UPDATE  5/3/23 - found the transcription!  Link should work now. 

Just thought I'd share a transcription I did a while ago.  I think it's pretty accurate, but there may be some some mistakes or typos (since I do these primarily…

I'm very excited to finally announce a few shows coming up.  It's been almost exactly two years since I had to cancel all my performances due to the pandemic, and more than anything, I've missed live events—playing music with people…

Here are two great tunes that are a lot of fun to play, and very conducive to adding improvisations in performance.
"Raqset al-Atlas" is a famous tune by the Moroccan musician Abdelkader al-Rashdi (عبد القادر الراشدي).   Listening to it recently…

Here's another favorite from Anouar Brahems Thimar on ECM.  This recording was a rearrangement of Brahem's earlier song "Touyour."  This is a beautiful and rare example of Brahem's vocal music.  For Thimar, Brahem took the instrumental interludes from the song…

This is a piece I heard recently and decided to transcribe.  It has a really beautiful and fascinating rhythmic structure, a fact pointed out on Facebook by Faisal Zedan.  Faisal is a master percussionist from Syria with a deep…

Here's one I've been asked for a number of times.  For some reason, I never got around to it before.  This tune first appeared on Rabih Abou-Khalil's album Tarab, and later on the album Arabian Waltz.  It's the…

Continuing my look through Anouar Brahem's music, here's another old one. 

An interesting thing about Brahem is that is recordings are often not perfect performances, and this tune is another example of that.  The first time through the B section…

In 2001, I attended Simon Shaheen's Arabic Music Retreat and was exposed to a lot of "real" Arabic music for the first time. Up to that point, I had mainly been listening to what I could find at Tower Records. 

…

This is a lovely piece by Anouar Brahem, one he has rarely performed.  The main recording available is Thimar, with Dave Holland and John Surman. 

This album was my first experience with Brahem's music; it came out in 1998…

I thought I'd share a few thoughts about a general concept/technique in Arabic music that I think of as "rubato on the beat" or "out-of-time but in-time." I've never heard anyone use a specific term for this in Arabic, if…

Inside Arabic Music is is an absolute treasure for anyone looking to learn more about Arabic music and maqam, specifically as it relates to the "Golden Age" of Arabic music from the 1930s-1970s where Arabic music moved away from the…

Here's my transcription of one Anouar Brahem's most popular pieces, Parfum de Gitane.   This sheet music is based on the version he plays on "Astrakan Cafe," which has some minor differences from the version he plays on "Barzakh."

This is…

This is a little exercise I wrote to practice the higher positions and achieving consistent intonation on the oud.   The notes are all C major on the first string. 

I suggest following the fingerings exactly to get the intended benefits…

I thought I'd repost some old transcriptions.  Yesterday's post of Anouar Brahem's "The Astounding Eyes of Rita" reminded me of some older transcriptions of his music that I did ages ago. 

I'd posted some of these ages ago on my…

This is a sound that (if memory serves) I first noticed when transcribing John Coltrane's solo on "I Hear A Rhapsody" from his 1957 album "Lush Life."  I don't think I've ever come across anyone discussing this particular scale, so…

(Note: Originally published November 2009 - accidentally deleted, so reposting)

In the previous post, I put up a transcription of a signature line from Kurt Rosenwinkel's solo on "Zhivago" from The Next Step. The line is basically planing a…

I've always been a fan of Anouar Brahem.  He's one of the first oud players I heard and is partly responsible for inspiring me to learn the oud in the first place (along with Rabih Abou-Khalil).  After met Simon Shaheen…

Once upon a time, I tried to blog about things I was practicing related to jazz.  Over the past several years, I've been much more focused on Arabic music and the oud, but I thought I'd repost my old musings…

I find myself thinking about this topic with some regularity.  It seems to me that “freedom” is often presented as a linear scale, with “limitations” in opposition to freedom, as if limitations are like chains that prevent us from being…

I'm going to be using this space to share what projects I'm working on, what I've been thinking about, and anything else I find interesting or cool.

I just finished composing some original music for a short documentary film, Beirut…

It's very common in jazz education to encourage a chord-oriented perspective on improvisation. In many ways, this makes a lot of sense and can be a valuable way of analyzing the music. However, it runs the risk of one failing…

Here are more rootless voicings for guitar, based on the "Bill Evans" left-hand style voicings.

These are mostly drop-2 chords, so unlike Evans's close voicings, these are open voicings. This does change the character of the sonority considerably; if the…

The uses of triads for an improviser are nearly limitless. As I hinted at in my previous post on digital patterns, adding a note to a triad to create a four-note group can create a lot of possibilities.  The…

Here is a set of rootless voicings for guitar that I adapted from the stock "Bill Evans" style left-hand voicings.  I show them in a II V I context to illustrate the voice leading, but they can of course be…

Okay, I haven't posted in a year. Here's a little worksheet of common patterns that are often used by modern improvisers. John Coltrane was probably the first to make notable use of these kinds of patterns, which he did on…