Free game for November

If you can tap your foot you should try November's free music game. Inspired in part by Luke Rhinehart's 'The Dice Man' it involves rolling dice to decide what beats to play on.

You really don't need any 'proper' musical instruments for this game. A tin can, comb, hole punch or plastic bag will work just as well. Obviously, if you happen to have a Stradivarius violin to hand don't hide it away: that will sound just fine too.

Anyone can play. And you really don't need a fancy die like the one in the picture. A standard-issue six-sider will work just as well. Or you can make yourself a spinner with a matchstick and a piece of cardboard.

I post a new game every month, in addition to the ten on the website. If you sign up to the newsletter you need never miss one. The dice game is great fun. Cause a stir by playing it between courses at your local restaurant - there are plenty of things to make sounds with on a dining table.

Improvise? I don't know what to play

Jazz can be very daunting to play: all those chords coming thick and fast. But there are sequences that are easy to play over, providing you keep within the same key. For instance, if you are soloing in C major against the chords C, F and G (the 'primary' chords in C) then anything you play will sound OK. Incidentally, this goes for the 'secondary' chords Am, Dm and Em too. Just play the notes of the C major scale and let the chords make you sound good.

Easy? Well you might think so but it can still be hard to play anything. This is like writer's block. Asking a musician to play up and down a scale is a lot like asking an author to type the alphabet on their blank sheet of paper. It's writing but it's not very creative!

But writing gives us a clue. Imagine the instrument you are playing is your voice and use it to say "Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall". Try it again with some different notes. Now you have a musical phrase. Only you know you are really playing Humpty Dumpty.

Now try some other lines you know. Something from Shakespeare perhaps? It doesn't have to rhyme; anything will do. You can tell your own story or describe how you felt on your way to wherever you are playing: "I burnt the toast so I had to make some more and that made me miss my bus and now I'm grumpy." Too long? Probably. So just take one part of it and play that: "I burnt the toast, I burnt the toast." Use another section for an answering phrase: "Now I'm grumpy".

Telling your own story in this way can make it easier to connect emotionally with the music you are playing. As you become practised at this technique you can react spontaneously to events as you play. Whether your audience is the Albert Hall or the rest of your class you can express annoyance with someone who came in late or proclaim your love for the attractive person in the front row. And they'll never know (at least until you tell them).

Having got started with improvising in this way you may find you have an incentive to tackle the esoteric arts of modulation and key change. But that's for a future post.

Musician's rest

I never really got on with the Walkman. Although small for its time it was still cumbersome and the novelty of music on the go quickly wore off. The mp3 player is less so but I realise that what I don't like is having music fed directly into my ears. I enjoy listening to music but also have a good memory for it and usually have something 'playing in my head'. The advantages of this are that I can't lose the player and it never runs out of batteries. And it nearly always plays something appropriate to the moment.

Living in Norfolk, a county not famous for dramatic topography, I tend not to recall tracks associated with vast panoramas. On a well-earned break in the Peak District last weekend I found myself revisiting The Who's 'I Can See For Miles' for the first time in at least a decade. It is a dramatic, uplifting piece of music and suited the splendid view from the top of The Roaches. (The curious lyric is about a boy who pretends to be blind so he can watch his girlfriend flirt and then complain to her about it afterwards. A psychologist would have a field day.)

The best part of the trip was a walk near Monyash before the weekend crowds arrived. There were times when I could hear nothing but the occasional bird. (Even the head-player switched itself off.) Living in a city there is always some man-made sound going on. Screening out the unwanted noise becomes second nature but still requires effort. What I needed most was the sound of silence and that afternoon it came like rain to a desert.

And then of course, this being England in October, it really did rain. But beautifully.

Seeds on stony ground?

I did two more woodwind demonstrations this week which passed without a hitch. The Pink Panther theme always goes down well, as does The Simpsons music. I hold up 8-year old Lisa as an example of someone who's done a lot of practice to reach such a high standard. (I suspect, in his time, Bleeding Gums Murphy has done a lot of something too but I don't go there.) The clarinet brought some surprising responses because a character in Sponge Bob apparently plays it. Note to self: watch more TV.

One year 7 class remains. I couldn't fit it into my schedule. When I asked about it I was told it was the special needs class: ten students, three helpers. I would be unlikely to get any takers but they would probably enjoy the experience.

Straight after that I found myself chatting with the guitar tutor about a student he had who was making little or no progress and seemed ill-equipped to grasp even the basics. What to do? So I told him of my time in a special school where for some kids even assembling a saxophone with the crook (curvy bit) pointing the right way took some weeks to crack. There were no future Galways, Charlie Parkers or Naftule Brandweins among them but there were improvements in their co-ordination, behaviour and appreciation of music. On top of that they were getting one-to-one with an adult who was neither parent nor class teacher and needy kids just love attention.
So now the guitar teacher is determined to enjoy his student on the child's own level and I'm ready to perform for kids in the bottom set and broaden their horizons in any way I can. But first it's the half term holiday and hooray for that.

The significance of the title? My memory of the Bible is poor: it was compulsory to attend church on Sundays at my old school and there were various assemblies led my well-meaning hypocrites. This 'Christianity as a tool of the Establishment' was guaranteed to foster rebellion against organised religion in all its forms. However I do remember something about the waste of scattering seeds on stony ground. That may be true for gardeners but when it comes to people no ground is so hard that you can't plant something.

The Drummer's Tale

Martin, the drum teacher at a local high school, related this exchange with at student:

Martin: "Where's your book?"
Boy: "I actually had my book and drumsticks in my hand but then the house caught fire. We had to leave and I wasn't allowed to take anything with me. I wanted to go back in to get them but the fireman said I couldn't. I said it was my drum lesson today and I had to get my sticks but he wouldn't let me ."
Martin: "You forget them again, didn't you?"
Boy: "Yeah."
Martin: "How long did it take you to think that one up?"
Boy: (thinks...) "About an hour?"

Time better spent practising, no doubt, but now that you're reading this perhaps the effort wasn't entirely wasted.

Teaching - the hardest gig? Part One

Performing for adults, although not always a breeze, is very different from entertaining children. For a start, adults have chosen to be there and are generally predisposed to having a good time. Kids, in school anyway, are there under sufferance and are not usually allowed to start chatting amongst themselves or drift off to the bar.

As a classroom teacher there is time in which to get to know a group and build a relationship. As a freelancer it's often a completely new class each time: new kids and new teacher in charge. There is usually, even within the same school, a completely different culture: ground rules and acceptable standards of behaviour are never the same twice. Yet every teacher seems surprised that there may be other ways of doing things.

I am presently in the middle of a series of sessions in which I am trying to revive interest in learning woodwind at a local high school. The place had just built a new library and created a sixth form when the old head retired. He was replaced by a man who was the perfect embodiment of the Peter Principle (by which members of an organisation rise to their level of incompetence). Within two years he had turned the school around, nosediving it into a failed inspection and a 'special measures' regime. Parents capable of exercising choice sent their kids anywhere but this school and music, including woodwind, went through the floor.

So in attempt to garner students I have been taking in a variety of instruments to demonstrate to Year 7 classes. I am about half way through the series and will report next week when it's all over. To date the highlight has to be the student who was evicted from the room for failing to give an appropriate answer during the roll call. Presumably to maximise the attention he was getting he decided to sprint to the door, failing as he did so to notice the music stand I had set up. The stand went down with the child on top. Fortunately neither suffered any real damage.

In all this episode must have wasted ten or fifteen minutes of teaching time as we waited for a senior teacher to come and hear both sides of the story in the corridor outside.

Sounds of Africa

I buy a paper most Saturdays and spend the rest of the week trying to read it. This morning I actually made it to the travel section of The Guardian where they drew my attention the their Blog of the Month. It's truly an amazing site called Listen to Africa and it features photos and audio clips gathered on a two year cycling trip. It's gone straight in to my bookmarks.

There is a splendid variety of sounds and commentary but I'll stop prostrating myself before the blog's creators and let you check it out for yourself. Beware the python-chicken clip. (They warned me but I couldn't help myself.)