A tune, and making sense of jazz

Wrote a tune, and tried my best to analyze a jazz standard.

Lonesome John—bowing (with video)

This is how I bow Lonesome John (source: John Salyer). Video is included, demonstrating fast and slow.

Another fiddle tune—Sandy Floor

Just a tune that I learned really early on and I can’t seem to find any recordings of.

EDIT: Turns out this tune was collected (from Illinois fiddler Pappy Taylor) by Garry Harrison but didn’t make it into his book Dear Old Illinois.

Sarah Armstrong’s Tune—bowing (with video)

This is how I bow Sarah Armstrong’s Tune. Video is included, demonstrating fast and slow.

Old-time bowing

After a discussion with user Fiddlepogo on Fiddle Hangout, I came up with some more things to talk about here. Here’s a comprehensive recap of my earlier bowing blog posts along with more content.

A couple medleys

Sat down at the piano to play, and I came out with two medley-type improvisations.

Some real jazz

Played an actual jazz tune on fiddle, and found a video.

Functional analysis, huh

I was reading this and it seemed to make way too much sense—I feel like it describes the framework for what I do when I improvise chords on the piano. Here’s some stuff that I thought about. (I apologize in advance for mixing roman numeral notation with the functional analysis notation.)

Two fiddle-piano duets

A conversation on Facebook gave me the idea to do fiddle-piano duets; I recorded two today.

Another cover

Just did a cover of the Someday’s Dreamers theme again.