Workshop - Can You Do The Boogaloo?
…or bugalú? The “latin boogaloo” seems to have emerged in the 1960’s out of the Puerto Rican barrios of New York City. These young Puerto Rican-Americans were represented in the classic musical and film West Side Story. If you remember, there is a scene where the Puerto Rican and New York kids are all together at a high school dance and they all break into a latin dance (composed by Leonard Bernstein) and they all yell “mambo!” So these young people are all listening to latin rhythms, rhythm and blues and the early rock ‘n’ roll of the day. The boogaloo was apparently born out of this cultural atmosphere.
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Workshop - When the Melody Ends on the Tonic
Songs that end with a melody note on the tonic of the key are very common. If a Major 7th chord is played against the tonic, it can create an unpleasant cluster, most of the time. The following examples are some ideas that you can use in such case.
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Workshop - Pork Belly Futures
I’ve been playing Pork Belly Futures for a long time. I wrote it back in 1988 while coming home in a snowstorm from a gig in Green Bay, WI. The announcer on the radio show took a break to give the news and the pork belly futures report. I was new to the Midwest and had never heard of such a thing. Whatever it was, I thought it probably wasn’t good news for the pig. I also thought the pork industry might like the idea of a theme song to go along with “the other white meat” slogan it had just introduced!
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Workshop - Eclectic Electric Systematic Inversions Part 2
Welcome to Eclectic Electric. This time we’ll be continuing our discussion of Systematic Inversions.
The basic premise is that we’re going to use systematic inversions to create four voicings of each chord quality and then we’re going to use the upper diatonic neighbor of the top voice to create a scale that melodically connects the four inversions.
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