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Saturday, July 11, 2020 | 2 p.m.

At Home with
Evan Price
The Basics of the Blues

A journey through the basics of the blues, including 12-bar blues song form, blues harmony, and how to improvise melodies successfully.

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Event Video

About the Event

Looking forward to reconnecting with you all at my Blues class! Everybody has something to complain about these days so why not say it through your instrument? It’s fun AND therapeutic.

– Evan Price

About the Mentor

Evan Price is steadily gaining recognition as one of the world’s most confident voices in extra-classical string playing. Born in Detroit, he came of age busking in Greektown and playing in many genres, from square dance and blues to string quartets., As a young competitive fiddler he was the U.S. Scottish Fiddling Champion, the Kentucky State Fiddle Champion, Canadian Junior Fiddle Champion, and Canadian Novelty Fiddling Champion. He also performed with some of the masters of fiddle lore—Stephane Grappelli, Johnny Frigo, Claude “Fiddler” Williams, Johnny Gimble, Buddy Spicher, and Vassar Clements—as well as a diverse array of pop icons from Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to comedian Steven Wright.

Evan’s college career included stints at both The Cleveland Institute of Music and at Berklee College of Music, and he has served on the music faculty at Wellesley College, The California Jazz Conservatory, and The University of California, Berkeley.

Evan is a ten-year veteran of the world-renowned, paradigm-shifting jazz ensemble, the Turtle Island Quartet. During his tenure in Turtle Island, Evan gave over five hundred performances in concert venues from Latvia to Australia and had the opportunity to collaborate with many musical luminaries, such as Cuban clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, The Ying Quartet, pianists Dr. Billy Taylor and Kenny Barron, and classical guitarists, Sergio and Odair Assad. He recorded five CD’s with Turtle Island, two of which—”Four + 4″ and “A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane”—received GRAMMY® awards in 2006 and 2008 in the Classical Crossover category.

Since 1998, Evan has been proud to call himself a member of The Hot Club of San Francisco, perhaps the most venerable gypsy jazz band in the US. During his tenure, the group has thrilled audiences from Iceland to Mexico and across the United States, and has released seven CD’s which feature Evan on violin.

An accomplished composer, Evan has contributed compositions and arrangements to the repertoires of HCSF, Turtle Island Quartet, Quartet San Francisco, San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Chanticleer, The Delphi Trio, and the International Space Orchestra, for which he also serves as musical director. In 2016, he premiered his Concerto for Jazz Violin and Orchestra with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and released his debut solo album, “Dialogues,” in 2017 on Azica Records.He lives in Mill Valley, CA, with his wife and daughter.

Learn more at evanpricemusic.com.

Workshop Materials

Chord Charts

Delta Blues

Swing Blues

Audio tracks to play along with

    Enjoy Bessie Smith performing Backwater Blues

    It’s a classic 12-bar form and the only thing she does that deviates from our workshop lesson is her gear-shifting between major and minor blues scales—especially her use of the flat-7 over the IV chord. But at least she follows the AAB form and you can clearly hear the major-to-minor shift.