I've been baking sourdough bread since the start of lockdown in March 2020. In this post I'll describe my process now. I'll try to make it as simple as possible. Starter I begged some starter from my neighbour. Or you can order a sachet of dried starter from here. There are a million recipes for making … Continue reading Simple Sourdough Bread
I've been looking at another tune that seems very familiar, but that has a couple of corners in it that up until now I've never untwisted, Like Someone In Love. It was written by Jimmy Van Heusen for a 1944 movie called Belle Of The Yukon (which I probably don't ever want to see), and … Continue reading The First 8 Bars Of “Like Someone In Love”
A lot of fakebooks and other sources give the middle eight of Softly As In The Morning Sunrise (in the key of Cm / Eb) as: | Eb | ./. | C7b9 | ./. || Fm | F#dim | DØ | G7b9| I've never been able to make sense of the change F#dim | DØ. … Continue reading The Middle 8 Of Softly
This is a recipe for pickled chillies that I made today, based partly on what my father-in-law Grandpa Josh used to make, and partly on all the recipes that I see on the webs, for example this one. I put a 900ml jar and lid in the oven at 100C to sterilise. I put in … Continue reading Pickled Chillies
Here's another post in a series on simplifying chords for soloing. This is not rocket science, so advanced players don't need to read it. Lockdown has been a good time for revisiting standards that I learned in my jazz infancy and haven't reconsidered since. Tunes for which I worked out an approach based on my … Continue reading The pitfalls of Fake Books
I wrote this piece in 2012. At some point it got lost from the website. I have edited this version a bit. At first it was just graffiti. A few grotesque figures painted with a fine brush in red ink, around doorways. Each work had an ethereal beauty. Each work was signed Spot. There were … Continue reading Spot
In my last post (You Can Constructively Ignore Harmony) I talked about simplifying harmony by removing unnecessary chords. Often people use pentatonic scales to reduce the complexity of a scale. The removal of notes from a scale makes a stronger, more defined sound. In this post I'll talk about simplifying approaches to dominant chords by thinking … Continue reading A Simplified Approach To Soloing On 7b9
Following on from yesterday's post Too Much Harmony?, a good approach to learning to solo on a standard would be to have in your mind a version for soloing that weeds out as many chords as possible, leaving only the most important. So taking the first 8 bars of I Thought About You as an … Continue reading You Can Constructively Ignore Harmony
When I was at best an improver at jazz, a tutor who I very much respected told me that he was hearing too much harmony in my solo playing. My first reaction was surprise – how could you possibly have too much harmony? Wasn't that what we'd been taught to do? Play through the changes … Continue reading Too Much Harmony?
I made pizza on a sourdough base. This post is to document what I did, so I can remember it. See this post for the basics of how I make sourdough bread. This recipe is enough for an 11" pizza or 2 x 8" pizzas. The night before you want to make pizza, take 50g … Continue reading Sourdough Pizza Base
