The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast
Podcast Description
Geoff Gascoyne chats to big-name (and upcoming) jazz soloists as they pick and play their favourite jazz standards and talk about their jazz lives. A mix of candid discussion, technical insights and spontaneous improvisation, this weekly podcast is a must-listen for everyone that loves jazz. Geoff is a renowned jazz bass player and prolific composer and producer with credits on over 100 albums and a book of contacts to die for! He is also executive producer of the best-selling Quartet jazz standards play-along app series for iOS.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast explores various themes within the jazz genre, focusing on artists' personal journeys, improvisation techniques, and the realities of a jazz career. Episodes include discussions on vocal improvisation techniques with Emma Smith, melodic paraphrasing with Alan Barnes, and the transformative musical experiences of Chris Standring, highlighting topics such as artistic perseverance and the significance of collaboration.
Geoff Gascoyne chats to big-name (and upcoming) jazz soloists as they pick and play their favourite jazz standards and talk about their jazz lives.
A mix of candid discussion, technical insights and spontaneous improvisation, this weekly podcast is a must-listen for everyone that loves jazz.
Geoff is a renowned jazz bass player and prolific composer and producer with credits on over 100 albums and a book of contacts to die for! He is also executive producer of the best-selling Quartet jazz standards play-along app series for iOS.
Perfect pitch, bebop, and the hard reality of a badly formatted big band chart all collide in this week’s episode. Geoff chats with the brilliant Alex Clarke, a young UK alto saxophonist (and multi-instrumentalist) who already sounds like she has lived inside the music for decades.
Geoff welcomes Alex into his South London home and gets straight into the choices that shaped her career from Cheshire school bands to Ronnie Scott's Jazz Orchestra and beyond.
Alex talks openly about dropping out of Birmingham Conservatoire after one year, not because she stopped loving jazz, but because the environment made practice feel like a chore. From there we follow the practical path: gigging early, learning the mechanics of form and harmony on bandstands, and taking a live-in job at Warwick School during the pandemic that let her keep playing while the world stalled. We also dig into her experience of the ‘Young Musician of the Year’ competition (‘BBC Young Musician’) and how a single line on an email can give promoters confidence at exactly the right moment.
The heart of the conversation is craft. Alex explains how she built jazz vocabulary through listening and transcription, pulling language from Art Pepper, Phil Woods, Cannonball Adderley and Scott Hamilton, and how perfect pitch helps with keys while sometimes masking deeper harmonic gaps. We talk jazz standards and the American Songbook, then play the 1930s Schwartz/Dietz standard ‘Alone Together’ (accompanied by Quartet – what else?) and break down her improvising approach, including diminished-based thinking, chord tones versus passing notes, and what makes the alto saxophone so flexible in sound and feel.
If you care about straight-ahead jazz, bebop language, learning standards by ear, and building a sustainable life as a working musician in the UK jazz scene, you will want this one in your playlist. Subscribe, share it with a fellow player, and leave us a review with your favourite standard to practise and why.
Presenter: Geoff Gascoyne
Series Producer: Paul Sissons
Production Manager: Martin Sissons
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast is a UK Music Apps production.
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