Preface by Gerald Rudolph, Ph.D.
When I first took piano lessons as a child, I learned to read music and
follow notation on the sheet. Although I learned scales and was exposed
to modes as part of my music instruction, composition and improvisation
remained a mystery until much later, when I took lessons from a jazz
pianist during my freshman year in college. Even then, although I could
repeat patterns that I copied from the instructor, and even modify those
patterns slightly, true improvisation did not come easily because I did
not understand the underlying musical structure.
Despite my extensive formal education, I found that I still could not
create a style of my own; I simply did not have a structure that allowed
me to explore options in a systematic and creative way. It was not until
I studied a text on jazz improvisation, and actually practiced using the
various modes and progressions, that I began to grasp how to improvise,
as well as how to add color and complexity to my playing.
As a formally-trained musician, I was at first skeptical of the approach
propounded in Exotic Scales. After all, ‘real’ jazz players rarely
consider improvisation from the perspective of applying a single scale
over an entire progression. Rather, they think in terms of changing
scales and modes, and applying arpeggios over specific passages. When I
sat down and carefully analyzed the results that emerge from applying
these scales in the harmonic settings developed in the book, I was
amazed to find that this is precisely what emerges, albeit from a rather
unconventional approach. Thus, as the reader works his or her way
through the text and the numerous examples provided, it develops that
although the player is thinking in terms of a single easy-to-internalize
scale, what is really emerging is exactly the right arpeggio, mode, or
scale for each chord in the developed progression. I was amazed!
Musical theory is an incredibly complex subject, and one that lends
itself to many approaches and perspectives. Even relatively elementary
aspects of the subject, such as diatonic modes, are a subject of ongoing
discussion and debate among musical scholars. For example, while one
might interpret the Aeolian mode as a diatonic major scale played from
its sixth degree, another musician will insist (equally correctly) on
approaching it in terms of its intrinsic step/half-step structure. In
this sense, Exotic Scales abstracts what would
otherwise be an extremely complex set of techniques into their simplest
forms--an abstraction that, in all honesty, had never occurred to me
until reading this book.
I am convinced that this is an approach that is particularly well suited
to the backgrounds and approaches employed by guitarists, although it
would also be beneficial to any instrumentalist seeking to enter the
world of jazz improvisation. A book like Exotic Scales would have been a
great time-saver in my own musical journey. It not only presents the use
of scales other than the seven basic diatonic modes, but also presents a
basic introduction to the use of scales and modes that would be valuable
for a beginner with little music theory and for a more advanced student
as a reference.
I have been honored to have had the opportunity to work directly with
Joe Befumo in a number of capacities, and to have made music with him. I
have learned much from him, and I suspect that in reading this book, you
will also.
Gerald Rudolph, Ph.D. .