MEL BAY Home Improvisation Workshop by Pat Cloud
Learn the banjo neck completely and forever!
This great new volume introduces a sound concept for improvisation for bluegrass as well as laying a foundation for jazz playing. It will surely be of interest to any banjoist seeking to expand their awareness and understanding of harmony as it relates to the 5-string. In this volume, jazz banjo pioneer Pat Cloud takes you on a fascinating journey, pointing out new ways to visualize and conceptualize the standard chord forms and positions that all banjo pickers have come to recognize. It utilizes five "sonic shapes" which train your left hand for facility and ear/hand coordination. You'll now be able to put all those licks into context!
One very useful section focuses on 'connectedness' by demonstrating how the
standard chord forms interrelate with one another. Pat shows how you can find
your way around the neck within and in between each of these forms. There are
key exercises to help demonstrate the ideas which are presented. This is not
a lick book, but rather the underlying basis for constructing licks. Why go to
the fish market, when you can teach yourself to fish!
Pat
Cloud was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and discovered the five-string banjo by
chance at age fourteen when his mother purchased a used swap-meet banjo as a
wall decoration. By age sixteen, he was playing professionally and toured with
the USO Bob Hope Oriental Command tours of 1967 and 1970 and in the early 1970s,
appearances on television include the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, and PBS. He
has been a Los Angeles studio musician for 25 years. In 1972, he began jazz studies
with former Nat King Cole guitarist, Horace Hatchett and then with William Thaisher
(co-author of the joe Pass guitar books) and started to adapt a fluid jazz vocabulary
to five-string banjo utilizing melodic technique pioneered by such banjoists
as Carrol Best, Bobby Thompson and Bill Keith.
In 1974, he joined briefly with mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau and the country music great Keith Whitley forming the "New Tradition" band playing Bluegrass throughout the southeast. Between 1976 and 1980, he continued jazz studies with jazz vibraphone player Dave Pike and continued in the Los Angeles studio circuit along with associations with the Walt Disney Corporation and UCLA jazz workshop.
In 1983, he recorded the album "Higher Power" with Barry Solomon and Bob Applebaum on the Flying Fish label and was nominated that same year in the best "new instrument" category by Downbeat Magazine.
He is included in the 1988 Oak publication, Masters of the Five-String Banjo, in which Tony Trishka says:
"He is the first five-string player to achieve a wide-reaching command of the jazz vocabulary, and as such inhabit a rarefied world which he now shares with a select few. To hear him play is amazing, but to watch him elicit those streams of "boppish" notes from a predominantly bluegrass instrument is other-worldly."
In 1989, he was awarded "Banjo Player of the Year" by the California Country Music Association.
In 1992, he participated in the Tennessee Banjo Institute with other banjo
notables including John Hartford, Douglas Dillard, Carl Jackson, Grandpa Jones,
Bill Keith, Taj Mahal, Mike Seeger, Ralph Stanley, Tony Trishka, Doc Watson,
and legendary New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker. Pat Cloud makes his home in
the Eastern Sierras in central California.