Sunday, July 30, 11 am - 2 pm (online)

Jazz masters can play blues-based phrases that soar over jazz harmony, seemingly at one with the harmony and simultaneously expressing an entirely separate logic. The ease of players like Kenny Burrell, Oscar Peterson, and Stanley Turrentine is deceptive. Perhaps you’ve tried to use the same blues scale as one of them over a chord progression and found it sounded nowhere as good. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the power of the blues idiom in your jazz playing. We’ll look at the general principles as well as the specific harmonic tricks necessary to make the blues idiom work over major chords, “jazz blues” chord changes, turnarounds, and other common jazz progressions—developing our musical “intuitions” through exercises we can practice to get these crucial sounds in our ears, and under our fingers. Prerequisites: Knowledge of basic jazz chord-scale harmony. Familiarity with advanced harmony, including altered and diminished chords, will be helpful but not required. Bring your instrument! (optional).

Jazz’s greatest improvisers create music that packs an emotional punch. It’s a lesson that tenor saxophonist Anton Schwartz learned well. Schwartz’s Quintet is the Winner of the 2016 Northwest Acoustic Jazz Ensemble of the Year. Their latest album, Flash Mob, spent eight weeks in jazz radio’s Top 10 and earned a four-star review in Down Beat magazine, reinforcing Schwartz’s reputation as a passionate but poised improviser and smart purveyor of captivating melodies. Schwartz has performed at jazz’s most prestigious clubs and festivals, including the Blue Note and Dizzy’s (NYC), Blues Alley (DC), Yoshi’s (Oakland), Jazz Alley (Seattle), and the Monterey Jazz Festival. Recent engagements include sold-out shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center and a feature as a soloist with the Boston Pops in Boston Symphony Hall. He is a longtime faculty member of the California Jazz Conservatory and has taught extensively at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and the Brubeck Institute. Schwartz is also the author of a popular blog about jazz, improvisation and harmony.