Our HL Music catalogue allows everyone easy access to jazz and any other style of popular music. Pieces are adapted to each instrument and generally include an audio or multimedia element. The selection is enormous!
Jeff Gardner
Blues book
Piano
The blues came first!
Whether you are listening to and/or playing jazz, funk, rhythm'n blues, fusion, soul, or rock'n roll, the blues is the heart of the matter. To build a firm foundation for improvising in any of these styles you have to know the blues.
These pieces are based on simple motifs, developed through one or two 12 - bar choruses. This technique of motivic development is essential to improvising and composing in any style of music.
I have included a chart of basic blues scales to aid more advanced and/or adventurous pianists in improvising on these pieces. Of course, try to listen to as many records of the blues piano greats to inspire you and help get the feeling of this great music.
Paul Mindy
Initiation to Brazilian percussions
When I first fell in love with Brazilian music, I wanted to learn how to play the instruments. At that time, however, there were no teachers nor any instruments on which practice, only a handful of recordings of Brazilian musicians whom I could only very rarely see performing. That period of my life became one big question mark - how could I learn to play, how could I interpret the music, how could I learn about it, and how could I make the instruments myself ? There was only one answer, and that was to go to Brazil and study there, to try to absorb the musical language of oral tradition, assimilating it and trying to write it own despite the limits of written notation.
This book is the result of thirty years of intense artistic experience, travelling and teaching, a written account of my impressions of Brazilian instruments and percussion.
Paul Mindy
Traduction : Mary Criswick
The percussionist and singer Paul Mindy teaches in the Conservatoire of Aubervilliers - La Courneuve, near Paris, specialising in Brazilian music. He takes several masterclasses throughout the world (including the Paris Conservatoire, Lyon, Monaco and Recife). Paul Mindy was awarded the George Brassens prize, and has sung at the Olympia theatre in Paris. In 2001 he won the Assemblée Nationale prize, followed in 2002 by the Académie Charles Cros prize for arranging. He has taken part in several recordings.
Alain Giroux
Picking jazz
Guitar
Alain Giroux is one of the pioneers of fingerpicking in France.
Early in the 1960s, he discovered acoustic blues and began studying the various guitar techniques used in blues and ragtime, and in particular Chose of the American guitarists of the 1920's, 30s and 40s, which are at the base of modern fingerpicking.
Parallel to his career as a concert performer with harmonist Jean-Jacques Milteau and later with violinist Jean-Louis Mahjun, with whom he recorded several records, he teaches guitar, gives workshops and has published blues methods and teaching videos.
- CD included