Re: Barry Galbraith's Fingering on Donna Lee

Nice that you wrote this. Barry was a great player, studio musician,
teacher and a real man with a heart of gold.

TD




Gerry wrote:
On 2006-08-26 14:57:52 -0700, "dave" <dbrennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Gerry, is the triplet in the 3rd measure, beat 1 (Gb-Ab-Gb) therefore
divided between the 5th and 4th string?

Correct.

This seems quite difficult at a fast tempo. At the bottom of the mss
Barry notes that triplets should be played with 1 pick attack.

It clearly can not include this one. Down-stroke on the Gb, up-stroke
on the Ab "following through" or "rake" back through the next Gb. Then
I have notated a pull-off (that blurry inverted caret above the bar)
from Gb to F. I've never used the pull-off, I find, picking both the
Gb and the F.

I note also, from observation, that I play that triplet more like an
8th with two 16th's. But the chart does not indicate this.

I must point out that though Barry may well have been most exacting in
his own playing, approach and notation, but if I changed a fingering
here or there for comfort's sake, he would rarely quibble. He wasn't a
pedantic rule-meister, that's for sure. Whenever I took a hard line on
something, he almost always casually responded with "whatever works for
you". Additionally when I came back three weeks later and pointed out
that my grand plan on one passage or another was unworkable, he never
gave me, by look or deed, the "I told you so" approach. Even though he
had told me so. Once after exhausting almost every conceivable
approach, he said with a smile "Hey, how 'bout this one?" and then
played the one I had rejected initially.

Same with the fixed picking (pinky parked on the pickguard) versus
"floating wrist" where I migrated back and forth on. He simply would
not give me an answer. He pointed out great players that used both
approaches. Regarding both this and other right hand techniques he
counseled me to select any approach and stick with it. I didn't. We
rarely discussed right-hand technique and I tend to think he too,
possibly to his detriment, had migrated a number of times in life.

He's one of the few players that successfully migrated from early to
modern styles as they were developed. He saw Eddie Lang (in the "Big
Broadcast") and switched from banjo to guitar, then he followed Charlie
Christian as a contemporary, then developed approaches simultaneously
the friends like Farlow and Raney. And further to developing his own
modern approach wtih Bill Evans and George Russell. This is my
projection: he changed horses many times. He could have been a
world-acknowledged clone of Lang or Christian or another, but instead
he covered it all, and so was less a prodigy on any one. He also
played very good classical lit.
--
What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in.

.

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