Music Education Monday: Fusion fundamentals with Lorber, Haslip & Marienthal

Most of the musicians who come to St. Louis to play at Jazz at the Bistro also get involved in some sort of educational activity on behalf of Jazz St. Louis, performing at local schools and/or working with their jazz ensembles, and doing master classes and workshops for the student musicians involved in JSL's own JazzU program.

While these events are open only to the student groups involved, as it happens the three named headliners playing this week at the Bistro all have created some fairly detailed educational materials that can be found for free online.

Keep reading after the jump for instructional videos and links to some useful lessons from keyboardist Jeff Lorber, bassist Jimmy Haslip, and saxophonist Eric Marienthal.

For starters, Marienthal has recorded several instructional videos over the course of his career, and one of them, "Tricks of the Trade," has found its way on to YouTube. You can see it in the first embedded window at the bottom of this post.

As for Haslip, last year he recorded a nearly two-hour master class on video under the auspices of amp maker Aguilar, but the embed unfortunately doesn't seem to work with Blogger. However, you can watch the whole thing online over at Livestream.

A couple more short behind-the-scenes clips featuring Haslip can be found embedded below. In the first, he talks about his Wilkins 5-string Bass, the E pentatonic minor scale, and what to practice. The second discusses how being left-handed helped facilitate Haslip's development of an idiosyncratic yet expressive personal style.

Lorber wrote a series of instructional articles for Keyboard magazine a couple of years ago, and while his author page on the magazine's site indexes most of them, a couple seem not to have been tagged and don't show up there. So, here are direct links to the individual columns in the series:

Blues soloing concepts
Keyboard soloing ideas
Pentatonic soloing in fusion
Pump up your solos with II-V progressions
Theme and variation in soloing
Funk comping
Modal improvisation for jazz fusion and rock soloing
Five ways to play like Billy Preston

Lorber also recorded a series of more gear-focused videos for the magazine, which can't be embedded but still can be seen on their site:

Introduction
Gear
Effects pedals
Mini Moog demo
Making a beat
Jamming to the beat
Pro tools
Gig recording
Album vs. live
Piano pickups

Lastly, in the final embedded video in this post, an excerpt from the documentary Down the Rhodes: The Fender Rhodes Story, Lorber talks about the keyboard that has been an important part of his music from the beginning.