melody note locked in. So the top note, in terms of your possibility,

so we're starting with your B-flap, you can choose randomly, thus the rando, a bass note. That's the first way I'd recommend to do it. And then think about all the different possibilities just so that you're hearing it. This is not the way you're going to eventually do it.

So if I go to D in the bass, so the melody's still B-flat, right? So we started here, B-flat major, and then we go here, what are some chords I could play over this? We're not going to go through everyone, So B flat on top and D in the base. Yeah.

You can do, of course, B flat over D. B flat over D. You can do some kind of D7, flat 13. Yeah, for sure. You could do a D diminished chord, like a D diminished seven chord. Yeah, is a possibility. You could do a D major 7 sharp 5 is a possibility.

Yeah, that's a good one. Like that one. That's a major 7 flat 5. Yeah. You could do E flat over D. E flat triad. Right? Well, that one's not as good.

Or like C minor, C minor 9. Yeah, that's good one. Yeah, so this is just, you want to go through and play as many as you can and then hear them so that you start to get some of your possibilities. Yeah, that's good. A lot of possibilities.

A lot of possibilities. But you have to hear, you know, have some options. Then you can start playing around with putting them together. Yeah, check out, if you're an open studio member, check out, Jeffrey Keiser has a chord warm-up on keys to jazz piano where you just go through systems of bass notes and melody notes

and then fill in the chords just much like what we just did. And it's a great way to open up your brain for that kind of thing. Keys of Jazz Piano, so great. We're going to link below to the keys to pick that up. That will be the keys. The K-E-E-Z. All right, next we have the Coltrane three tonic system. Now this is where we're going through. This is what you started off with

with our... That's my PM Pretty. You just got them listed two players. I think that's what it was. That was your PM Pretty? I like that so much. I mean, it's funny because when I played it before you, I was like Giant Steps, you're like, no, that's three tonic system. I was like...

Well, it's the same thing. Okay. Well, you didn't give it up that it was the same thing. You acted like it was... I mean, it's not exactly... What's giant steps? I'm kidding.

Okay. So, C major. Yep. And then we're going to the three. But like, I really think of this. The reason I was connected with giant steps is very much melodic movement

of the root. Yeah, okay. So you start off. So break that down again. Because it starts off like the ladybird. That's right. C major to E flat 7. Then the A flat, right?

To A flat major. But here's where it changes. Then we just keep going the same melodic pattern of the root. So it's up a minor third, up a major fourth. Up a minor third, up a major fourth. That's right. Okay. So C major, E flat seven, a flat major.

And then we go up a minor third to B7. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then up a major fourth or down a fifth. You know, that's just a five one movement is all that. E major. And then up a minor third. And then you're back home. Yeah, that's good.

Thus the turner. Well, and I'm about to hashtag blow your mind. Because you can, just like giant steps, you can move the baseline. Could do that, though. Or could go down in whole steps. Oh, yeah. I like it. Me likey.

Right? So you have C major 7, E flat 7 over B flat. A flat major 7, B over F sharp, E major 7. What's not to lie? G7 over. What's not to lie? I'm a lover, not a fighter. Come on.

Nice. All right. Okay. Now we have the B-flat-7-sus to 17-sus. No, no, no, no. We have the flat-7-sus to the one-seven-suss. I don't know if you heard about a little one called the... Oh, this is the Adam Man of Spett.

This is the High Ridge Express. We're calling this one. I think kind of almost like Michael McDonald's A little yacht rock Oh yeah Come on I want to get all my yacht And high ridge Come on

Full Gordon I keep forgetting All my cadences now I love this cadence I don't know if you know this Well you've written this into several arrangements I've had the pleasure to play Yeah this is my favorite cadence of all time

Because I just feel like it just feels like It feels like high ridge But can it also go No. No, but the very last time. Of course it could. Man, you look so offended. And then you can also,

the one I like this, especially if it's group. Oh, come on. Let's go below. Go down to A flat if you want. Wait, what? I love the delay. It's great. I'm chilling on my yacht.

Ken Loggins, Michael McDonnell. What? This is the first yacht rock because I can think of. Well, there you go. We have made a connection between John Coltrane and yacht rock that you never thought.

You're welcome. You're welcome. And Brad Meldow as well. No, we hope you enjoy these. These are fun. These are fun for, you know, a lot of times for pianists because we kind of lead through these

if we're not playing, you know, like by ourselves, but definitely if we're by ourselves. Oh, man. But they're important to know for horn players and for singers, because if you can kind of latch on to these and even start to direct it,

Should we tell all the other non-pianists about the secret facial expressions that each one of these... No, let's say... We'll do that on later episode. Let's not reveal that secret. We'll do that on one of our famous you'll hear at Lives. Yeah, we should bring that up at the next jazz piano conference. Yes. Yeah.

Okay, so we do have one bonus, but we're going to talk just a little bit about our sponsors, Open Studio Jazz. They... Open Studio Jazz is a place where you come as you are, but you get to meet the masters. So Jeffrey Keiser, Adam Manus, Diane Reeves. Diane Reeves, Christian McBride, Sean Jones, Warren Wolf, these great players, not only great players, great teachers, people that are passionate about music are ready there to meet you wherever you are to bring you along on your jazz journey. And we are more than just lessons, jazz lessons from jazz legends. Yes, of course we are. But we are more importantly a meeting place and a community to get better to talk about the kind of stuff we're talking about here. So join us over there whenever you are ready.

Okay. And we got a bonus How'd you like your backup? I liked it very much It was so soothing I felt like I was back at the Ramada in North Ready for the bonus? Yeah

So the bonus is A Sin Street Did you like that set up for you? Come on That's the street Where all the good folks Bad folks meet Down in New Orleans

Okay I'm not gonna do all that But this is the We're calling this one The Nola Bluesy Right So break it down break it down. Okay, break it down. So let's actually, let's, well, we can do it wherever. I was thinking like E-flat. There's so many variations on this, but this is the basic one I like to show. So we're going, this is all about moving diatonic, diatonic and chromatic movement of some hip shapes, but they can't be too hip. You don't want to be like, it's not about that. We're not doing that right now. No. That's not what we're doing. So the one I recommend to start with is this. So we got three and we got that B-flat minor try, but it's just the dominant. and seventh, so you got the shell, the ninth, and the fifth.

Because we're E-flat. And we're thinking about it as dominant as we transition back. And then we're going to go down chromatically. And then don't be afraid to hit the one and then go to the five. Little New Orleans trick. Because then you're going to go to that five with... Ah.

What? Yeah, it works over that. So hold on, let me break this down. So you got the B-flat triad on top. Are you playing that with just your right hand? Yeah. Okay. But you could go.

You can go either way. So that's really interesting. So I always thought about this as... Yeah, that's good, too. That E flat, and then you keep that E flat there. That's a good variation on it. Yeah. Cool.

Man, that's great. That's a more kind of gospely one. I'm going to check yours out. And then even like... Man. Sorry, it's so sloppy. Like, a real New Orleans, like sometimes, you know, on all that stuff.

But a real is like two. Yeah, yeah. Don't be afraid to go straight to. It just feels right. This is like the anti-rando. Yeah. You know. Come on.

But that Very important. Dominant 7, sharp 5. I think we laid it out. Yeah, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.