transcription keith jarrett somewhere over the rainbow

Transcription keith jarrett somewhere over the rainbow how to#

Even on piano, I’m finding that the two-finger trill is better if you can do it, because it’s more even.

You know, harpsichordists don’t learn the 2-3-1-3-2-3-1-3 fingering, they don’t learn the “alternating second finger so you give the other one a break,” they only learn the two finger trills. However, when you apply the same ornaments to piano, you can end up in trouble because the resistance is so massive.ĮI: I think Franz Liszt said somewhere that the heart of piano virtuosity was the trill – that if you could play those, you could play anything. It’s surprising how much that has become part of me since my harpsichord learning years in the 80’s. But I also know traditional performance practice for those trills and ornaments. But I hear things occasionally, depending on what’s going on I let things happen. Bach was said to have said that everything he wrote in is what he meant, and that it’s not supposed to have needed anything added. I don’t even like making a mark on the page…ĮI: What about the ornamentation? Do you play that differently every time? With the Bach, I’ve been able to stick with that. So I went through three different editions of the Shostakovich and ended up with absolutely no fingering: the Urtext, with no fingerings at all, and that’s always what I prefer in the end. It works sometimes, but it doesn’t work in the studio, when you don’t want to do a second take. When I realized I was going to record it, I had to say to myself, wait: I’ve got to find an edited version of this with fingerings! Because what I normally do is find different fingerings every time I play, probably. With the Shostakovich, I just played it and played it and played it. And even with the bass line, if you stop looking you think you know what it is, but he always thought it out so well that it’s not always not predictable, but his note is always better than yours.ĮI: Do you work out your fingerings early on, or keep experimenting? So you’ve changed harmonic center in the process of playing what you thought was a simple scale so you can’t take your eyes off the music. And Bach has this crazy ability to change key in the middle of a scale.

And working on the fingering puts you in a hypnotic state, playing the same phrase down one half step at a time or down a scale, and you’re doing the same fingering but it isn’t the same fingering, depending on how many black keys are involved. The jazz player doesn’t ever play these patterns: they don’t come up certainly not in the left hand. Probably I’m in better shape than I was before, due to some of the patterns Bach forces upon you. But I’ve seen how it seems to work this time, and I’m just taking advantage of it. When I was getting ready to record Mozart I couldn’t have mixed both. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”ĮI: So, at one point, going between jazz and classical felt like more of an embouchure change than it does now? Is it beginning to even out? Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach, but now I’m playing the Bach, and for the last twenty-five minutes I do the other thing and it works very well.

Transcription keith jarrett somewhere over the rainbow how to#

I was just working on Bach over the last few months, and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert, and while I’m pretending that, that’s practicing. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another. It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do. Steve Weiss was the engineer and Bradley Farberman handled the transcription.)Įthan Iverson: Do you play the piano every day? (Reprinted from old DTM originally posted September 2009. Thanks to Peggy Sutton of BBC’s Jazz on 3 for arranging the interview.