Anybody use the "Sudnow Method" piano course?

[Keyz316]

I'm currenly learning from an instructional course called the "Sudnow Method" ( www.sudnow.com )that teaches you a pretty useful approach to playing nice thick jazz voicings. I got to the last track on the 3rd/final CD, and discovered that my disk has a rather bad scratch along the outer edge, making the last track pretty much unplayable. Unfortunately I bought the course a few years ago and didn't start using it until now, so there's really nothing I can do at this point aside from buying the whole thing over again.... though I'm hoping there might be someone here who also has "The Sudnow Method" course and might be willing to rip an mp3 for me of track 4 on disk 3 (the "Learning Misty" track).

 

If anyone can help me out with this (I'd reeeally appreciate it), please send me a PM on the forum and I'll send you my email address. Thanks

 

Peace.

[jazzyprof]

I have the audio tape version which I bought many years ago so it won't be that easy to make you an mp3. I bet if you emailed Dave Sudnow he might send you a replacement CD.

[Keyz316]

Yeah I may try that if it comes to it, though I doubt he'd be able to do it for free... well definitely will try that as a last resort. Hopefully someone will have the CD handy though.

 

Anyone? Would really appreciate it

[Bartolomeo]

Ask over at rec.music.makers.piano as questions related to the "Sudnow Method" come up there with some frequency. If you have no other usenet access, you can use http://groups.google.com and perform a search for rec.music.makers.piano.

 

Bartolomeo

[Jazz+]

Review:

 

"It speaks volumes that David Sudnow found it necessary to completely rewrite his treatise on his experience learning jazz improvisation at the piano. According to Sudnow's introduction, upon reading it again not even he, the author, could penetrate the cloudy, turgid prose that cluttered his first edition to get any meaning out of it. However, Mr. Sudnow has blown away the first edition's clouds only to replace them with a thick fog in a tome just as impenetrable as the original. Occasional moments of clarity notwithstanding, Sudnow's book reads like a manual of how to convolute language beyond its capacity to render meaning. That this occurs in a book about music--arguably the most emotionally expressive of the arts--makes Sudnow's literary idiosyncrasies unforgivable. Expecting enlightenment, the hapless reader instead encounters turbid gems like this: "A rapidly paced entry into a way thus known could take it with a sure availability for a numerical articulational commitment, and with no prefigured digit counting. Its paceable availability, here and now, afforded securely paced entries whose soundfully targeted particular places would now be found in course, doing improvisation." It's English--well, most of it; he invents a word here and there--but totally meaningless, and far from insightful. Examples like the one above paint every page, and only morbid curiosity can keep the pages turning."

[Keyz316]

Hm I don't know what course of his that refers to, but it doesn't seem to be the one I have. Mine is a small black booklet with roughly painted white piano keys vertical on the cover, labeled "The Weekend Piano Seminar" and the copyright is 1999, and there are 3 CDs inside the book. So far I've only had "slight" trouble following along with what Sudnow says/writes at full speed. I mostly just attributed it to the "Brooklyn accent" he seems to have. His sentence structure certainly would get him thrown out of a college English class, but I can still follow the meaning well enough.

 

Suffice it to say, I'm in the process of writing out my own version of notes based on what is said on the CDs and what's written in the book, and have sifted out at least 4 full typed pages of excellent information thus far.

 

I know it is most definitely "not" the end-all piano instruction course... it really only covers one aspect of playing (harmonizing a melody). "That" is the area I personally need the most work on though, and the particular approch Sudnow takes to that specific aspect of playing makes more sense to me than what I've previously been taught. I'm already pretty good at playing left hand jazz voicings and playing a melody or solo over them with my right hand, and playing right hand "A/B" type voicings while walking bass in the left, etc. I just needed help with harmonizing melodies.

 

Peace.

(and of course if anyone can send the track still, that'd be excellent)

[jazzyprof]

Originally posted by Jazz+:

Review:

 

"It speaks volumes that David Sudnow found it necessary to completely rewrite his treatise on his experience learning jazz improvisation at the piano."

Jazz+: What you are referring to is not David Sudnow's course, which is called "The Sudnow Method", a fairly easy approach to creating nice, jazzy harmonies at the keyboard. I have the course and have found the material instructive...though I haven't had the discipline to actually work through it all.

 

The review you posted is about something else altogether, David Sudnow's scholarly treatise entitled "Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct". It is not a course or a method book. Rather, it is an attempt by a sociologist/ethnographer to describe how the brain and hand conspire to acquire improvisational skill within a particular context, in this case jazz piano, bebop style. I have read the book. Indeed there are parts that are impenetrable but most of it is actually fun to read once you get used to Sudnow's idiosyncratic writing style. Not all reviews of the book have been bad. Here are excerpts from some other reviews:

 

"A dazzling and deeply probing study of the relationship between human consciousness and behavior. "

-- Jack Kroll, Newsweek

 

"With astonishing descriptive precision, the author compels the reader to think and feel along with him as his fingers progress toward intimacy with the key-board. This is at once a work of minutely detailed phenomenology and a virtuoso performance of language in action."

-- Psychology Today

 

"Original and detailed phenomenology of the sort that philosophers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty promised but seldom carried out. [sudnow's] minute observations are astounding. This book is a great contribution to our understanding of embodied knowhow and to a foundation of a method for learning more."

-- Hubert L. Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley